Saturday, June 21, 2008

PCEngine!

I've been going through a whole load of old backup CD's I have, trying to have a little clear out, and I've finally found the old source to Ballistix! It looks pretty complete including editor and game code. However I'm not excited about that so much as the music player source I'd lost!

This was based on the HiredGuns octamed player (I think) and allows the full 6 channels to be used. It was attached to the timer IRQ which means I can probably plug it into virtually anything I do - particually since I also have the PC Engine music itself!

The music player was built ontop of my sound effects player which simulates the C64 ADSR stuff (since each channel had its own volume). There also appears to be a sample player (including a function called PlayAmigaSample) although I can't remember Ballistix playing samples at all... I'll need to hook it up again and have a listen...

It will also remind me how to arrange the ROM so that it'll actually load in an emultor - exciting stuff this!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, this is all fascinating stuff, Mike! The independent TG16/PCE development scene has grown a lot in recent years and the community would be fascinated to hear about your work! I highly recommend checking out the forums on pcenginefx.com and posting in the development section - people will be thrilled! Keep up the great work!

Mike said...

"people will be thrilled"

:) You from the 1950's then? :)

Only kiddin', I might start posting when I get stuff up and running, but I need to update my assembler (again) to do TG16 stuff.

Anonymous said...

Haha! Of course by "people", I mean mega nerds ;) . By the way, if you use IRC, you should definitely check out #utopiasoft on EFnet. It's a channel dedicated to PCE development and it's a very useful resource center for programmers. Suprisingly it's pretty active.

Unknown said...

So what did you use for tools when this was built ?

Hudson's AS/LK/SD/CE/PE ?

OR perhaps a homebrew assembler and libraries ?

Mike said...

We used their assembler/linker, but I was so annoyed with the debugger (a command line thing which was like MSDOS Debug...) I reverse engineered the coms stuff and wrote my own.