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Unicorns season: Prince of Persia for the A8!


rensoup

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3 hours ago, xxl said:

I propose to settle two birds with one stone:

 

 

82DF: A2 80     LDX #$80   ; bug

c 82e0 ff

 

 

 

it even says so in the original apple2 source code:

 

* Read joystick
*
* Out: joyX-Y
*

* joyX: -1 = left, 0 = center, +1 = right

 

I had a big brain fart and wrote $80 as -1

 

?

 

Quote

9184: AE 09 D2  LDX $D209    ; will handle the keyboard better jmp $937B

c 9184 4c 7b 93

 

Well this is actually code that I use in my virtual version (6502 emu + DirectX) which I should never have left in the Atari version

 

Good catch!

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I think it's amazing progress and well executed overall so far.

 

A small point you can make note of - if you haven't already considered this.  Is that instead of the bland uniformity of walls - if you can add some irregularity and variation present - it'll help make the overall look better.

Maybe it's accidental at the moment with the WIP - that if you do have a few extra characters spare - making the walls more realistic can add to the atmosphere - instead of it being so clean and boring - that most conversions have gone for.

 

That if you have the opportunity to do something different and improved in this Atari conversion - do so, making this conversion looking better than others.  The walls in the Sega Master conversion do look particularly awful with what they did.  Some of the others also had a different look, that is no improvement over the original/first conversions.

 

Harvey

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8 hours ago, kiwilove said:

I think it's amazing progress and well executed overall so far.

 

A small point you can make note of - if you haven't already considered this.  Is that instead of the bland uniformity of walls - if you can add some irregularity and variation present - it'll help make the overall look better.

Maybe it's accidental at the moment with the WIP - that if you do have a few extra characters spare - making the walls more realistic can add to the atmosphere - instead of it being so clean and boring - that most conversions have gone for.

 

That if you have the opportunity to do something different and improved in this Atari conversion - do so, making this conversion looking better than others.  The walls in the Sega Master conversion do look particularly awful with what they did.  Some of the others also had a different look, that is no improvement over the original/first conversions.

 

Harvey

yes the wall regularity is a problem, it's a single 16x63 tile, and it should be pretty easy to update the code to make it 32x63 but the main problem is memory right now, that extra tile would cost 256 bytes... which is a lot at this point. Same with wall transitions.

 

I don't have all the assets and still have a lot of code to churn out so I don't know precisely where I'm sitting in terms of mem usage

 

I'm still considering it if there is space near the end of the project.

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Hey everyone.

 

Those of you who tried one of the recent versions may remember that there is a very rough attempt with porting the sounds to the game, and probably thought this was pretty bad. You can blame me for that, hahaha.

 

I tried to remake the tunes again from zero, with hopefully a more consistent design, and hopefully not as many wrong notes and weird effects.

These are very likely to be changed again, but the approach this time should already sound a bit better. For now they don't really sound particularily special, but improvements are always possible :)

 

I'll include a .wav of what I did this time.

 

 

pop v2.wav

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So while Vinscool's taking care of the music ( seems were getting somewhere ? )  we need sound effects too... Sound being my favourite subject I haven't got a clue where to start ?

 

 

Just curious if anyone would be able to design them ?

 

 

A few things:

 

  • As far as I know sound effects play constantly during the game (footsteps, gates moving up and down) but Kerian (BBC version coder) confirmed that only one can play at a time.
  • The music only plays for key events (losing a fight, winning a fight, drinking potion,...) so it's ok to use all 4 pokey voices for fx if required.
  • They should take as little space as possible and play as fast as possible. I was hoping for digisound at first but mem/cpu aren't available. 100 bytes per sound max ?
  • I'm not sure if a custom solution is required or dmsc's LZS player would be fine ? The LZS player takes about 10-15 scanlines though... which is good for tunes that play from time to time but perhaps a little much for sound effects that play constantly (but again less channels could be used). The compressor may not be able to do much on such short files either so perhaps SAPR would be ok ?

 

Here are the samples from the PC version. There are about 30(but the BBC version only has 20)

 

popfx.zip

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  • 1 month later...


Working on it ?

 

The next version won't have that many obvious changes but there'll be new enemy graphics by @TIX, updated tunes by @VinsCool and SFX by @miker & @makary.

 

One thing that's been bugging me with the original Apple2 version (and the other 8bit versions to some degree) is the huge framerate drops anytime background pieces move... to the point where the game becomes unplayable. So I've been speeding up some of the display code which required freeing up some memory first.
It's not as fast as I hoped but it should be a noticeable improvement (I find the game quite playable most of the time)

 

PoP fits fine in 128KB but once you want to go beyond what the original did while still making it fit in the same space, it gets a little more complicated (A 256KB version would have been a different story of course since I could have precomputed a ton of things.)

 

The next step is to fix the PMG overlays placement for the enemy... and that should be good enough for a new release!

 

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39 minutes ago, rensoup said:

PoP fits fine in 128KB but once you want to go beyond what the original did while still making it fit in the same space, it gets a little more complicated (A 256KB version would have been a different story of course since I could have precomputed a ton of things.)

Interesting. Maybe you can make precomputed calculations on different cartridge banks and improve speed as well as not needing to use expanded ram.

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3 hours ago, Wilheim said:

Interesting. Maybe you can make precomputed calculations on different cartridge banks and improve speed as well as not needing to use expanded ram.

Yes that's totally possible.

 

I'm using some precompiled sprites for a few background tiles. I just flag them in my exporter and I could just flag a few more to get more speed back.

 

I could preshift the swords and the enemies and perhaps even the prince.

 

A cart version might require a very different memory layout though so that's quite some time away.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Very cool video!

 

Much respect to J.Mechner, he really came up with novel solutions for his rotoscoping and it became one of the game's most outstanding features.

 

Interesting that the fighting was an afterthought and he considers the game wouldn't have been complete without it. I find the fighting much weaker than the exploration... so much that it's a chore fighting a guard when I'm testing it... 

 

(Didn't know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the inspiration for the gameplay!)
 

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5 hours ago, rensoup said:

 I find the fighting much weaker than the exploration... so much that it's a chore fighting a guard when I'm testing it... 

 

(Didn't know that Raiders of the Lost Ark was the inspiration for the gameplay!)
 

 

During development can you have a flag/toggle to switch guards off so you don't have to fight them during testing?

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1 hour ago, pusakat said:

 

During development can you have a flag/toggle to switch guards off so you don't have to fight them during testing?

um during testing you want the guards because they consume resources and can help with timing issues and final game-play feel and fluidity.... I would think level breakpoints and saves would be a wiser choice for dev so you don't have to walk through the whole thing every time when testing on real hardware.

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I watched it last night, agreed, a very good video.  A bit more into the technical aspects would have been nice but I guess they wanted broad appeal.

Also good that the evolution from Karateka was included... and I always pronounced that game like car-ah-tech-a, not the way he did (though it might be a regional thing)

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14 minutes ago, Rybags said:

I watched it last night, agreed, a very good video.  A bit more into the technical aspects would have been nice but I guess they wanted broad appeal.

Also good that the evolution from Karateka was included... and I always pronounced that game like car-ah-tech-a, not the way he did (though it might be a regional thing)

kuh rah tay kuh    at least that's how the 82 year old short dude from Okinawa that kicked all our arses pronounced is in 1991

Edited by _The Doctor__
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4 hours ago, _The Doctor__ said:
5 hours ago, pusakat said:

 

During development can you have a flag/toggle to switch guards off so you don't have to fight them during testing?

um during testing you want the guards because they consume resources and can help with timing issues and final game-play feel and fluidity.... I would think level breakpoints and saves would be a wiser choice for dev so you don't have to walk through the whole thing every time when testing on real hardware.

Turning off damage subtraction from their attacks, so that falling still kills you?

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