Sunday, October 01, 2006

XeO3: bits and bobs...

Sound is interesting.... you can work away trying to get perfect pitch and volume and then when its working just the way you want, you can sometimes make it really course and never notice the difference. I put keys for volume control into the game, and all the work spent on the ADSR (a whole day of it...) is reduced somewhat to a whimper depending on the volume. Now, when playing back on the actual machine TED sounds are far FAR louder than Solder's SID chip addon, so I need to set a volume of around 2 or 3. This means all my ADSR values of 7 down to 0 are now just 2 or 3 down to 0. Not a lot... But they do still count, because if you dont use ADSR at all, it sounds terrible... weird.

I have to confess, I've been playing with some C64 code tonight.... I found the source to the Armalyte Multiplexor on (Lemon64), and thought I'd go through it... and perhaps get it up and running. However, this has lead me to look back at my Blood Money multiplexor (which itself was based on me hacking Armalyte - although I wrote it myself once I had the gernal idea), and its not bad either... theirs is a bit larger with the loops unrolled a lot, but mine wasn't too bad at all. Anyway, I think with very minimal work (and a working multiplexor) I can get XeO3 up and running pretty quickly on the C64. I'm kinda half waiting on Luca to do some more sprites now anyway, so I've an excuse to play a little... well... thats my reason and I'm sticking to it! It will be a little harder to get .PRG's onto the C64, although my MMC64 will help a bit, but a download cable would be much better.....

So, after looking through the source, I've started to macro it a bit more to make it easier to follow - for the sort at least, I may well write my own multiplexor bit again... but I suspect I'll try and get something running first. The great thing about doing a C64->Plus4 or a Plus4>C64 conversion is that being 6502, it'll just run - I won't have to rewite it all the way I used to do when doing a port. This means I get to do all the fun stuff and dont have to do ANY of the boring stuff again!!! Great!!!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nnnooooooo, I became the slow wheel of the while chain :'(

Mike said...

Nah, games are like this somtimes... the starts pretty quick, the middles really slow, but then once all the major functions are in, it all speeds up again! :)

Usually when the coders are in the middle bit, the art guys are pushing on... we just missed that because of all the pauses in the project, thats all.......honest.

Anonymous said...

That's because graphicians's body is full of wounds, and coders have whip in their left hand :O

Mike said...

Well, there is that I suppose :)

Anonymous said...

Mike, I guess we have to take away that C64 ;)

Luca, nice to see you :)

Loading just "one piece" for every level... I don't really think it makes that much difference if you load three small parts instead of one big one. At least not on the 1551 and the 1541 is not that much slower. The ROM routine's start track/sector look up is not that slow. I did some 1551 versions of demos and games and sometimes I had to load the speeder after every part again because it wouldn't fit into the memory. Speedwise not much worse.

Are you including a speed loader?

What you said about the frontend is oh so true. It's annoying when you just want to restart and have to go to a title screen and all that again. Maybe you should just make that optional, ie "Press fire to restart or whatever to go to the title screen".

I always thought things like that are obvious but they are not, so I'm glad you mentioned that :)

And while we are at it... Do you have a 256kb plus/4? I guess we all agree that the game should work on a 64kb machine but it would be nice if it supports 256kb in some way, e.g. loading the next levels etc into those additional RAM banks. Of course that's not very important but it would be nice.

And if you don't know what to write since you are waiting for Godot, err, Luca. I'd like to read something about the PC-plus/4 connection and the software on the PC and plus/4 side.

Cheers,
Chicken

Mike said...

On you go! I have 3!! :)
I just ordered a retro-replay as well, so I might see what thats like then buy the serial or network kit for it! Ooooo..download through ethernet!! coooooool!

As long as there aren't too many, theb multiple parts aren't a problem no.

HA! We dont even have space for the text font at the moment! Im not sure...I'll have to wait and see.. perhaps we can sacrifice a couple of sprites... or I might be able to build sprites dynamically using the system font or something... but all that takes code space I dont really have! :(

No, I dont want to get into 256k +4 games... If I was going to do something like that, it'd be for the C64 - I have a 512Mb one here.

Mmmm.. not much to the connection program really... send byte...get byte.... thats about it really :)

Mike said...

If you really want me to go through the connection program, start up a thread on +4 world... tis easier there..

Anonymous said...

Once again ;)
I didn't mean a dedicated 256kb version. Just make use of the extra RAM for level data or a frontend that otherwise has to be loaded from disk, kinda like a RAM disk.
There are a very few multiload games that have been adapted for the 256kb RAM extension and it's great, e.g. play "Summer Events" without loading in between :)

Mike said...

Well, as I dont have one....I dont like not being able to test that stuff properly.

However, once its released.... I'm sure someone can add it later :)