Muddyfunster

@mksmith is there a way to update the studio to the latest version of 7800Basic? I had a look but I couldn't see a config setting.

Thanks, I think i've got it now I'm sizing banners correctly and respecting the zone height boundary and I'm making progress with the colour indexing. My next thought is on palettes... if I run with 160B for my title screen, can I revert to 160A later for objects and can I redefine the the 160B palette (ie palette 0 to 3) later to have "game colours" instead of "titlepage" colours, so in effect, I have a title palette and a game palette? Sorry if this is covered already, I've searched and found some interesting threads but I didn't see anything definitive. I'm trying to see how much palette flexibility I have and whether to structure my palettes, sprites and graphics in 3+1 or 12+1 sets. I won't have tons of sprites so the overhead of 160B for extra colours (in a sprite) is a good trade off for me if I understand things correctly.

ah sorry I missed that, thanks @RevEng . Every day is a school day for me with 7800Basic right now

@RevEngI have replicated the issue i'm seeing with clipping. This is a 160A 4 colour indexed png banner, code and png attached below. looks like it's clipping the bottom 4 rows (png is 40x36). Is the 36 pixel height the issue? The width of 40 is inside the 64 pixel limit, is there a vertical limit or should the png be cut at 8 or 16 pixel boundaries? I tried an 11 pixel high banner and the compiler rejected that too (just as a test while fiddling about). banner_clipping.bas

I recreated it but i think it's an export issue. I'm using gimp and exporting the image as a 4 colour indexed png. The bottom 5th of the image just gets binned and I get blank space instead. No amount of messing with the indexes in my program will make the missing area show up. Going to try with paint.net

@RevEng splitting the banner worked great, but I noticed that I also got some vertical clipping with the bottom couple of rows being snipped. I ended up experimenting with quartering the banner and that worked fine, other than palette funkyness.

@mksmith thanks for the video, i'm going to watch that later when I get some time. I hope that I can get some insights on palette management from it The one thing that's really killing my enthusiasm right now is indexed colours. I feel like I'm spending a lot of time fighting the system to get my sprites and banners in to experiment on. I've tried 3 or 4 applications and none of them work well and I find myself going to the Atari Dev Studio sprite editor, even to do banners. I wanted to use 160B as some of my ideas would work really well with the 12+1 palette but I've found using 160B to be incredibly hard work due to how the palette dances around, even from banner to banner (that's before I get to sprites and thinking about tiled). I stripped the idea back and made my banners in the sprite editor by using two 40x65 sprites 12+1 palette (left and right halves) with the same palette and loaded them with palette 0 in my program, they both had scrambled palettes (expected) but the scrambling was different on each side even though the original colours were the same. Some of my banner detail vanishes as 7800Basic seems to push one of the transparent colours on to my "detail" section. I know I can change how the colours are indexed and which refers to which entry but trying to line that up for 12+1 is really tedious. I know some of this is down to me to learn a new workflow and how to work efficiently but right now 160B is not co-operating and 160A has a lot of restrictions in terms of what I want to do. I'll post an example after I've watched the video as that might help folks to understand my rambling There's probably an easy fix to all of this, I just need to learn the right way

ok, so I could split the banner in to multiple parts as long as no part exceeds 64 pixels in width (32 bytes)?

Thanks RevEng, source is below. I'm also running into issues with colour indexing but that's more to do with how the images are saved and is a problem for another day source is attached Test ping is the png banner, capture is the output im getting bannerexample.bas

I've been experimenting with the sample programs and putting simple banners on the screen. I made a simple 160B banner which is 80x96, indexed png with 13 colour (per the various tutorials and useful threads that I managed to find). When I load the banner using : incbanner gfx/lr1.png 160B and then display it with plotbanner, I only get the leftmost 20% or so of the image. Displaymode is set to 160B and palettes 0,1,2,3 are set to random colours. I've been beating my head against this one for a couple of hours, any suggestions on what I'm doing wrong would be appreciated!

I agree and I said something similar after the 2018 awards, I felt 10 + in some categories was too much. 5 feels like a good manageable number for folks to play through and test.

@mksmith hey that would be really helpful. I spent a couple of hours tinkering last night and I could get a basic tileset from the sprite editor and into tiled but then I couldn't get anything from tiled into 7800 basic to experiment with plotmapfile, i just kept getting errors like "plotmapfile didn't find a palette for palette0". I expect i'm missing something and I need to go back to basics and start working through the process, first with just simple PNG files. (double wide or not, zone height 8 or not.. lots to figure out). After stepping through some of the sample files on with 7800 basic, I'm quite excited by the potential of what I might be able to do with it!

Thanks @RevEng I just found the sprite editor and it looks like I can build a tileset and export that . I think I have a lot of experimenting to do!

For me too, this is the one thing I've been struggling to conceptualise and also the same as Karl, trying to work with GiMP has killed me lol. I'll give Paint.Net a try. I'm keen to get into 7800 as I have some game ideas I want to test out which need text and that's beyond what I can personally do on the 2600.

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@TwentySixHundred Agree with you 👍🕹️ The voting thing is a bit of a quandry. One one hand what happen it's not explicitly against the rules, but on the other hand, it's (in my view) against the spirit of the event and can easily cause distortion (as we saw). It's a tough one to solve but I'm sure the folks behind the event will approach that issue carefully and thoughtfully in the future.

I think James and the crew did a great job. I was happy just to be nominated and I think it was pretty clear the great titles from Champ Games would sweep the board this year, deservedly so. Galagon and WoW are modern classics for the 2600. I have a lot of friends who are "into" retro games, but not so much into Atari. A lot of them follow my "MuddyVision" page and offered to come and vote for me. I discouraged it unless they wanted to play all the games and vote accordingly. Correct me if I'm wrong, the awards are supposed to be a fun community event.. Credit to Al, ZPH and the other folks (Arenafoot etc) who are involved in making the event happen. I'd like to see consideration given for next year to reinstating the Bb category. I think there is a case for its inclusion as Bb games have more limitations to contend with than someone programming in 6502/ ARM and hitting the hardware directly. Just my 2 cents

I'd be interested to see the final votes for all of the categories.

it's usually double or quad and only in the sense that the pixels are stretched, no horizontal resolution is gained. There may be ways in assembler to do more by or by having more sprites (and a flicker) but as I'm using Bb, i'm more limited to the conventional constraints :

Just want to add that the title screen music in Dare Devil was composed by @RushJet1. Ingame SFX and music are by me. Usually Rushjet is credited on the title screen (and in the manual etc) but in the release candidate for Dare Devil, there is an rolling advert for Tyre Trax. Future binaries / release binaries will have that back to normal.

Woohoo, Thanks James and the nomination council.

Should the 2018 vote threads be retired to avoid confusion when the 2019 polls go live ?

Thanks James, understood & no problem. For clarity, Tyre Trax only received a physical release with box and manual in 2019 at PRGE. The binary was released in 2018. [edit] Also the instructions included for Dare Devil are very out of date. The last edit to the development thread was 31st December 2019 so those instructions would be better.

Surprised Tyre Trax wasnt included in packaging, last year only some box art was available, not the actual packaging with label and manual.

I really need to transition properly to this now DD is done.