Wednesday, October 18, 2006

XeO3: Front End..

So after a couple of days squeezing the front end down as much as I can, I've now spent today putting much of it back in - bugger. I got a logo from Luca to try and tart the front end up a bit, and it means I have to start double buffering the front end a bit. Since the logo itself takes up almost 1K, it also means I'll have to try and free up even more space. Its worth it though as it does help make the front end a bit nicer. I hope to finish this up tomorrow, and then I can take stock of the damage its done to the memory. At least if we do need to trim it, theres at the very worst we could just reduce its size.... It also means my nice and simple 3 layer starfield isn't nice and simple anymore. I now need to double buffer that as well so I dont need to redraw the logo all the time! Its never easy.....

I've had to redo my C64 parallel cable as I got the pins backwards! Doh. Idiot. All the diagrams I found to tell me the pins never actually got around to telling me that it was describing the back of the computer, and not the cable itself. I had assumed that it was descibing the cable, since thats what everyone wants to know! But no... wrong again. Anyway, I've built my own cable rather than the PC64 one, and once I manage to get the PA2 line working, I'll be able to download a whole byte at a time, rather than a nibble which all the other cables seem to do. Not sure why... it might be to do with old parallel ports not being bi-directional or something, but I don't really know. If I can't get the PA2 line working, then I'll have to drop down to a nibble and use some of the datalines as handshaking - which I'd rather not do; although if Im desprate, I could do 7 bit.... but thats horrible!

Edit: Oh! And after finding the old instructions to my SID card, I've discovered it has an adjustable volume! FAB!! I can now balance out the TED and SID music without having to turn TED music down to virtually nothing! Hurrah!!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doh... Didn't understand what with TED/SID balancing.
You can detect/choose TED or SID at the very beginning, as always, and the game will react consequently, that's clear for all.
In the SIDmusic/TEDfx case, adjust SID volume by the screw on the card is not fair, it's a poor trick to boostup both SID and its pretty nice ground noise.

Anonymous said...

... adjusting the SIDcard's volume is just a part of proper equioment setup. I adjust my monitor as well...

Unfortunately, you can raise up your monitor's value and face distortion+ground noise when your TED is really s-c-r-e-a-m-i-n-g. Juggling on the SIDcard's volume screw produces distortion+ground noise at relatively lower volume levels.
That's because volume tuning in these two cases has no real comparision: SIDcard users, as suggested by Solder himself, should find a good volume/noise balance between monitor and SIDcard, and try to keep it set.

Mike said...

Actually, you should adjust the SID when you recieve it - I didn't. My SID volume was so low I had to turn the TV volume almost all the way up, which in itself introduces artifacts. But now that they are about the same, my TV/Monitor volume is around the middle of its settings. Much better.

I'm not going to remove the in-game volume settings (which I might save with the HISCORE btw), because sometimes I WANT to have louder music or effects.

Anonymous said...

F1: toggle music SID/TED/off
F2: toggle fx on/off
in the game, F1/F2 adjust TEDsound (both if music or fx), F3/HELP adjust SIDsound
Still, SID detection (or selection) before frontend.

Would be very kewl :D

Anonymous said...

Is there really a need to toggle music/fx on/off? It's a bit redundant (though faster, I admit) if volume 0 is "off", too.

If you wanna have the audio shutoff as a feature, you can't set to 0 your volume in the game (do you remember? that option is present when the game starts ;) ).
It should be logic to choose it in the frontend.
If not, well... :)

Mike said...

I dont think a volume control on the front end is practicle. You dont know what volume you want until you play the game.

Music+sound on/off. its not vital, but its handy. It also saves a LOT of in game CPU time if its switched off. So if the game does slow down for any reason, this would speed it up again.... if it slows down.

The front end is now burning memory again, so I'll wait and see how much we need to cut. It may not stay in... but it might.