SpiceWare's Blog

I've played a few rounds each night with the new Frantic build¹ and haven't see the 2x sprite glitch yet so at this point it seems very likely that the glitch was caused by C variables & stack colliding. Please continue testing the build though as I'm now going to concentrate on finishing my changes to Stella so I can send them in to stephena. After that I'll resume work on Frantic.

¹ if you didn't make it through that super long, and possibly super boring (especially to the non-programmer), blog entry before you can find the new build by scrolling back a bit to just above this comment

When you say C.. is that C as in printf C?

 

That'd be interesting if you could code an Atari 2600 game in ARM C and just use a DPC+ cart for the finished game.

Yep that C - though printf is part of the stdio library (#include <stdio.h>) which doesn't make sense in the context of the 2600.

 

Some standard C libraries can be used with Atari projects, like the functions memcpy and memset that are found in the string library (#include <string.h>). However they're quite large in size, so it's best to roll your own. I was originally using the string library for those functions when working on Stay Frosty 2 back in 2010 when cd-w suggested replacing them with my own routines. I whipped up these:

 

void my_memset(unsigned char* destination, int fill_value, int count)
{
	int i;
	for (i=0;i<count;i++)
		destination[i]=fill_value;
}

void my_memcpy(unsigned char* destination, unsigned char* source, int count)
{
	int i;
	for(i=0;i<count;i++)
		destination[i] = source[i];
}

and saved 352 bytes, enough space to hold over a third of the platform/ice layout data.

Some part of my brain managed to hang onto the New Zoo Revue theme song for all of these years.

 

I'd like to think that was somehow a good thing, but strongly suspect that part of my brain could have been better utilized by remembering things like math and peoples' birthdays.

I'd forgotten about it until I did up a card for a coworker a few years ago based on this:

 

and thought "hey, the hippo from that kids show would work well" and it all came crashing back in