VROOM!

[VROOM!]

55 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

• How strong should the boost be?

Maybe have occasional special golden arrows with a power boost? So missing those would be extra costly. Basically like the boost arrows in Mario Kart. 😏

 

 

[VROOM!]

I was thinking something. This game would work nicely in the vertical direction but with rockets instead of cars. Although limited to 6 rockets for non-flickering sprites. Instead of acceleration arrows, maybe acceleration clouds. Heh.

 

Maybe an option for a future sequel? 

[VROOM!]

5 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

The cars are fixed assigned to a controller. I suppose when this is played on a party, the controllers would be marked with colored stickers.

What if you had a little on-screen indicator in each lane that blinks on and off when you press and depress the button? The visual feedback would tell you which car is yours, because it will blink in synchronization with your button presses. It would have to be during the waiting time before the race starts. That's kind of how it works in Nintendo multi-player games where you're selecting a character. There's on-screen feedback when you press buttons.

 

I went back and noticed you do indicate which lane you're in by changing from grey to color. It's easy to miss though if you're not paying close attention.

[VROOM!]

22 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Effectively the values would be averaged. And since some cars are accelerating while others are slowing down, the ups and downs would mostly get lost.

I'm assuming you wouldn't use deceleration as part of the function. It'd be only cars where acceleration > 0.

[VROOM!]

3 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I am not very talented when it comes to sound design. The current version uses two different engine sounds in parallel (AUDC0 = $3, AUDC1 = $f). The current noise is OK, but any useful help is welcome.

I tend to overcomplicate things, so don't let me sidetrack you. What you have sounds pretty good. After thinking about it some more, very little has to be done to shape the sound envelope when the sound is a function of the acceleration (or velocity or both). The math is already done in the car physics.

 

It might be worth an experiment to divide the 8 cars into 2 groups and bind 4 cars to each sound channel: Top 4 cars on the left channel and bottom 4 cars on the right channel. Each channel's volume could be computed from a base minimum plus the summation of the currently accelerating cars in its group. That way all players would be interactively contributing to the sound rather than the top 2 leaders and you'd still get throbbing ups and downs.

 

 

[VROOM!]

1 hour ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

That might work (or maybe not), but even two engine sounds are hardly distinguishable.  

I think you'd have to play them at two different pitches and shape their sound envelopes with offset attack and decay so they contrast. When I loaded up the game I immediately thought of the sounds at Disney's Tomorrowland Speedway (better with earphones), but louder and sped up. It sounds like a back to back series rising and falling motor sounds shaped by a combination of throttling and the Doppler effect

[VROOM!]

I'm curious if there will be sound effects given the 8 cars and how that'll work out. Btw, it looks really good. It reminds me of a rhythm game.

[Tandy 3200 acquired]

It has Microsoft Office, Visual Studio C++, and a lot of educational CD-ROM games installed, so maybe it was an overlay for one of those? Possibly an obscure game.

[Tandy 3200 acquired]

I'm not sure if a Tandy 486 is too new for this section, but I recently acquired a Tandy 3200. It's in very good condition. It appears to have been left untouched in a home for the past 20 years. I'm so happy I found this. I just wanted to show it off.

 

The last pic is playing Commander Keen in DOS mode.

 

Specs:

• 486 SX 33 MHz upgraded to a Pentium 83 Mhz Overdrive
• 32 MB
• 1.5 GB Caviar HD
• Sound Blaster 16 with CD-ROM
• Win95
• Tandy VGM-390 14" monitor
• Tandy PS2 keyboard
• Logitech PS2 Mouse

I bought the setup for $22 on the last day of an estate sale, so it was 50% off an already low price. I have purchased speakers, an ISA network card, and a Gravis gamepad to finish it out. I spent way more on those than the PC. Unfortunately, I don't have the original software discs. I searched the estate sale for an hour looking for them.

 

Problems that need fixing. The monitor VGA port is loose, so it's wonky and the picture flickers when moved. The CMOS battery is bad. Not looking forward to replacing that, because it's soldered in.

 

I don't know what those three rectangular holes on the keyboard are for (right side). It looks like the owner put them there.

 

 

 

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

I haven't posted in a while, so I uploaded the current WIP. I redesigned the title screen using a new kernel that allows for dynamic palette changes. Watch the blue text and wait 4 seconds to see what I mean.

 

I'm working on changing the betting screen to allow for higher bets (5 or 6 digit amounts), but the change will touch a lot of code, so it's going to be a significant change. The 1K and x2 bets are not working yet. x2 will double the current bet. I have to reassess if I have the RAM. I don't believe I do at the moment. The new kernel is using a few more bytes RAM, so I'll find some other code to crunch.

 

These are not big changes, but I've been working on them for the past several weeks.

 

Next change after this is adding keypad support. I display the two controllers that will be supported on the title screen.

[The 8-bit guy blows up IBM 7496 prototype(?)]

On 9/26/2020 at 12:07 PM, bluejay said:

I'm beginning to see the decline of his channel. It sorta reminds me of the video game crash of '83 really.

I've been thinking the same thing. He's so slow at producing videos that I've stopped visiting his channel, because I've already seen his entire library. He clearly needs help with video production, because it's consuming way too much of his time. I got into his channel, because I love 8bit and 16bit classic machines. He showcased some cool hardware and software, and his Planet X3 game journal videos were super fascinating.

 

He's got to stop doing everything and outsource the busy work. He is simply not producing content fast enough and this botched job shows it. Now he's consuming too much of his time on the new studio build, when he should be letting contractors handle it. I think he should devote half his time to game production and journaling his progress, because that's what he excelled at. He's a great game developer, so why not lean into that?

 

And worse yet, he didn't have to begin hacking up this machine to generate filler content. He could have simply showcased the computer, ruminate on why it's not booting, and simply left it that. The solutions would have come in the comments for diagnosing the machine. There are so many interesting filler videos he could have done to keep the channel churning. Interviews, showcasing retro stores, the history of the Crash of '83, start a new DOS game, etc.

 

-----

 

Update: Six hours after I commented it seems he posted a rundown of his new game. Neat.

[It is 2020 after all... should we practice for?]

The nuclear destruction in Missile Command would count as a disaster game. Maybe Atlantis too.

[Battle for Proton (2600)]

I've uploaded version 0.2. I have the top and bottom rows rendering buildings, so they don't pop in and out of existence. The top row also renders enemy fighters. Enemy fighters don't currently cross into the bottom row. This was kind of tricky, so I went through a few kernel versions before getting it to work. I also reduced RAM usage, because I had a few unnecessary arrays. 

 

I also added the full title name to the title screen. Enemies and buildings spawning is still stubbed. I'll be working on that next.

 

 

[Battle for Proton (2600)]

12 hours ago, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

A couple ideas:

- The buildings can show more destruction or are on fire as the enemies attack them

- Powerups to collect (wider laser, extra life, etc)

- Ability to rebuild the destroyed buildings by hovering over them and pressing the button. This also temporarily leaves you vulnerable as you are not able to shoot the enemies. The more the building is destroyed/on fire, the longer it takes to repair the building.

- A counter with how many buildings there are left in your colony at the end of each wave. Kind of like Paperboy / Missile Command where you can gain or lose buildings depending on how well you do.

 

Bugs / Intentional?:

- There are pixels in the playfield on the right hand side that shimmer as it scrolls.

- Depending on how fast you fly, the buildings and/or enemies may or may not appear

- The buildings pop on and off the screen instead of being partially drawn as they scroll. I don't expect you'll be drawing the enemies on the same line as your ship as they're the same graphic but they could be drawn at the top scrolling on/off.

 

I like the idea of healing/repairing the destroyed buildings. I'm adding more stuff to the HUD. A rudimentary radar, fuel, damage, and alarm gauges. There's no problem with showing stats on an intermission wave screen. 

 

This is a very early WIP, so there is no real alien or building logic. It's just stub code to test the kernel rendering. I'm working on an RNG for generating aliens and buildings procedurally. I will be rendering aliens and buildings in the top and bottom rows. I haven't got around to it yet.

 

If you mean the green playfield shimmering, that's unavoidable at the moment, because it's doing work on a horizontal positioning line. Horizontal positioning while rendering playfield complicates matters. It's essentially violating horizontal separation. There are only 5 excess cycles available for extra work in the horizontal blank during horizontal positioning, so I may need to go with another special case positioning routine. The strange thing I discovered during testing is 1 blank line hidden among the backgound texture isn't noticeable, so I can fall back to that. If not, I'll chop some pixels off to avoid it entirely (like Activision games.) I like the wide screen format though. Wide screen is worth the effort, imo.

 

Features I am considering at the moment:

 

• Ice, desert, mountain landscapes.
• Defend and chase modes. Defend mode is when the aliens attack buildings. Chase mode is when you go after flying aliens.
• Combat divided into waves.
• Reduced terrain detail at higher speeds. Too much detail at speed becomes a blur.

 

I have a few more features in mind but I'm holding off mentioning them, because I'm not sure they're technically possible. I have to tighten up the kernel to free some cycles.

 

[Battle for Proton (2600)]

I've uploaded my Proton code to Github. I'll be probably be uploading my Blackjack code after some more reorganizing. 

[Battle for Proton (2600)]

This is something I've been working on over the past couple weeks. It's very basic and very WIP, so there's no real game play yet. It's only a demo. I'm not that sure where I'm going with this one, but I have some ideas. It started with an experiment, but I scrapped everything I wrote and started over. I have only two goals with this game. Fast and greasy.

 

The concept so far: The new human settlements on the recently discovered exoplanet are under attack. You're the best pilot in the colony, so it's up to you to defend the colony from the alien attackers. You're piloting the state of the art ship equipped with the best laser cannon in the fleet.

 

I've uploaded the code to Github.

 

I'm open to suggestions.

 

 

 

proton-02.bin

proton-01.bin

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

3 hours ago, stephena said:

That only means the frame when you just ran the command ended in 262 scanlines.  That may not be true for all frames.  To detect underflow, you'd need to set a conditional breakpoint to check it on every frame.

I had tried it with a breakif, but it didn't trigger. 

 

I'll post an update when I can better understand the precise point in the code it was having a problem. I'm switching between 3rd shift to 1st shift at work and I'm very sleep deprived at the moment.

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

42 minutes ago, stephena said:

Sometimes the problem isn't going over the limit, but under it too.  The command mentioned by @Karl G addresses the former.  For the latter, look into the '_scanend' option.  It reports the scanline count in the last frame, so you can also detect underflow (if this is even what the problem was in your ROM).

I was still on 6.0.2. I installed 6.2.1 and tried it out on the known bad version of my game. 

 

"print _scanend" shows #262 for both screens.

 

 

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

1 hour ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Can you tell me details about the scanline problems (in 0.91 I suppose)? When did they happen? Maybe the info can help improving Stella's emulation.

It was in 2 sections of code running in variable time inside the kernel. I didn't have them wrapped in a timer. My current hypothesis is I think they were probably cancelling each other out in the emulator. When the top row ran long the bottom row ran short (and vice versa), so the emulator saw a stable line count. They weren't cancelling on the hardware, so there must be a timing difference.

 

Showing a working example is going to take a little bit of effort without a full upload of all my files and support scripts. It may be easier if I reproduce it by transplanting the offending code into a sample program.

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

Stella's debug output was solid 262 the entire time. I just tested the breakif on the older versions. It didn't trigger.

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

I've uploaded another version as a result of testing on real hardware. There were a number of problems with scanline counts. I also re-enabled the landing screen. I also fixed a bug with the split automatically hitting the split hand twice.

[BlackJack Theta VIII - 2600 game - 8K]

I've uploaded another version: 0.91. However, it's not well tested. I'm not sure if I've broken anything on real hardware. I just need to get a version out regardless of the state it's in.

 

What have I done with this one?

 

It's not visibly apparent, but the card rendering is completely rewritten. I rewrote it to reduce two pointer arrays down to one array. I was using one array for the top half (rank) and the other for the bottom half (suit). The change saved 12 bytes, but at the cost of using 6 bytes of temporary stack space inside the kernel, so 6 bytes were freed globally. It was the most difficult part, because animating the gap space between the rank and suit while loading graphics pointers was kind of tricky for me. It does both by interlacing the work.

 

I freed up a few more bytes here and there. I actually lost count how many. It's probably around 10 bytes total. I freed up more ROM space by redoing some dumb code and using more table lookups.

 

I finally implemented the selectable options for early and late surrender, dealer hitting or standing on soft 17, and 1, 2, and 4 decks are fully working. I don't intend to implement any more options other than card colors. I'm looking into the card colors, which can be done if I turn off the background texture.

 

I reworked the navigation help. I never liked it, because it looked bad. I moved the menu options to the middle of the screen to make them more obvious. I changed the joystick inputs to be more natural with the menu. The fire button now selects the current menu item.

 

I fixed a few bugs: cards flickering, status display flickering, and yet another bug in the random card dealing.

 

I expanded my task handling routine to support more than 15 tasks.

 

For the next version, I will be working on keypad input, card colors, and game over animations. The split hand interface really needs attention. There's just something about it I don't like. The controller menu on the title screen is a non-functional graphic. The intro animation is temporarily disabled, but it will return soon. I don't expect to be doing too much beyond that other than minor touches, testing, and bug fixes.

[so you guys had this and still didn't manage to play the game?]

On 3/22/2019 at 4:34 PM, Swami said:

Theres also a hack around here that fixed the brokenness

 

If the game was playable (with the manual) as so many keep saying, then it wouldn't have needed a hack to fix the broken bits.

 

Since a hack was necessary to fix the broken bits to make the game playable (with the manual) then I argue the game wasn't playable (even with the manual.)

[Stella 6.1 released]

On 5/5/2020 at 6:48 AM, CrazyChris said:

Is there an option in Stella to rotate the screen?

If you're on Windows, you can try simultaneously pressing CTRL-ALT and an arrow key to rotate the desktop screen. The arrow direction determines which direction the top of the screen will rotate to, so you could press CTRL-ALT-LEFT to rotate left and then CTRL-ALT-UP to reset back to normal.

[Need game ideas]

Sky Jinks might be good. He can control the speed.