jefffulton

This looks and sounds really nice!

Some of the traditional means of scrolling the screen might need needed here. Are you saying that a tile map can only be horizontally positioned at an 8 or pixel zone top and there is no way top position it to fake a scroll at other pixel locations? In that case, a series of "banner" like objects that span more than a single zone could be used to push the background down the screen in a 1943 style auto scroll (think the islands and ocean) , while sprites are plotted on top in formations to fire at. I'll have to play with it to see what us possible. With a traditional full screen fine blit scroll, you would move a single tile at at time on the buffered screen, then translate back with a simulated matrix math "translate" to the actual pixel position needed, and then copy the full screen to the view-able screen. Might need VBL to to this or it will take up all of the processor time.

I have a PD sprite library by Ari Fleishman that we used for the book. It contains everything necessary for a 1943 clone. I can probably convert all of the sprites to work on the 7800 and try that. I just want a good (besides Plutos) top down scroller on the 7800. I was thinking in the vein of the SMS classic AstroWarrior, but with planes and ships, so not a 100% clone, but a fun blast-em up. If we utilize zones, can we get more than 24 sprites on the screen? Or is that the limit in 7800b? (I think 24 is enough, but I want a lot of missiles to be firing from the player = )

Yes, this is great. We did all box and circle collisions when blitting (just like plotting 7800vb soft sprites with no built in sprites or movie clips) when I wrote the Book The Essential Guide To Flash games with @fultonbot I just need to "unlearn" a few c like structures and re-learn how to mimic them in basic with constants , variable arrays, user functions and or gosubs etc to make up the same style of procedural code but for 7800b games. Your VScode library helps a lot. My "Raiden / Xenon2" - Like will come out of this. 😃 -Jeff -Jeff

@mksmith Here is a simple question that might help a lot of new users of 7800 basic and your cool tool set. I can plot the same imported graphic on the screen multiple times (example is a "missile.png" sprite) , but is there a way to create a variable reference to each plotted version so I know which missile (for example) needs to be removed when a missile collides with an enemy? -Jeff

Done, thanks!

Hey Matt! I love this so far. I love being able to edit and compile in VSCode and the Sprite editor is brilliant. One problem that i hope someone has come up against. I can use pre-existing pngs creates with the GIMP palette method, and use ones that are provided with the samples, but on Windows 10 now, with the latest version of GIMP installed, neither the Sprite Editor or Gimp is able to export a PNG file that will load in properly. All files exported with either (even if I load in a working png and just re-export in GIMP) give me a compilation error that says the rom file size is not correct and must be at least 4k. I'll focus on your Sprite Editor as that is my preferred method to make sprites and tiles. Do you have any idea what the header information, etc should be on the PNGs that are exported? Does the Sprite Editor use a PNG library that is already on the user's system? I need to figure out where to look for why the exports will not work. Thanks, -Jeff

Purchased. Will review on the Into the Vertical Blank Podcast if I can break myself away from reading and playing with the projects! 😃

X:8 is one of my favorite 8bit shooters! Great work.

You can't search for it on Google anymore. And the site is down everyone once is a while. I tried my bookmark and it's working: http://www.mushca.com/f/atari/ It's not a bad idea to download all of the disks and files again periodically anyway.

I usually stuff some bigger bubble wrap inside to space out the box and keep it sturdy (or some styrofoam). Will try to first tape the box on inside (if possible) or on the outside (more likely with some of these boxes). It looks ok on a shelf and doesn't cost too much.

Albert. I have at least 20 copies of video olympics and combat each 😃 Are you still looking?

That's awesome. No rush though. Be it would be really nice to able to make some A8 games in C for sure!

Being a C programmer, I'd love to buy a tutorial in e-book form (or shit, I'd pay for a notepad txt file) on how you make a game and use the Atari capabilities using CC65.