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Aardvark for Atari VCS/2600


nanochess

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I haven't looked in on this in awhile, and it's coming along great! I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus of people asking for the joystick directions to be handled a bit more forgivingly when trying to get into gaps. If you could have it so diagonals worked like turning ahead of a corner in Pac-Man, I think that would really help a lot. I find myself dying too often, just trying to get the tongue to go into the (you know... no matter how I write the rest of this sentence, it just sounds weird).

 

Also - the arcade game does let you double back on yourself, so it would be great to see this here as well. Handy for worms.

 

Excellent work - looking forward to the next update!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Released the 9th version demo'ed at PRGE 2017, check the >big< list of changes in first post ;)

 

BTW, glad to say Thomas Jentzsch is now aboard and he has improved vastly my display kernel and also I'm going to implement some awesome features to the core game ;)

 

Also I'm going for a F8SC kernel because these features really deserve it :grin:

 

So expect more news soon ;)

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At last I can show a picture from the most recent display kernel by Thomas after lots of fixing ins and outs to interface it to the core game and moving to F8SC mapping.

 

It includes multicolor sprites, assymetrical holes in tunnel floors and textured floors.

 

Edit: forgot to say the number of tunnels is now 8 like the arcade ;)

 

post-30245-0-24616800-1509906863_thumb.png

post-30245-0-96952800-1509906869_thumb.png

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Hi there,

 

I've been out of the scene for a while and not fully following all the new games and development coming to the VCS. I must say, this looks and sounds great. Great job on this game.

 

I am curious why the extra RAM and ROM are needed. Could you share why they're needed? I've been more interested in code and construction of VCS ROMs.I really miss [stella].

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Hi Thomas,

The RAM is mostly needed for the eggs and the tongue in the tunnel. There are 8 tunnels which require 6 bytes for the eggs and another 6 for the tongue. That's already 96 bytes.

Are all the bytes needed for the tongue? Only thinking of the left side at the moment, if the tongue has reached PF1 then you know PF2 would be filled. Also, if the tongue has reached PF0 then you know both PF1 and PF2 are filled.

 

Using Tod Frye's Pac-man as an example, he used 16 bytes to represent a set of player wafers in the game by using the RAM values as pointers into data in the ROM.

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Hi Thomas,

Are all the bytes needed for the tongue? Only thinking of the left side at the moment, if the tongue has reached PF1 then you know PF2 would be filled. Also, if the tongue has reached PF0 then you know both PF1 and PF2 are filled.

 

Using Tod Frye's Pac-man as an example, he used 16 bytes to represent a set of player wafers in the game by using the RAM values as pointers into data in the ROM.

I have thought about using such pattern to reduce memory. But since the anthills are random and therefore the layout can vary a lot, the number of patterns required I calculated became huge. There also is little to none time inside the kernel* to do any pattern handling.

 

*The tunnel kernel has 2 single line, multicolored sprites and a full size asymmetrical playfield. So there is no time for index accesses for the PF. Therefore free cycles in the floor kernel are used to copy tunnel PF data from RAM to a fixed RAM address.

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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This game is looking great! Would you be interested in adding a high score table? If so, I could write a version of F6SC that saves the high scores onto the Harmony/Melody cart (like Star Castle Arcade).

 

Thomas - I think we could port across the high score code from Star Castle Arcade without too much difficulty?

 

Chris

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