sack-c0s

Cola = diabetes in a can diet cola = cancer in a can I can see Olympics are ALL about the betterment of the human body's ability to achieve greater and greater things and nothing about a massive scam for londoners to pay for some twats in govt/big companies to get even more rich lol Allow me to disag.... nah screw it - that's absolutely right. No 'halo effect for British business' because only the multinational official sponsors were allowed to advertise, and nothing says athletes at the peak of physical perfection like a supersized bigmac, does it?

by that logic the C64 doesn't either. Maybe it was the different terminology that threw people. (I know who is thinking of following this one up. Just don't.)

I grew up with the Skoda Estelle and would quite like to drive one for a bit of a laugh actually...

you can mention coke - just don't mention p*psi as the official Olympic brand police will haul you off

ARM was designed to be easily learned by 6502 coders so you could say it is descended from it.

I notice your moderation system seems to be broken - people keep posting corrections to the factual inaccuracies in the blog yet they somehow seem to fail to appear. you might want to correct that or it might appear you are blocking them out of some kind of bias

am I right in thinking that the easiest way to add a bit of colour to a game would be to have a highlight/shadow colour pair in my background graphics (which you'd need anyway to draw background graphics) and you could underlay a double-width player under the softsprite to give a freely chosen player colour (same as using the freely selecable colour on C64 sprites) to add some colour to the sprite? I seem to remember some lengthy explainations about how the colours interact though - if I don't want the colours to have any effect on each other and just appear as chosen by me what are the restrictions? I'm weighing up doing a little game, but I've just gotten my head around making it work with the C64 colour restrictions and I'm wondering if I can get it to work with the A8 as well...

well to be fair after sitting as a target for his rants about being part of a group of C64 fanboys whose only aim in being here is to somehow ruin things for theAtari and being questioned plenty enough about my own credentials I can see how someone was going to snap sooner or later and tell him what they really thought - alcohol or not. The only thing that surprises me was that it wasn't me who did it. I don't exactly have a long, stunning history to parade around (so I don't), but the way Emkay speaks I would've expected the kind of history that would make Archer Mclean jealous. back to the sprites...

hehe... I would still like a clear, definitive answer from Emkay to the question 'What have you written?'. he does seem to be rather avoiding the issue.

I don't say this as a C64 fanboy, because I try to be as agnostic as possible and sample the delights of as many 8-bit machines as I can get my hands on, but you are aware you come across as a bitter, twisted resentful bellend with that blog? commodore basic was shit. This might be part of the reason you now serve up burgers in a Wimpey in Peckham rather than being a superstar coder but most likely it isn't. That's life for you. Now grow up and stop whining.

Just be aware that staying in an easyhotel is not entirely unlike experiencing the opening of Portal (albeit without the cool gun)...

I'm going to have to refigure my road plotting idea then. I've got an idea about how to do it, but the question is 'will it be fast enough?' It's happy fun 6502 algorithm time

and how far up the screen (in lines) do you think the road would come in a worst-case scenario? By 'worst-case' I mean higher up the screen

so you are one of those lazy sods who puts the score panel down the right hand side of the screen then? Hey.... more than 20 years moving sprite vertical by copy data at pos to pos+1 I really appreciate one INC call me lazy... I call it clever but flickering rasterinterrupts are not my friends... I misread the INC as incrementing the X position and was referring to the old newbie trick to avoid setting the MSB register. D'OH! Ignore me - it's been a long day…

I have some code on the C64 that ought to be able to do a reasonable job of the undulating road. It should port just fine to the A8 too (just need to tweak the C code on the PC that spits it out) don't know about overlaying everything else on top of it though

so you are one of those lazy sods who puts the score panel down the right hand side of the screen then?

the thing with C is it is such a bare-bones language it's damn near a portable assembly language. I use it at work, but everything we code has to run on ARM and x86 these days and writing everything twice isn't an option. Being graphics driver code the optimised assembly is the stuff that the GPU itself runs, so most of what the code actually does is kick off a bit of hand written or cross-compiled assembler on another chip therefore isn't the code we really need to worry about optimising anyway.The time not spent on hand-coding x86/ARM to prod the hardware registers on a once-per-draw operation is time better spent on tightening up microcode that is run on a per-pixel basis. That and the usual caveats - optimising compilers are almost unbeatable these days, choosing the right algorithm in the first place is 90% of the battle, etc.

the memory map on the C64 isn't that complicated - the ROMs are write-through and you can bank out the basic and kernel ROM by writing $35 to $01. The rest is true though. I think the main thing is that some games the style translates better to the Atari rather than the C64, and Minter needs lots of colours and strong, ballsy early 80s arcade sound effects that resonate through the desk. Although he wrote games for both machines his games just feel like Atari games.

Crowther was alright if you wanted a series of Super Locomotive knockoffs, otherwise no. The other thing is those folks are just talking about a snapshot of how things are at that point in time and things were still ramping up on the C64 front. If you want to make a better point of A8 vs C64 you should've quoted Jeff Minter and thrown up the videos of the clearly superior Attack of the Mutant Camels on the A8 as evidence then you might've been more convincing. I'm a C64 kid though so I really shouldn't be helping you out here I don't get how the easier to program machine is supposed to lead to worse games though - up until a point a low barrier to entry lets everyone write a game (even those who really shouldn't - just look at the iOS appstore or any repository of gamesmaker 'games'), but then once you are past that point every minute spent on trying to thrash out your sprite plotter or overcome a colour restriction is a moment lost from game design.

Speaking of mascots - am I the only one who thinks this looks like an animated version of the 2012 Olympic mascots (although with the important difference of not being rubbish)? looks cool though

sounds viable. I'd also have the enemies placed in a work queue and have several worker threads up and running to take the work from the queue and process them so you get the benefit of multicore CPUs.

Den Mist kannst du dir an den Hut stecken. Was der Konverter macht, ist einen Teil vom Feldberg zu nehmen, da eine Scheibe herauszuschneiden und zu vergessen, weil er ja nicht wichtig ist... dafür wird ein Stück vom Westerwald genau passend gemacht und auch gerne mal das Tal zwischen den Bergen vergessen. Noch schlimmer ist, dass der Konverter den kleinen Feldberg nicht kennt und deswegen nicht berechnet. Hast du es jetzt verstanden? No he entendido ni una puta palabra. Si intentas otra vez en ingles quizas... To be fair sometimes when you feel you aren't getting the point across I can see that out of frustration you do just want to drop back to your mother tongue to make sure you are absolutely saying what you want to say to get the point across - I've been there and done that. It doesn't cover the fact that other people just don't speak the same language though so it's not really a way out. Some people just don't have English as their first language - I'm not sure I'm 100% behind the idea that people who don't quite have it as easy as me (I'm not sure how long I could hold out on a Spanish language forum) and can use their first language without having to think so hard are somehow stupid. There's a lot of folks here using a 2nd/3rd language and doing the best they can with it (which sometimes feels like fighting with both hands tied behind your back), which is better than I think most of us brits/americans/whoever can do and attacking someone on that basis isn't really called for. Criticism for being negative and coming down on everyone elses projects and achievements is fair enough though.

My question about donkey kong has to be this: Given that there's a 2600 version that sounds okay, and an Atari 8-bit version which also sounds okay why does the 7800 version sound so bloody awful?

Anybody who says ARM is too complicated probably hasn't spent too long with x86. It's far nicer No worrying about what register can be used under which circumstance, conditional execution of all instructions (nice not having to branch over single instructions, and can be really powerful if you chain comparisons in the right way), easy to learn the basic instruction set... I loved ARM coding as a teenager. I think if I looked at the entire extended instruction set today without having learned on an oldschool ARM 250 it might seem a bit overwhelming though. Whilst I've been waiting for RISC OS to get sorted out (it boots - but the bottom 10% of the screen is clipped off - which is the important bit sadly) I've figured out how to get things going from cold. I think I've got code sketched out to take over from the pre-boot stuff and replace kernel.img and find the video memory but I just need a bit of time to see if I'm right. If I am I'll pass around the framework code

Cheers - I'll have a look through that little list for more inspiration. What I had in mind would be more the 'Dizzy' model - mostly based around puzzle solving, item usage and exploration, and some very forgiving arcade elements. That should ease a lot of the control issues. The answer I was expecting (although I didn't say it because I didn't want to influence the answers) was the playing speed - but I thought that was mostly down to a lot of them being directly ported from the Spectrum Z80 code and not being written properly in 6502 or using the hardware available, so I thought it should at least be possible to do something properly and redress the balance a bit.