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Game Title & SpiceWare Logo in place

SpiceWare

Entry posted by SpiceWare in Frantic

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I was able to get a 2 color 48 pixel routine going while working on Chun Li last year. I decided to use it for displaying the game title in Frantic as I thought it would be cool if the humanoid was used for the I. This is a rough logo I threw together this afternoon, if anybody cares to contribute something else I would not be offended in the least, though please maintain the humanoid I aspect of it (there's no need to keep this specific humanoid image). The humanoid could even be taller and facing/shooting at a robot standing above the first few letters of Frantic :ponder: The current image is 17 rows, it can easily be made taller.

blogentry-3056-0-28021700-1304813687_thumb.png

 

The way the 2-color routine works is by inverting the graphics used in the sprites. The sprites are colored black, while the background is used for the primary image color. The secondary color is filled in using the Playfield and/or the Ball. When using the playfield, the width of the secondary color must line up on 4-pixel boundaries. The ball can be used to line up on any pixel, but is limited to a width of 1, 2, 4 or 8 pixels. The humanoid in Frantic does not line up on the playfield boundries, so I'm using an 8 pixel wide ball. In Chun Li I used both the playfield and the ball so I could have the secondary color span the last 14 pixels of the image.

 

The playfield pattern and the ball position must be set before calling the 2-color routine. As such, the 2nd color appears as strips going down the image. both colors can be updated on every scanline, the rows with the solid colored stripes just have both colors set to the same value. There's 5 cycles left in the routine - in Chun Li those cycles are used to update the 3-voice music on the title screen. It would be possible to use those 5 cycles to update one of the playfield registers to modify the position of the secondary color on each scanline.

 

To prevent the background and playfield/ball color from appearing on either side of the 48 pixel graphic, the 8 pixel wide missiles are positioned on either side of the image, and VBLANK is used to turn the video output on/off. There is a minor tradeoff with using VBLANK, it's creates a noticeable effect if the brightness on the display is set too high (I had to disable the color bars to take the photo as they were too bright and confused the camera).

blogentry-3056-0-94044700-1304817811_thumb.jpg

 

 

The SpiceWare logo and the score are getting cropped in Stella - do they look OK on a real PAL set?

blogentry-3056-0-06825000-1304813694_thumb.png blogentry-3056-0-78641300-1304815320_thumb.png

 

The original SpiceWare logo routine was pretty lengthy, so I rewrote it to take advantage of what I've learned since writing Medieval Mayhem (as well as DPC+). The tricky part is extending the lines on either side of the logo.

 

 

The ROMs are made for the Harmony cartridge. If you don't have one, I highly recommend you buy one. There's also a custom build of Stella that you can run it on. You can find that here. The official build of Stella will be adding ARM support in the near future.

 

NTSC

F20110507_NTSC.bin

 

PAL

f20110507_PAL.bin

 

Source (note: includes both ROMs)

Frantic20110507.zip

 

edit: Screen Layout in PDF form. It's been updated to show the Frenzy room layout

Screen Layout.pdf

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SpiceWare

Thanks!

 

I'm working on that. In the source I updated the Screen Layout to show that Frenzy's room layout will work as well (it's rooms start with 15 instead of 8 posts). I just attached a PDF version of the file in case you don't have Open Office installed.

 

I'm brainstorming ways to visibly show which walls are shootable vs. reflective.

 

After seeing Medieval Mayhem in action on a PAL display, I was shocked at how much empty space there was at the bottom so I decided that future projects would either be PAL 60, or scale up to support PAL 50. For Chun-Li I'm using PAL 60, for Frantic I'm using PAL 50.

 

I'm using the Fractional Data Fetcher for Frantic. I set the increment to 256/5 for NTSC and 256/6 for PAL. Because of this, using a flickering playfield would be easiest. Switching to use a striped playfield complicates things because of the different number of rows per brick.

 

Along the same lines I plan to have PAL specific versions of the player graphics - if the humanoid ends up about 10 scanlines tall, I'll make him 12 scanlines for PAL (and likewise for the robots).

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LS_Dracon

Wow that's a nice MM's tournament in France, with a shield for the winner :)

Yeah the empty space in PAL Tvs. I've noticed that in Bee-Ball but unfortunately I haven't bytes enough to centerize the screen.

 

About the Logo, that's a nice trick.

 

For the walls, how about interlaced, one line display one pf color and even line another color? Then you can draw 2 colors of PF flicker free, you know.

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SpiceWare

Yeah, the shield is awesome. They did that last year as well.

 

The problem with every-other-scanline is that doesn't work well with the NTSC screen as it uses 5 scanlines per brick. Works OK for PAL.

 

What I'm thinking is to flicker the reflective walls because there are fewer of them per room. I'm also not thinking to flicker them as entire wall on/off, but to alternate the blocks that make up the wall. And to make it not so annoying, do it at a slower speed like I did the door.

Frenzy.png

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espire8

Hi spice!

I noticed the berzerk tread i started long ago was bumped up recently and the link you posted lead me here.

 

This wall project looks super!

 

I really would like to see how you're going to do your version. Frantic is a good title.

 

I don't know how your robots and humaniods will look. Will they be single colored sprites or multi color? And will the gfx sport a new design like the way you updated the look of warlords to Medieval Mayhem? since you're giving it a new name?

 

Anyway, I'll PM you a title screen using a different variation of the humanoid "I" and a color robot design that you're welcome to use if you like.

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