TG16 stuff....

Now that my TG16 (PC Engine) flash card has arrive, I've been trying to think of something interesting to do with it to get back into it. I was looking at an old Video of Shadow of the Beast I did years back and realised it could have been much, much....MUCH better....

Now if you watch this through, you'll see that when it gets to the platform section theres no dual playfield mode - pretty much because the TG16 doesnt have one! But I've figured out a way to get a simple playfield going,which would make it look astounding!

Using an old technique from the C64 and by what I've been doing with the Super CPU, I think you could add a proper playfield without losing sprites etc. That would be a pretty cool demo to start with!

When I was doing TG16 stuff, I just didnt use the CPU power properly; sure I know more now and was pretty much wallowing in CPU time last time, but I think I can now fully utilise the space CPU time. 7Mhz is a LOT of time to burn...

TG16 Shadow of the Beast - ROM!!

I've managed to convert the old devkit Beast.BX file into a real BEAST.PCE file! The only reason I was able to do this easily was because years ago when I was doing SotB(Shadow of the Beast) I hated the offical debugger so much, I wrote my own! If you want to see what I was dealing with, drop down into a command prompt and type DEBUG. This is what the offical devkit was like - terrible! So I spent a couple of months after work hacking the debugger and working out how it talked to the ICE unit, then I wrote my own. The first thing I did of course was to upload the assembled .BX files, and to do that I had to reverse engineer the format of that as well as the symbol file.

Of course back then I was having so much fun doing this I stayed at the office and worked late into the night. It took a couple of weeks to get to a usable point, and around 3 months to actually get to a finished state, but it was a vast improvement. I remember being pissed off at Dave though as he refused to try and sell it back to NEC, even though they would have been sure to take it. It was party because I wanted something out of it, and becasue it was going to be more compilcated than just sell and forget, he couldn't be bothered.

However, it was good fun and taught me a lot, particually the expression evaluation stuff that Brian Watson wrote for me. I had a really simple one it, and it wasn't recursive. So he knocked a proper one up for me, and I've been using that method ever since.Its also funny to see the cheat mode is still in there, but unlike the final game, this one displays the Lemming's logo! No idea why that was removed, I was probably told to - but its pretty funny seeing it pop up. For those that don't know, on the title page of SotB, you can press Fire1,Fire2,Fire2,Fire1 and the number of lives go to 99. And your into cheat mode. Easy as that!

This demo is only the top level, and the first multi-directional level, theres no castle yet and all the graphics are Amiga ones with the exception of the trees (which do look a little pants). After seeing this Psygnosis weren't happy with the look of it at all and so drafted in Martyn Chudley (who went on to own Bizzar Creations) who drew all the cool backgrounds and sprites. He was actually busy on his own game at Psygnosis at the time Wiz 'n Liz on the Megadrive, which I almost ported to the SNES funnily enough.

I have to say this is interesting...but dull really. It's an interesting snapshot of development, but the game still sucks and its only a partial game with just 2 levels. But its funny seeing it never the less.

TG16 stuff...

Not been doing a lot past few days, but I'm now off on holiday for a week so Im going to push on with my TG16 assembler first. I did get a little shock though as one of the manuals I have must have been a pretty early one since it doesn't document CSH or CSL which are used to switch the PC Engine into high and low speed modes. Now, I knew about these commands since I have some old source, but the manual I was using didn't document them at all, and its not like there were pages missing as the page numbers count up fine! They just weren't there! However, my other (slightly grubbier) manual does have them, so I can find out the opcode and add them in.

It's probably going to take me a few days to get all this stuff in which is a pain, but then I should be good to go!

I also found a VERY old bit of shadow of the beast. I think this is pre-CDROM! In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that its the version that was in the Games-X mag back in 1991 where I just had the beast man running around on the 1st level - before all the pretty graphics went in! I'll need to try and work out the format of the ROM dump as its a special outpu for the offical kit, but if memory serves its pretty simple. I'd love to see this again and get a bit of video of it for my DMA page.

I also found my SuperSystem2 card, and on the back It's been labeled No. 2. I wonder if we did get the second one ever made... or if it was the 2nd one given to developers or something - who knows. I do know we were one od the 1st to develop on using the new SuperCDROM, so it might well be the second card ever made - which is cool.

Damn those NEC people!!

I've been updating my assembler to do the extra TG16 opcodes I need only to discover that NEC in their infinite wisdom have changed every opcode! Every single one! Damn them!! So I now need to create another opcode table for the PC Engine.... Bugger. It also means it's going to take me a little while before I can get to actually work on the blood thing.

I found another old PC Engine manual though, and its the good one! It has all the hardware and CPU stuff which means I can at least start to read about things - even if i can't plunge on and program anything!

While I do want to play with a dual-playfield thing, I suspect I'll end up porting XeO3 to it coz...well... why not. The TG16 was a shooters dream machine and had some amazing shooters on it, so it will be good to actually write one on it. Shadow of the Beast let me code this little machine and I do love it... but I hated almost every moment as the game was totally crap. Oh well....