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Mord

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Posts posted by Mord

  1. Posted

    Yeah, not surprised. So long as the battery is kept charged regularly enough it's likely still going to be kicking around just fine. My PSP2000 is still working fine with it's original battery as well. However a battery that was never charged would have leaked all it's charge then started to corrupt after a couple years. It's why the spare batteries I have ended up all dying before they were taken out of the package.

  2. Posted

    I tested it with a 1000 and it worked a while back with just the charger.

     

    I can't say I'm going to be happy with that eventual setup - my power adapter can sometimes be a bit finicky when plugged in for charging. So I can easily see me trying to play a game and randomly (And probably often) it just dying because the powercord was nudged.

  3. Posted

    Those two lines are defining the direction for the bullet for vertical and horizontal directions via two bits in the "BulletDirection" variable.

     

    Based on what I'm seeing above it looks bit 1 specifies if the bullet is travelling left or right, and bit 0 specifies up or down.

     

    The bullet wants to go towards the player, so I guess if bit 1 is 1, it will travel left. if bit 1 is 0, it'll travell right. If bit 0 is 1, it'll travel up. otherwise, travel down.

     

    All it's doing to determine this is comparing the screen coordinates of the target (the player) with the source (the shooting mob). If you switched the < conditions, you might need to switch the then and else portions of the if statements as well.

  4. Posted

    I'd expect all new, completely unused, official batteries to be bloated beyond use by. When I finally unboxed a sealed 2000 unit - many years ago at this point - it's batter ywas bloated. In addition to that, all 3 of the spare batteries I had bought new were similarly affected. The battery in my main psp2000 still works, although I charge that every month or two even when I'm not playing it since they discharge even if not plugged in. Which reminds me I should probably recharge the psp this weekend...

  6. Posted

    It's not the installation of the games on the drive I mind... it's the fact that enough of the game has to be installed as a "patch" that the game can't reliably be played if the publisher disappears.

     

    While there are certainly plenty of games, particularly by a certain group of big publishers, that have needed patches to make their messes playable or give the rest of the game to you, I've found many games have a patch primarily just for the online components of the game. When the PS4 is dropped by Sony and updates go away, the online portion of the games go away - but since you need Sony's servers for online play anyway it's not really losing anything significant.

     

    Best way to see how a game will be affected post-online support, is to (delete the game from your harddrive first if you already have it installed!) disconnect the PS4 from the internet and do a fresh install of the game from the disc to see how it goes. I would expect most games to just install properly and you might not see much of an issue afterwards. Some might crash now and then. Some, like No Man's Sky, will feel like a completely different game given you'll lose a LOT of the content they eventually added to the game - plus it'll crash like crazy, etc.

     

    And of course you'll be forever axed off from the DLC on a game. I generally avoid buying most DLC til after I've played a lot of the game to make sure the physical/base game feels like it actually has enough content on it's own. Because I know if I want to play the game again 5-10 years down the road after support is pulled from the console, that's what I'm going to be stuck with. (And it's why I've passed on No Man's Sky physical release even when seeing it as low as 10 bucks. If I saw the digital game for 10 bucks, I'd probably consider it but we know digital is usually the most expensive way to get a game on the consoles these days despite promises by devs/publishers that digital would bring cheaper prices since their costs would go down. :))

  8. Posted

     

    Thread is almost 10 years old. Just shows how long people keep predicting the death of consoles and being wrong time and again. First PS3/Xbox 360 was going to be the last console generation. Then PS4/Xbox One was. Now PS5/next Xbox are on the Horizon and we are going to start to hear a new round of this.

     

    My own prediction in this thread about when the consoles will be dead isn't when we no longer have dedicated gaming boxes, but when they stop acting like consoles, and start acting, essentially, like low end PCs. In this case, while they're still not "dead" yet, the industry isn't nearly as healthy as you'd like to say.

     

    The PS4/Xbone generation was going to try to block used sales, require online connections, focus heavily on digital only content, etc. Microsoft announced their plans and thankfully was booed off the stage for the most part. Sony at the last minute after seeing that reaction privately axed their plans to do the same. The only reason the PS4/Xbone era is relatively still close to the PS3/360 era is because of this backing down and forcing Microsoft (in the face of millions of lost preorders) to do the same.

     

    And that only really saved the used market and -mostly- undid the online requirement. Many games continued to require online checks to enable purchased DLC for instance.

     

    Games all require installation nowadays, it's no longer optional. The state games are being released in are starting to commonly be beta versions that are patched repeatedly or with the rest of the game officially offered as a "season pass" with extra DLC added on top of that. I doubt there's going to be as big an outrage about physical releases being axed when they are at this point simply because they've spent the last 10 years making physical releases as bad as possible. It's to the point where they can add a small black and white manual to the game and that's now enough to call it a collectors edition.

     

    I don't think this is the last gen just yet, but it feels a lot more like a PC than a console at this point already.

     

    As for Nintendo, the Switch is popular yes. But it's already no longer a console in the strictest terms. It's a high powered handheld that has the ability to be docked to your TV. And that's fine. At least it means the handheld industry is probably safe from this BS for a while longer. - not that it's immune to it by any means. ;)

    • Like 2

  9. Posted

    What in the hell do you mean? The original PSP sold like 90 Million

     

    With a lot of them being sold because the thing was easily cracked open for piracy I'd say. That 90 million, which wiki seems to point at being closer to 82 million, was still half of what it's competition sold, and it was a worldwide total. Of those about 17 million were the sales in North America. It took 5 years to sell that many, and I'm sure that total includes all the ones sold during the liquidation phase where you could pick up a system for 40 bucks. That's less than 4 million sold per year on average and in fact that would favor the launch years where it did sell better initially. If any other system sold that slowly it would have also been considered a failure.

     

    Again, the PSP and Vita did as well as they did DESPITE Sony. Not BECAUSE of Sony. That's my point.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted

    Sony wouldn't support the PSP, much less the Vita? So what would the point be? No one would make games for it

     

    Nintendo's handhelds always had solid support from Nintendo themselves, though arguably to the detriment of supporting their consoles. They solved with with the Switch, which is both basically.

     

    You do realize there's a LOT of games for both the PSP and Vita right? Even long after Sony stopped pushing the PSP there were some devs releasing games for it until just recently. Same with the Vita.

     

    The problems with the PSP and Vita had a lot more due to Sony's poor marketing and even poorer handling of them than actually having too few games. Pricey low sized proprietary memory sticks for starters kept coming back to bite Sony in the ass on both consoles - especially when Sony tried to do a digital-only PSP Go.

     

    If they do release a new handheld, I'll at least take a look and see what they have to offer but if they try repeating the same mistaken decisions as they did with the PSP and Vita I doubt they'll get me on board.

     

    Regarding the memory sticks for the Vita and how it hinders the platform - I have a 16gig card in my Vita. It was the largest size commonly available around where I was and that cost 40+tax. Once that filled up with games bought on PSN, I simply stopped buying vita games digitally. Didn't matter how cheap they would end up in a flash sale. I had no room to add them to my Vita and I wasn't about to be bothered with swapping out those microscopic easily lost and/or broken cards. I'd say "Well, ok I'll just keep buying games physically!" Except Sony really tried their hardest to push digital at the expense of physical distribution so here we are.

     

    My Switch has a 128gig card in it. Standard micro-sd card. I'll likewise probably never remove it from the Switch but there's still over 110 gigs left on it if not more waiting to be filled from the nintendo eshop before I stop buying games digitally for it.

    • Like 2

  11. Posted

    I think Epic is mainly beneficial to the devs/publishers rather than the gamers. Less user options including (unless it's been added recently) the ability to leave user reviews and I think they had to use steam forums to help fix at least one game issue in the epic store already ;) All it really ends up being is a fragmentation of the PC game market. Lots of people like to go "more choice!" with where to buy games but when games are being made exclusive to one store or another that's not more choice but more software you need to install to keep the same choice you had before. ;)

     

    Odds are I doubt I'll ever be tempted to use the Epic store. Much like I have never been tempted to use Origin. I have steam and gog and that's plenty. (And like others, I just have way too much to play as it is so being lured onto new platforms with free games just isn't a thing for me anymore.)

    • Like 3

  12. Posted

    Another question as I debug things in an experiment, can we dim variables with non-variable expressions?

     

    In other words, can I use "dim mapzone2 = mapzone1+20" to make sure mapzone2 always starts exactly 20 bytes after mapzone1? Main advantage to doing this is to prevent needing to calculate the exact address values of every starting zone, which is why I'm trying to do it. just want to make sure this is how it's expected to work while I continue to look through my tangled web of code. :)

  13. Posted

    Been having trouble with for loops.

     

    Below's a quick sample program. When you try to compile it you receive the error:

     

    "*** (16): ERROR, bad non-variable value
    Compilation failed.

     

    The line number it's referencing is the "next" line. The actual culprit appears to be the "step -1" however. As if I try to do a for loop with an increasing value (either with or without a step parameter) it compiles properly. Is there something I'm missing here?

      set doublewide on
  displaymode 160A
  set screenheight 224  
  set tv ntsc 

  dim CurrentBGC = $2200
  dim TargetBGC = $2300
  
  
  for z = 24 to 2 step -1
    y = CurrentBGC[z]
    if y > TargetBGC[z] then y = y - 1 : CurrentBGC[z] = y
  next

  14. Posted

    Prediction: backwards compatible but no optical drive. So you can play PS1234 games if you can get them onto the console. Which you can only do if you buy them (again) from Sony.

     

    Better prediction: Optical drive can stay. Odds are the backwards compatibility will be for sony's use, not ours. Much like what they have on the PS4 currently with PS2 games. ie: it will be only so sony can cheaply add games from the previous consoles to the PS5's store. Even if you have the original disc, the system will likely not understand it.

  15. Posted

    Making sense of DL/DLL stuff is admittedly confusing for me which is why I spend more time with 7800basic (Even if I do dig down into the DLs with assembly...).

     

    You appear to copy pre-made DLs/DLLs in rom to ram. All starting at $2300?

     

    However the DLLs look like they're going to be pointing at the original rom versions of the DLs rather than the ram copy you've made. So while you update the ram copy, the DLL list blissfully ignores your ram changes and looks at the unchanging rom version.

     

    I -think- that's what I'm seeing here.

    • Like 1

  16. Posted

    What zone is that DL entry part of? (where on the screen should we be looking for/expecting movement, etc) And what sprite in particular are we suppose to be expecting to move. You're only adjusting one byte so most of that screen I would expect to stay in the same place. I suppose I should ask for clarification: Is the moving sprite even on the screen in the video above?

     

    And how often does that inc/jmp activate per frame? Only once? Is it in a DLI routine.

  17. Posted

    Maybe just placing the helloworld.bas sample file in the 7800basic directory and not a subfolder? Might give that a go

     

    Shouldn't be necessary to put the .bas in the 7800basic directory if the install_win.bat completed successfully. However, if you have it placed in a subfolder, make sure you move to that subfolder in your command window prior to running the command. ie: You must be in the same folder as the .bas program when you run 7800bas. Based on your screenshots, you're not in the correct folder when running 7800bas if you have the .bas file in the gfx_helloworld folder. You'd first have to type "cd gfx_helloworld" to move to the proper folder then run "7800bas helloworld.bas".

  19. Posted

    Developers will get the first runs of the XM's and I'm sure everyone can totally understand why, they need these first because they are the ones who are going to be exploring its capabilities and exploiting them, to start putting together a whole new line of games that when plugged into an XM, they will sense the available features and enabled the enhancements.

     

    With regards to this, when devs start getting their XMs can you make sure all the final details on how to program for it is public for everyone? Some of us are wannabe programmers who may not be worth getting an XM first but would really like to plan ahead so to speak. ;)

  20. Posted

    Took a while of tinkering with Tiled 1.0.3, but finally managed to make it generate plotmapfiles compatible with 7800basic. Having not used the program before, plus the way their online help is set up, made it look like embedding tilesets was removed. And indeed there's one location in the menus (where their online help indicates how to embed stuff - what to check) that has the embed checkmark grayed out.

     

    Apparently you need to add a tileset to your map, and as you're adding it, mark it to be embedded right away. Not a good idea to press the tiny "embed" button after you've linked an external .tsx file as things start looking confusing with two copies of the tileset appearing. And when tiled goes to save the file at that point it likes to play around with the order of the tile sets unless they're embedded when they're initially added.

     

    There were a few other issues I had with getting it to work but those were code related in terms of making sure certain setup functions are in the code before adding graphics. Having the graphics added first mucks up the indices as 7800basic compiles.

     

    If you plan on reusing the same tilesets for multiple screens I'd recommend saving a template of a blank screen after you've gotten the tilesets embedded properly.

     

    I still recommend adding that CVS encoding for the map data though. Far more compact and has the potential for convenient quick edits/updates to a map from the file itself in a text editor. :)

    • Like 2

  21. Posted

    Sure, it's just a new mapper design. The only "big thing" compared to the existing schemes is the ability to differentiate between Sally and Maria fetches which lets both of them use different banking arrangements.

     

    I'm assuming this is achieved by tying the HALT line into the switching logic? :) I had an idea for that ages ago, great to see it actually works in practice!

  22. Posted

    I'm leaving this comment on the third or so occasion that I caught myself incorrectly reading the word 'diskless' in the thread title.

     

    As for me I just looked at it and wondered why they'd be removing the hard drive.

     

    But removing the optical drive... have to admit it, Microsoft found a way to make me want their system even less.

    • Like 1

  24. Posted

    Sorry, probably just reading comprehension issues caused by posting soon after I woke up, although looks like you edited your post while I was typing as well. :)

     

    I've generally been able to hunt down bugs just from using the line numbers given by 7800basic + the .asm file all the same. Most often the actual bugs occur before those things flagged by the compiler however.

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