mksmith

Wow hope I never have to see the sad face 😁 Thanks Mike and Robert!

Thank for the explanation. I certainly feel the under the hood method could definitely work well for this type of game if you spread the tile animations over a few frames. If I get a chance this week I'll try and put something together using the UTH code. Oh the tiles in M&M are based on the c64 sprites which are 24x21. As they are colored double wide that converts best to 12x24 in 7800 land and they keep a good aspect ratio.

Hi Lillapojkenpåön - unfortunately I have no control over that as it's a 'feature' of VS Code. I just checked and it's strange it works one way and not the other just not sure why that is the case. Perhaps it's because bB is registered first as a language by the extension.

Hi! thanks for the suggestion! I tried to follow the c64 version as closely as I could but then as the wipe was different I decided to add the 'poof' animation to sorta match the 'magical' entry. A little dance might be possible if existing frames can be used as the gfx blocks (and everything else!!) are totally full and only a handful of bytes are available. I might have a look over Christmas to see what might be possible but really appreciate you playing and thinking about how things could be improved!

Hi @Lillapojkenpåön Been following along with interest - Mike has outlined most of the stuff I did with Millie & Molly and Arkanoid already but here is a little more background. With the animated tiles in M&M the whole tile gets replaced where with Chase is it appears you are laying out a background tile and then overlaying that with the dot? (have I got that right?? - if that's the case I can see why you would be running out of render time). M&M is relatively simple as the tiles were 12x24 so the screen is a grid of 14*9 - the animations were able to be validated over 2 frames (even one was fine TBH). Arkanoid is a little different as the tiles are 12*8 so that made the game grid area something like 11x24 and animating those takes far more frames - maybe 4-5 frames? I just use a rolling update to do 3-4 rows each frame and it just cycles in the background. With Mike's under to hood sprite process you don't use double-buffer as essentially pointers are updated instead. A couple of levels in M&M can have up to 50 tiles animating using this process - there would have been no other way for sure. If the dot in incorporated into the tile you may have a good shot (obviously tile colors will be limited and 160B might push you over the edge). Overlaying the player/enemy should be be ok though (M&M overlays the player sprites).

Me too @nadir! It will happen at some stage - @RevEng has added so many controller types I just have to finish it. Currently working out a date with Al for a cart release of Millie and Molly - hopefully in the first half of next year 😁

The file associations are a bit tricky in VS Code as other extensions registered for the file type interfere at times. Both bB and 7800basic both have a history of using .bas so big brother (.bb) won out in this case. Need to work out a better way to surface some of this stuff for users for sure.

Hi @h0trod Glad you found what you needed! I want to redesign the editor eventually so that stuff can surface a little easier eventually. I did used to have the Project dialog pop-up initially but that interferes with the ability to open a project from the file list (right-click pop-up). I also need to add the coloring for 2600 mode as well.

@SlidellMan Certainly happy to pop up anything like that once I setup a decent example. Will keep that sort of thing in mind for future tips!

@SmittyB wow really nice job on the fade stuff! @Lillapojkenpåön this looks like it could be a really fun game - great job!

Singlewide Text in Doublewide Mode @Muddyfunster recently posted about how you might display singlewide text when doublewide mode is activated. Thanks to @Karl G and @RevEng there is now an answer to how this can be achieved. Make sure to read the original post to fully understand the scenarios where this feature applies. The main decision with using doublewide mode it is an all-in feature. For most games or applications this work great and allows 7800basic to be fully optimised and produce small and very fast assembly. Occasionally there may be a requirement to use both doublewide for the game proper and singlewide for status and instruction screens. Example The following example activates doublewide mode for compile purposes and then de-activates it as required before the display is built. The other requirement is appending plotchars with singlewide to allow 7800basic to identify this requirement. set doublewide on displaymode 160A rem disable double-wide mode gosub DisableDoubleWideMode rem main MainLoop clearscreen rem flag as singlewide to draw correctly plotchars 'hello from 7800basic!' 0 0 0 singlewide drawscreen goto MainLoop rem -------------------------------------------------------------------------- rem DOUBLEWIDE MODE rem -------------------------------------------------------------------------- EnableDoubleWideMode sCTRL{4} = 1 : CTRL = sCTRL return DisableDoubleWideMode sCTRL{4} = 0 : CTRL = sCTRL return Full example The following attachment contains full working examples for the above: DoubleWide.zip Using Doublewide and Singlewide fonts together There may be times where you need to utilise both Doublewide and Singlewide fonts within the same game or application. Using the same basic principles outlined this can be achieved if required. The key requirement is a consistent alphachars initialisation with both fonts using the exact same characters and each font existing in it's own gfx block. You also cannot mix modes. Full example The following attachment contains full working example: Multifont.zip Dev Notes You cannot mix and display both doublewide and singlewide characters at the same time This is an advanced technique and is not always guaranteed to work with all features in 7800basic due to the compiler optimising the assembly as it's builds your game You should always set doublewide on to ensure all language features requiring this mode continue to work as expected and deactivate/reactivate the mode as you display your status screens Always use an consistent alphachars initialisation and both fonts using the exact same characters If using multiple fonts you are required to use different gfx blocks PLOTCHARS command plotchars textdata palette_# x y [chars|extrawide|singlewide] textdata - RAM, ROM or literal string 'message' to plot onto the screen palette_# - index of palette (0-7) x - x screen co-ordinate y - y line (zone) co-ordinate chars (optional) - number of characters to display extrawide (optional) - display chars twice the width of the character size singlewide (optional)*

Ok this works for me. I used the topscreenroutine instead as you can occasionally see it revert from double on first draw. I'll add this to my tricks and tips list. @RevEng Thanks Mike - always have some little sneaky tricks available 😁 set doublewide on set tv ntsc set zoneheight 8 set romsize 48k displaymode 160A rem font (include your char set here) incgraphic gfx/font.png 160A 0 1 characterset font alphachars '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz! >`?/.,:-_()[]&[email protected]*"#' rem palette P0C1 = $0f rem main MainLoop clearscreen rem flag as singlewide to draw correctly plotchars 'message' 0 0 0 singlewide drawscreen goto MainLoop topscreenroutine rem disable double-wide mode gosub DisableDoubleWideMode return rem -------------------------------------------------------------------------- rem DOUBLEWIDE MODE rem -------------------------------------------------------------------------- EnableDoubleWideMode sCTRL{4} = 1 : CTRL = sCTRL return DisableDoubleWideMode sCTRL{4} = 0 : CTRL = sCTRL return Update Actually it appears that you can just set the state before your displayloop rather than calling it in topscreenroutine/bottomscreenroutine but either way it does what the intended feature requires for using plotchars! I've also been playing with plotmap so if you require doublewide for that then make sure it's turned on by default at compile and de-activate just for your out of gameplay status screens.

Interesting I was just playing around with this myself and thought lets search the forum and here it is!! Will have a play as well 👍

Hey Anthony, not a problem at all mate - I actually hadn't seen there was an update at the time so was a good prompt for me as I do try and get them out pretty quickly when I can. Mike, the Stella and Dasm teams do most of the hard work for sure!! I really enjoy helping out around the community as people have done the same for me. Very much appreciate your support too 😁

Good stuff!!

Ah good news!!

A new release (v0.6.5) is now available with the following changes: Updated 7800basic to v0.16 (Windows, Linux, macOS) Updated Stella to v6.4 (Windows, Linux, macOS). Note: Linux 32-bit is currently v6.2 Updated dasm to v2.20.14.1 (64-bit only Windows, Linux, macOS) Added new 7800basic keywords: deprecated (frameheight), hiscoreload Fixed opening initial files via the Open in Sprite Editor pop-up menu in the VS Code Explorer (fingers crossed) Fixed multiple repeated processing on events when using the Sprite Editor (think I actually got it this time - fingers crossed) Hopefully this is the end of the damn multiple event processing (SE) and the Open in Sprite Editor pop-up will be much more reliable going forward. I've given this a test on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 64-bit but with my hard drive dieing recently I haven't got my macOS virtual environment working as yet - generally if Linux works I don't have issues with macOS but shout-out if thats the case. Also I think we need a conversion around whether the extension goes full 64-bit as Stella and dasm have since moved in that direction and 32-bit will only be staying at the last available releases for that platform. I've leave it for now but please shout-out if your still working on 32-bit. I might look at add some messaging around when older versions are only available.

Thanks everyone for your thoughts. Been a tough day for the family with my younger brother loosing his wife to an asthma attack. Such an amazingly happy, always smiling, caring person who beat breast cancer and lived life to her fullest.

Hi everyone apologies for not getting the update out - my family had a very unexpected passing last night. I had just started some testing so not much left to finalise but it might be a day or so.

@Lillapojkenpåön unfortunately the index ordering out of the image converter doesn't appear to have a specific ordering that I can find (I've tried a couple so far). I normally build a little image tool to view and adjust the indexes to work that out. Still continuing to find an answer if I can as it is a little fiddly for sure. Thanks @RevEng for jumping in.

Yeah going to do it in a few hours 👍

Awesome Mike thanks!

That looks awesome Lewis 😍😍😍

@Muddyfunster

Yeah same - i've only ever seen the occasional pop-up as part of a console sale but generally not really outside that.