Friday, October 06, 2006

Xeo3: Vice...


Well, thanks to the comment made the other day, I've managed to add symbols to VICE. Since I use my own assembler, it was a quick 10 min job to get the symbol table exported in the VICE format. This does help when trying to track down odd bugs so its very much appricated - whoever it was (names on the comments would help!). Although not being able to have a memory window is prehistoric!!

I've got the basic flow of the Multiplexor in, so now I need to test the start of it, and then start generating interrupts. I can test the beginings since I copy in the first 7 sprites in the list to save having to do early interrupts. Its also a good way to start, it lets you see if things are progressing the way you expect.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, that was me (Johan Forslöf if you must know). I'm glad that I could be of use, it may not be MSVC but it's a whole lot better than nothing ;)

Actually I'm currently working on a multiplexer myself as part of a small shoot'em up (related to this thread).
Anyway, I'd love to compare notes about multiplexing, scrolling and shoot'em up coding in general. So feel free to drop me a message on ICQ (213799814) or MSN (doynax@hotmail.com).

/doynax

Mike said...

Ah - well, thanks. Its helped quite a bit. I just wish you could load symbols at the command line now, its a pain having to load them up all the time.

I'm pretty much finshed my multiplexor I think. It currently takes a max of 10 scanlines to reposition 7 sprites (the 8th being kept for the player), so thats pretty good. I've settled on 16 aliens, which is a fair number and should keep the screen fairly busy.

Yeah, I saw that demo... pretty cool, and 600 cycles isn't too much (around 9-10 scanlines worth?). It should more than pay for itself when scrolling the screen.

For chatting about this stuff, its easier in a forum so I can answer when I have free time; its also handy to keep track of the conversation.... feel free to start one up on Lemon64 (or you can start one on my DMA forum if you like http://bbs.dmadesign.org

Anonymous said...

Loading the labels isn't the problem - that's only a matter of typing ll "ll" in the console in my case. The truly annoying thing is having to show and position the code and register windows each time..

I'll post something on the DMA forum. It's more fun to keep low on Lemon until I've actually got something to show (and less public in case I fail to produce anything).

/doynax

Anonymous said...

Scrolling usually takes about 9k cycles for the video matrix plus whatever you use for scrolling the color ram. How much you save really depends on how fast you scroll.

The nice thing about the whole scheme is that I can double buffer the color ram too since it only show every second line. Of course in a horizontal shooter like yours you can always use DMA delay, but for my vertical game it should allow me to use full color resolution (well, only half now I suppose).

/doynax