Editors for Horizontal Scrolling Playfields

[+therealbountybob]

I'm creating a a Horizontal Scrolling game for abbuc this year, it's about time I did something different!

 

I've got my simple scroll working with LMS on each line and 1 page of RAM for each.

 

My favourite Atari utility Envision supports a wide playfield and puts out the data as continuous bytes spanning the full width, great I thought... but it appears to have a bug: the maximum playfield is 255 columns *but* it starts on column 1 - so that's only 255 characters across causing it to wrap the data by 1 position on each line.

 

Q1 Any possibilty someone could patch Envision? Link to Envsion source code

Q2 Any reason why Envision is like it is?

Q3 What other packages Atari or PC do people use for similar H-Scrollers?

Q3 Any other utilites related to data manipulation e.g. slicing up and merging data from multiple single screens?

 

Thanks

[wesmond]

Bit of a long shot - but in the early-mid 90s, there was the "Programmer's Development Kit" series by Tiger Developments which I think had tools for creating character sets, combining characters into objects, then putting objects on multi-screen, or scrolling maps. Might have been used to make "Lizard" - I'm not sure. (Bob The Bug may know?). I can't find it online - I'll try and have a look through the boxes...

[playermissile]

Omnivore 0.15 has a map editor, although more designed for reverse engineering at this point. It can handle the full 256 byte wide playfield.

 

Omnivore 2 will have a full general purpose map editor.

[Irgendwer]

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/275944-atari-font-maker-by-matosimi-short-question/?do=findComment&comment=3971948

[Alfred]

I'm creating a a Horizontal Scrolling game for abbuc this year, it's about time I did something different!

 

I've got my simple scroll working with LMS on each line and 1 page of RAM for each.

 

My favourite Atari utility Envision supports a wide playfield and puts out the data as continuous bytes spanning the full width, great I thought... but it appears to have a bug: the maximum playfield is 255 columns *but* it starts on column 1 - so that's only 255 characters across causing it to wrap the data by 1 position on each line.

 

Q1 Any possibilty someone could patch Envision? Link to Envsion source code

 

It's always possible. I just downloaded it, another Synassembler project, erg. Seems to be split into three object files, doesn't seem to say why. I'll see if I can even get it to build. So the problem is it should do columns 0-255 and it doesn't ?

[Alfred]

It's too mind numbingly boring porting the Envision source. I keep making mistakes because my eye just glaze over and so far I've only got 4 of the 16 files done. I'm going to write a tool to do all this bs label conversion, so that will take a day or two.

[+therealbountybob]

It's too mind numbingly boring porting the Envision source. I keep making mistakes because my eye just glaze over and so far I've only got 4 of the 16 files done. I'm going to write a tool to do all this bs label conversion, so that will take a day or two.

thanks for even considering this, the save/export would need to be changed too so it might be too much to ask. Meanwhile I'm coding something to adjust the map lines manually so that will be a workaround.

 

Thanks for all the replies :thumbsup: - "we" have a lot to think about

[Alfred]

thanks for even considering this, the save/export would need to be changed too so it might be too much to ask. Meanwhile I'm coding something to adjust the map lines manually so that will be a workaround.

 

 

 

Well don't thank me yet, I haven't done anything useful so far ? I always wanted a file based version of Envision, so here's my chance. So far it seems to use memory down to $1D00 so that puts the kibosh on using MyDOS or any of the DOS 2 variants. Sparta 3.2 sits at $1C19, presumably SDX is lower, and we always have Sparta 2.3 at, hmm, $0DBE I think it is. So I think there's still a chance of a file version, but I'll know more once I get further into it. Anybody know what MEMLO is with the DOS XL variants ? I don't have an ATR with one of those handy to check.

Edited March 21, 2019 by Alfred

[+therealbountybob]

 

Well don't thank me yet, I haven't done anything useful so far I always wanted a file based version of Envision, so here's my chance. So far it seems to use memory down to $1D00 so that puts the kibosh on using MyDOS or any of the DOS 2 variants. Sparta 3.2 sits at $1C19, presumably SDX is lower, and we always have Sparta 2.3 at, hmm, $0DBE I think it is. So I think there's still a chance of a file version, but I'll know more once I get further into it. Anybody know what MEMLO is with the DOS XL variants ? I don't have an ATR with one of those handy to check.

We now have Mr.Atari's Lite DOS - $1000+ is free

 

My assembler code to align the columns worked!! I looped through using an offset. I could manually put something in the missing column if required.