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SlithyMatt

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Posts posted by SlithyMatt

  2. Posted

    Elementary School only had Apple IIs - my first time touching a computer was a II (maybe a II+?) in second grade (1982-83). In third grade learned to program in Logo, and the school kept investing in Apple, eventually getting a IIc in every classroom by 85-86.

     

    Christmas 86 I got my first computer: a 64kB CoCo 2, complete with CCR-82 tape deck, DMP-130 dot matrix printer, and Color ScripsIt cartridge. It was my first exposure to BASIC, and I taught myself to program with the manuals and example listing provided with the system. Eventually acquired a floppy drive and a bunch of games, and even OS-9 that was a mystifying, strange thing that my father somehow agreed to buy for me.

     

    Starting Middle School the next year, the computer lab there had TRS-80 IIIs with the integrated monochrome monitors and floppy drives, which is where I first encountered BASIC in school, and by then I was a "seasoned expert". We also played Oregon Trail on those, never on Apple II, like most folks in the US apparently did.

     

    By high school, I got my first PC clone at home (a Tandy 1000 HX, because where else would you get a computer than Radio Shack?) and at school they had Apple IIgs's (connected to a handful of Macs) and IBM PS/2s, but no more TRS-80s to be found. I gave away my CoCo 2, and haven't touched any TRS-80 since outside of emulation.

  3. Posted

    Elementary School only had Apple IIs - my first time touching a computer was a II (maybe a II+?) in second grade (1982-83). In third grade learned to program in Logo, and the school kept investing in Apple, eventually getting a IIc in every classroom by 85-86.

     

    Christmas 86 I got my first computer: a 64kB CoCo 2, complete with CCR-82 tape deck, DMP-130 dot matrix printer, and Color ScripsIt cartridge. It was my first exposure to BASIC, and I taught myself to program with the manuals and example listing provided with the system. Eventually acquired a floppy drive and a bunch of games, and even OS-9 that was a mystifying, strange thing that my father somehow agreed to buy for me.

     

    Starting Middle School the next year, the computer lab there had TRS-80 IIIs with the integrated monochrome monitors and floppy drives, which is where I first encountered BASIC in school, and by then I was a "seasoned expert". We also played Oregon Trail on those, never on Apple II, like most folks in the US apparently did.

     

    By high school, I got my first PC clone at home (a Tandy 1000 HX, because where else would you get a computer than Radio Shack?) and at school they had Apple IIgs's (connected to a handful of Macs) and IBM PS/2s, but no more TRS-80s to be found. I gave away my CoCo 2, and haven't touched any TRS-80 since outside of emulation.

  7. Posted

    4 minutes ago, MLockmoore said:

    I had been doing some other work in Matlab

    A bit off-topic, but do you really need Matlab? I've found that Octave works just as well if you don't need any specific Matlab-only packages. And I'm surprised Xilinx doesn't have better Linux support. I remember back in the 90s having to use an HP-UX system to do FPGA development!

  9. Posted

    On 11/25/2020 at 5:49 PM, MLockmoore said:

    When I load Alice I see initially weird player sprites for Alice and the White Rabbit.

    I have fixed this in a new release: https://github.com/SlithyMatt/vcs-alice/releases/tag/v0.1.1a

     

    So, today I learned one key difference between the Windows and Linux versions of Stella: on Windows, the state of the D bit (BCD math) is set at startup, whereas on Linux it's clear. So, that first ADC instruction to set the sprite frame offset is doing it in BCD instead of binary, changing the pointer to an invalid address (some where in the $2000's). I simply added a CLD to the top of the code, and now it works fine on both platforms.

     

    So a word to the wise: don't assume any status bit values!

  10. Posted

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    +32 operation is equivalent to just setting the 6th bit to a one, so a single OR operation should do it. 

    Not necessarily. If that bit is already set, then we need to do a full binary add. Right now, I'm not looking to align the sprite data to ensure that, plus this code is in the VBLANK, so timing isn't as sensitive. I have plenty of time to do the add -- I'm already burning off 30 scanlines doing nothing before that part of the code.

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    you can have a compact table of the the bitmaps for both PF1 and PF2 (16 bytes)

    I've considered this, as it makes the processing quicker, but it takes up a lot of ROM space, which is why I crammed every row into a single byte before. However, now that I'm resigned to the fact that level 2 will take up the whole bank, I can probably take up more real estate and get some time back.

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    I'm not sure if ca65 allows doubling up like this

    It totally does.

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    I am currently working in Windows

    Nobody's perfect. 😉

     

    7 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    When I load Alice I see initially weird player sprites for Alice and the White Rabbit

    Not sure what that's about. Somehow each sprite table is getting a bad pointer at the beginning, but that should be explicitly initialized. I've never seen this with Stella on Linux or on Javatari. Do you still see it if you do a reset?

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    either the last line is not visible, or last line is duplicated as the 2nd-to-last line

    Yeah, both were intentionally let slide as it's hard to really tell when playing the game in real time and it made things a lot easier.

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    I'm not sure why there are two versions of the sprite data in the .asm source code file, one vertically-flipped compared to the other

    Basically, I didn't want to use a special index, so they are formatted to use whatever is currently in the Y register, based on all possible branches.

     

    6 hours ago, MLockmoore said:

    Is the current cake supposed to be a "petit fours" type?

    Yes, in the original illustrations, they are petit fours shaped as gift boxes, but I like the ones you created!

     

    So, wow, you really dug deep there! Have you created a public fork of the repo on GitHub? It would be the best way to share any modifications you come up with, and you can do pull requests, if you come up with any fixes or improvements.

  14. Posted

    3 minutes ago, gambler172 said:

    without a playable demo.....i cannot say,that it

    is a great game....a video does not say a lot.

    Well, it's very much a work in progress. I am very close to making the second level fully playable, but later levels have not been implemented yet. Stay tuned!

  15. Posted · Edited by SlithyMatt

    I am working on an open-source homebrew adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" for the 2600. I had posted my first demo on Facebook, but now I'm finally here! So, here's an update of my game with some new gameplay elements implemented:

     

    Alice 2600 Demo #2 - Down the Rabbit Hole!

     

    If you have any ideas about what could go into an Alice game, please feel free to reply to this thread or comment on YouTube. Thanks!

     

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