Uridium demo.

[Mrarkus]

On 11/5/2020 at 8:13 AM, shoestring said:

 

I'm afraid to call this a WIP, as it's not an easy game to port.

Still, it's been fun dissecting the original game and messing around with MADs to see what I can do on the Atari.

 

Here's what I have.

 

* The splash and High Score screen is standard 40x24 text screen with DLI and one display list for each screen, two different character sets for the 8x16 font. It looks horrible in antic 4, so this will do for now.

* Scrolling screen is 4 rows of standard text separated by 20 rows of an antic mode 4 character screen for the playfield. Getting the stars to remain stationary was a PITA.

 

I'm pretty happy with the scrolling, just as smooth as the original on real hardware. xex is attached.

 

This is looking great, keep it up!

[Mrarkus]

3 hours ago, Stephen said:

There's a common denominator here, and it is neither I, nor Mclenic that are the issue.

 

Seems to happen every few weeks too.  Non-coder who hasn't released anything but RMT tunes, many of them horribly out of tune, constantly tells other people what can and cannot be done.  Puts down every effort by people.  Then wonders why we don't get more new software.  Projects his issues onto everyone else.  I really wonder what his mental issue is because it seems to be more than just being an asshole.

 

I have to say, it's the most severe case of an obnoxious troll in the 8-bit forums that I frequent. Few more like him, and it would turn into an Amiga community these days...

[shoestring]

Sorry that my rmt skills aren't the best, first time using it to edit or make something.

 

Still doesn't quite capture what I'd like delay wise but I had something like this in mind for the 4th track with the rolling arpeggios.

 

uridium-sketch.v1.2.rmt

 

Anyway, back to coding.

[miker]

7 hours ago, shoestring said:

Really nice. However, I made a quick small change ( I hope you don't mind ) as I think the first bass note in the sequence 04 should be an E instead of C#.

<snip>

 

uridium-sketch.v1.1.rmt 923 B · 4 downloads

Could be. I was kind of tired and sleepy afted whole working week. No problem with tampering.  

 

 

Shhh... Let's wait for our virtuoso. ?

[snicklin]

14 hours ago, Stephen said:

There's a common denominator here, and it is neither I, nor Mclenic that are the issue.

 

Seems to happen every few weeks too.  Non-coder who hasn't released anything but RMT tunes, many of them horribly out of tune, constantly tells other people what can and cannot be done.  Puts down every effort by people.  Then wonders why we don't get more new software.  Projects his issues onto everyone else.  I really wonder what his mental issue is because it seems to be more than just being an asshole.

Definitely not you Stephen or McLaneInc. I am just sick of reading decent conversations that get ruined here. There are some really amazing things that go on in this forum, but so many times they get torn by down by one individual. Not you Stephen,  not you McLaneInc,

[Mclaneinc]

I know its not us and just who it is, me personally I have always 100% supported people in here and praise all work including his because its more than I can do and who am I to rubbish a person giving something to the community. Sadly his contributions either start negative or swiftly turn that way, he's always on a downer to productivity in here unless its his work and then its a miracle.

 

I feel sorry for someone who has put time and effort in to a demo, tune or whatever only to have him make snide remarks about it...It really does not help coders or non coders to learn more..

 

I will continue to welcome and support people in here regardless of his negativity...

 

I used to enjoy an alternative viewpoint from him, to hear the other side was refreshing until it very quickly became clear that his viewpoint was always anti productivity in here unless it was a view he had which he would wax lyrical about how his POV was the right one. Just go through threads he has jumped in to, you will see it happen pretty much every time, none of us are doing it right and his view trumps all..

 

Pointless and stifles creation...

Edited November 7, 2020 by Mclaneinc

[shoestring]

19 hours ago, JAC! said:

Looks really nice. I love the design of all Braybrook games.
Simply go ahead and see how far you can get with your version. In the worst case you will gain a lot of experience coding for the A8.

And don't expect too much from posting these early versions here on AA publicly in the common forum. The discussion will typically derail quickly?.
If you have coding related question, you should post in the Programming subforum.

Hi Peter, thanks for the kind words. Your tutorials on YT are great, I often review a lot of your content over time which has helped make the transition over to the A8.

 

 

 

 

[shoestring]

2 hours ago, Mclaneinc said:

Sadly his contributions either start negative or swiftly turn that way, he's always on a downer to productivity in here unless its his work and then its a miracle.

 

I feel sorry for someone who has put time and effort in to a demo, tune or whatever only to have him make snide remarks about it...It really does not help coders or non coders to learn more..

He’s an autocrat and wants to be the gatekeeper of all things produced on the Atari, the Saddam Hussein of the 8 bit computing world. These are desperate times my friends, we have to prevent those rabid ungodly lemon64 forumers from stumbling upon these creations of ours lest they laugh and mock us.

[Mclaneinc]

I have to say I'm a Lemon64 forumer myself BUT I can totally agree, I post rarely in there as it turns ugly real fast..Those guys could start an argument with just one of them in a room. I go there to support the devs, just as I do here..

 

There's a fellow c64 as well person on here who's a dev and he won't hang around Lemon either..

 

As for our royal pain on here, I have him on ignore so only see when he's quoted but its always the same...

[ivop]

2 hours ago, shoestring said:

the gatekeeper

Hey, I'm The Gatekeeper!!1!1eleven

 

[Yautja]

3 hours ago, shoestring said:

the Saddam Hussein of the 8 bit computing world

This made my day... Thanks!

[+CharlieChaplin]

31 minutes ago, ivop said:

Hey, I'm The Gatekeeper!!1!1eleven

 

 

Zuul = The Gatekeeper

Where are the Ghostbusters ?

 

[ivop]

41 minutes ago, CharlieChaplin said:

Zuul = The Gatekeeper

Where are the Ghostbusters ?

Funny that you say that. Back in the day, a lot of people thought I got my nick from Ghostbusters, but that's not the case. I based my nick on my surname, which is Van Poorten. Could be Gates (meh), could be Gatekeeper

 

[shoestring]

On 11/7/2020 at 2:40 AM, José Pereira said:

I'm not into Uridium because I always thought gfxs could be much better as the ships.

Though on A8 we would need to have our ship as PMGs and its shots but also the shadow under it then all enemy ships must be soft sprites because there's no other way around I see (ok, Mirax Force has all as PMGs but are only 2 per line or it'll flicker if you had more).

Then all enemys should be soft sprites.

 

C64 as 3common colours: white, light gray and gray (these two can then change to light blue/blue or light green/green,... on other levels) so also enemy ships keep white but will change these 2.

 

Here's a quick example:

Like C64 is black and that blue as PF2 & PF3 and on all levels what changes is the blue to any wanted colour but always keep the black.

Our ship may need to be resized as here we aren't with any PMG for the shadow.

Gray border as BAK then PF0 & PF1 as white and light gray.

Reducing our ship may cause also to reduce to 8/9pixels enemys ships so less cpu (they can be in [3x3]chars size each including theirs shifting/for movements).

Top status can be even in hi-res like you did as in these modes we can have a separate border colour.

As for the charset you can go for Interleaved charsets like I posted here and @popmilo some times and we're using on ours Wonderboy work.

Don't see anything other possible.

 

Thanks for your post, great reference going forward so I might have some questions later. Also, thanks to @CharlieChaplin for compiling that list of games earlier, good references as well.

 

I worked on the starfield last night after discovering a bug, so now the pattern of glyphs generated behind the foreground looks identical except for some reason, these are taking on light grey instead of white. When the scroll is shifting in the opposite direction ( from right to left ) , some glyphs appear white as these should be.  I suspect that their horizontal positioning seems to be a factor in the colour they take on, I'll look at this later for clarity.

 

There's also some timing issues on NTSC A8 systems in regards to the parallax effect. You'll see some adjacencies or stars flicker/disappear on certain scanlines where the timing isn't quite right, the original PAL version running on an NTSC system seems to struggle a bit as well. And at the time of writing this, I now learn there's actually an NTSC version so I'll be taking a good look at that as well. Thankfully I have an NTSC Atari 800 to test any specific NTSC changes on.

 

Now currently getting the Super-dreadnought into the attract sequence, not all the graphics have been imported yet so it 's missing some tiles and overall, the colour should be yellow. To save memory, I need to leave some things out ( bonus stage, shadows ) for now and get the most essential things in first. Once the graphics are in for the Super-dreadnoughts, and I'm happy with them, then I'll start building a debug console which will overlay a summary of variables ( first 4 rows seems a likely spot to display such info since it's already reserved and I don't want to kill the framerate too much by sequencing additional DLIs down the screen). I'll want a little more variable control over all the platforms ( things like control speed and direction of scroll, spawning, turn off collisions ..etc ) and I guess that's when all the fun and headaches begin.

 

 

Edited November 8, 2020 by shoestring

[Mclaneinc]

Looking real sweet...Excellent work...

 

Paul..

Edited November 8, 2020 by Mclaneinc

[José Pereira]

C64 have things like this (using theirs 8 hardware sprites):

-> 1 + 1: Our ship + its shadow;

-> 5 + 1: 5 enemys + 1 can shot each time;

Our ship shots are just chars (seems moving, like in Turrican, but not are chars placed in char boundaries)...

 

Doing this on A8 would be following my previously posted:

-> Convert our ship to 10pixels wide (also, of course, the shadow, so it'll be: PM0&PM1 Multicolour 3colours + PM3 for its shadow;

-> PM2 for one enemy per time shooting;

(PM2 goes up in priority over PM3 and the shot colour is bright over dark shadow of PM3 in a way that'll not give an Oring for Multicolour)

 

So is how it'll look:

That solve the problem for the beginning and you can have then things scrolling. You may need somehing like in ours Wonderboy using Interleaved charsets to achieve the 256chars of C64 charsets.

Then the light and dark colours would change level to level and do enemys as soft sprites. If 5 C64 size not enough cpu then just reduce them to [3x3]chars size including shifting.

[Dinadan67]

On 11/6/2020 at 10:51 PM, CharlieChaplin said:

Well,

 

here is another demo influenced by Uridium. This was one of the intros for Abbuc Magazin 20 in 1990 (there were two more intros, one by P.Sabath and the winner intro by Gnome Design). The demo/intro was made 30 years ago by D.Johannsen, who is also the author of Yoomp, errrm, Jump!

 

 Jump!

 

It was never intended to be a game, just an intro for Abbuc magazine and therefore it should have been short and not require the full diskette...

To be honest, it was initially intended to become a full game. But back in the time, i bought an Amiga 1000 and abandoned this project in favor of learning m68k-assembler and porting "Jump!" to the Amiga. Years later i decided to turn the existing code into a large scrolling Demo.

 

Today i found an old disk containing the level (mothership)-editor and the workdisk with my sourcecode (Atmas-II). Maybe shoestring finds something useful on these ATRs. When you boot the editor, you can choose the type of tiles with the arrow-keys and place tiles on the map with the joystick. ctrl-l and ctrl-s loads and saves a level. When you load the level "abbuc" from this atr, you have the scoller from the demo. Have fun!

mothership_editor.ATR workdisk.ATR

[Mclaneinc]

A fan of Bounder / Re-Bounder on the C64...

 

Thank you for the disks, always great to have code etc...

[shoestring]

20 hours ago, José Pereira said:

So is how it'll look:

That solve the problem for the beginning and you can have then things scrolling. You may need somehing like in ours Wonderboy using Interleaved charsets to achieve the 256chars of C64 charsets.

Then the light and dark colours would change level to level and do enemys as soft sprites. If 5 C64 size not enough cpu then just reduce them to [3x3]chars size including shifting.

For the 20 or so mode lines, here are the total number of shapes used for the dreadnoughts

 

Character set A - 1kb ( from $7800 )

 

 

Character set B - 3kb ( Underneath I/O D400-DFFF via bank switching on the c64, I use $5C00 on the Atari for now )

 

So, 4kb total just to store all the different symbols used for the playfield throughout the game ( not including bonus stage )

 

The first character set from $7800 is appended/modified using the additional characters stored underneath the I/O ( character set B ). So you end up with a variation of the following depending on which level is built up. ( there are 15 levels or dreadnoughts in the game)

 

$7800-$7FFF 2kb, 256 characters need to be referenced at any one time, as you've mentioned above.

 

Now regarding the missing, or rather incorrect tiles displayed as I mentioned in my previous post. Even after importing the rest of the characters into my project and finally realising a few hours ( doh ) later that I was only going to be able to see the first 128 characters at one time, quickly flipping chbase from $7800 to $7C00 to confirm that the data for the few missing tiles is correct. So I'll definitely need to use an interleaved method similar to what is used in WonderBoy.

 

 

 

 

I've also made some changes to the RMT as well, I think it sounds a little better now. 

uridium-sketch.v1.3.rmt

[José Pereira]

I got the maps for all levels but is in .jpg lots of pixels mess

To see what could or not be done with the Interleaved charsets method I really need this in real colours/pixels .png.

Do you have it?

 

P.s.- By the way do you already got how C64s version arrange the chars in tiles? Is it tiles of what size, [2x2]chars,...?

This maybe usefull for the Interleaved charsets...

[José Pereira]

Got it!...

The game is arranged in [3x3]chars tiles size as you can see from this picture whare I added those square this size gfxs and you'll see that they 'check' with mostly of the others gfxs:

This way I think we can go for 3 Interleaved charsets.

But then all enemys should be turned into no more then [3x3]chars size including shifting to follow this rule...

 

I have a program to calculate the number per each and if is possible or not but really need th in ose maps real sizwe .png.

Or can you get from the C64 code each/all the tiles in [3x3]chars size?

 

Have the maps then I could get the tiles just by using C64s Charmap program, I think...

 

 

[shoestring]

Hmm. I haven’t generated those yet but I can see where this would be useful. I can force the current driver to display each level I want, then dump the screen frame by frame and manually stitch them all together using something like gimp.  
 

I wonder if I use something like G2F or Atari font maker to import the characters for each level and then use the screen data ( from $4800 ) to stitch the map by hand each time 40 characters have been shifted horizontally. 
 

I could dump the character tiles from mame and export 15 individual .fnt files from $7800 once the game has generated those before each level starts. Though I don’t see any quick method to generate the entire map without manually stitching them together frame by frame.

Also mame can do things like view the tile maps and entire screens ( bg, fg , sprites ) generated by them. But I’ll just need to check and see if it supports browsing the different gfx sections for non arcade ( computer ) drivers as well.
 

 

[shoestring]

11 hours ago, José Pereira said:

Got it!...

The game is arranged in [3x3]chars tiles size as you can see from this picture whare I added those square this size gfxs and you'll see that they 'check' with mostly of the others gfxs:

This way I think we can go for 3 Interleaved charsets.

But then all enemys should be turned into no more then [3x3]chars size including shifting to follow this rule...

 

I have a program to calculate the number per each and if is possible or not but really need th in ose maps real sizwe .png.

Or can you get from the C64 code each/all the tiles in [3x3]chars size?

 

Have the maps then I could get the tiles just by using C64s Charmap program, I think...

 

 

 

Firstly, I had to generate all the 15 unique character sets that were derived from A & B by dumping $7800-$7FFF ( attached ) after the game did the changes for me, thanks to trainers and MAME for easy dumping.

 

So the requirements are 3 character sets for each 15 of the levels, each is generated by unpacking from character set A ( which is static, confirmed that it never changes ) then copying the required to character set B before the level starts.

 

Next,  since I have a reference for the tiles used in each level, I'll have to recreate the map for the entire game, without all the jpeg artifacts of course. So this will take time.

 

For the [3x3] 24x24px character tiles, how would you like these arranged ? (ie.. vertically or horizontally).  I'm not sure how your program works.

 

 

chrsets.zip

[shoestring]

Here's the first level done. 14 more to go, let me know if this is what you had in mind.

 

 

Edited November 11, 2020 by shoestring

[José Pereira]

4 hours ago, shoestring said:

Here's the first level done. 14 more to go, let me know if this is what you had in mind.

 

 

Don't worry and don't waste time because Uridium because I remember it was on the CharPad program examples with all chars, tiles and levels map so give me 1 or 2 days then we'll talk.

On there they say is tiles [1x1]chars size and is 17chars tasll but from the game playing area it misses 2 at the top more 2 at the bottom that makes the 21charlines.

Download it at: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=176475 but here's by now that 1st level with real playing area 21charlines:

-> CharPad file (.ctm to there using Open Project): Uridium L01 _21charlines.ctm

And the map (the 5ht colour seeing on some squares will be ours PF2 so PF3 is black (like C64 chars colour) and will colour them later...):

 

P.s.- Program to get is just number of chars per wanted number of Interleaved Charsets and is from @popmilo...

I'm with a problem using here Windows10 where previously was 7 so have to wait for his answer or I'll say you right now how many chars this level have for the 3charsets.