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Mord's Blog

A blog by Mord in General

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About this blog

I'm really not sure what I'll use this blog for so I should probably leave this blank, but that would require backspacing. Much easier to just hit a period and stop typing.

Entries in this blog

Maria/Sally split rom?

Just a random thought I had while procrastinating on the display half-asleep. (I will work on the kernel again this weekend darnit!!)   The halt line controlled by Maria on the 7800 extends out to the cartridge. So what if that line was tied to the highest address line on a 17-address-line rom? Since the HALT line effectively identifies which CPU is in control, it would automate the task of changing between a rom that Sally saw (filled with data tables, sound info, and algorithms/routines) an
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KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

*cough*   I'm glad I stumbled upon a thread that pointed to the mini-dig. While I've been there and poked around in the past now and then, I randomly checked Eckhard Stolberg's description of how VDEL works. That's saved me a few rewrite versions. But at the cost of needing to think about how this'll impact my upcoming display kernel. Hm.   Might work out. Might be hell.   In other "news". I think I've mentioned it before but odds are in the process of building up Action RPG's functi
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Procrastination means I'm on the right path!

Or so I'm letting myself believe. I'll find out later if that's true though.   I've been thinking over the code needed for what I described in the last entry and I think I have a good idea what's needed. It just feels real ugly.   I hate ugly code. This is why I'm thinking about it more than coding it. I want to make the code as simple as possible, yet as understandable as possible. (For me if nobody else. )   As a result serious attempts at the code are being put off little by
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(Action RPG) Display planning continues

So I had all day to procrastinate on the display. I mean to work on the display.   Admittedly, for code I didn't get much done. I ended up reverting the main source code back to beta2 in preparation for the next display kernel attempt. Then I cleaned up the variables some and reorganized them a bit to make them a little easier to find (for me at least.) Then I sat down and thought about all the things I want the display to be able to handle in a single frame.   1. Ball display. 2. Sp
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wha.

Ahahaha. I suck goat eggs.     I had a little bit of time to work on the rom today so I decided to try to fix the bgcolor so that it wouldn't start a scanline late at the very top of the game screen. (you'd notice the playfield drawn 1 line over what looked to be the menu still, but it was really the menu dipping into the game screen.)   I've already fixed what's going on in the rom and moved on but thought I'd share the odd reaction to my code.   And as I was unhappy with how the bgc
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(Action RPG) Bug Fixing Trials

On an earlier version I was describing some of the bugs that I ran up against but ended up forgetting what I did to fix some of them. This time I wrote them down!   After I put in the initial code for the new Display kernel, and fixed the common typo-syntax errors (you'd be surprised how important "#" can be.) the displayed screen was... unrecognizable. The player was back as a pillar (wasn't turning itself off) and I had a display consisting of the status bar (lookin' normal) with just mult
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(Action RPG) Getting there.

Now at Version 0.009 Beta 2. Beta 1 I'll release a bit later when I have more time (Going to bed!) this is just a screen shot of what the new display kernal is capable of. I'm surprised I got it working to this point from the initial stab at it this morning, there wasn't recognizable object displayed at first besides the status bar!   There's still a problem with the bottom of the screen's boundary clipping. I can have the player touch and press against it, and it won't cause a problem, but
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(Action RPG) Version 0.008

I decided the final Status Bar scanline size will be 20. The top 16 basically handle the useful info, but I'm keeping a few lines reserved for repositioning the sprites used in the status bar to be used in the gamescreen itself. Obviously that's going to be needed.   As such, the final version 0.008 looks slightly different from beta 2. I'd love to finish the status bar completely but until I master a hmove 73 routine it just isn't going to be. I have a potential alternative to it if it be
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(Action RPG) Return to Playfield

I'm going to have to admit defeat on attempting to unlink the SP bar from the HP bar for now. There's a lot more to consider than I originally realized about needing the cycle73 routine. Especially when I use a regular hmove routine at the same time at other parts of the screen. (For the player which can be positioned during vertical blank.)   Essentially, since the movement registers don't change unless we reset them to the value 0000 with the hmclr register, or unless we alter them indivi
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(Action RPG) Version 0.008 beta 2 (Second Bar)

Beta 2. Second mini-goal done. Added in the second bar as planned, and set it so that the item-equipped displays properly. Also took a few seconds to replace the horrible looking sword with a horrible looking chalice.   I've pondered the idea of minor animations (2-4 frames) for the items, although where they're single color I don't know if that's really worth it. I am pondering allowing the item's color to change each scanline if I find I have time for it. That'll probably be a touch up
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(Action RPG) Version 0.008 beta (Looping Original)

I guess I'm feeling better-ish, although still not top of the world. I decided to do this a bit more gradually instead of doing it all at once and assembling. The beta attached looks identical to earlier versions, and it isn't the finished version for 0.008, but it shows the corrected off-by-one error I mentioned earlier and the code generating the scanlines for the P bar is about 1/11th the size of version 0.007. I managed to loop it up with just a few bytes added to one sample line and m
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Blah.

I had something done for this week's Action RPG (version 0.008) but upon finally getting to test it, it failed spectacularly. It was so mucked up I didn't even know where to begin to debug it (all semantic/timing bugs) so I'm scrapping it and I'll start over. Perhaps the problem was trying to get too much done. I tried looping the kernel up some, modifying a position-a-sprite routine so it would execute all in one line, and adding the second bar.   Also, I'm starting to feel a bit under t
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(Action RPG) Status Bars

So after a weekend of mucking with code, and making the obvious typo errors as usual I managed to hammer out a status bar. It's functional if not exactly how I want it yet. For one, different color choices need to be made. Secondly, the code explicitedly write out each line (no loops) and that annoys me. I'm going to try to loop things up in version 0.008 as well as add a Mana bar to go under the HP bar already functioning. I also have an idea for altering the max-hp size for the bar as w
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(Action RPG) Version 0.006

Not that there's much different between this and version 0.005, it's about all I'm going to pretty it up at this point. All I did was remove a few things here and there that weren't needed and were just messing up the code unnecessarily. I figured it was pointless to go through the display code right now as I'm changing/modifying it with the next goal anyway, which I'm hoping to have done by sunday night.   That next goal is going to be the status bar.   This will obviously cause chang
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(Action RPG) Version 0.005 Complete

There were three errors that evaded me all day while trying to find out why the collision detection was weirded out. All three ended up being found in BackUpPlayer. The first error was having a bcc where it wasn't needed - and in fact short-circuited the code for the Up/Down position restoring.   When this was removed, sliding against the horizontal walls worked fine, but approaching them head-on continued to act like crazy glue. Once you touched it, game over. No more moving. Howeve
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(Action RPG) Fixed-Point movement

I've changed the way the player moves to make use of fixed-point math. In the rom right now I replaced the castle with a simple square in the middle so I could work on screen clipping with the new movement code. Took me a while to get that right, once again due to my confusing how cmp works with setting the carry flag. I seem to keep testing for the opposite case than what's called for. ^^;   Also, another strange thing I had going was that movement got busted as soon as I swapped in the n
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(Action RPG) Sliding against walls

Adding simple collision detection was easy. Test missile vs playfield/ball, back up the player if collision detected. Of course, that gives the predictable result of sticky walls. I wanted to be able to slide against the wall. Less frustrating that way.   That wasn't quite as easy, and failed brilliantly... and comically... a couple times as I wondered why the heck touching upper walls acted like some sort of player trap that would drag their butts violently off the screen regardless o
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Action RPG

Adding the playfield was a nightmare.   I had thought up ways of trying to impliment it but not only could I not get them to work at first - I also saw the glaring problem of excessive ram usage that really wasn't necessary. As a result, versions 0.002 and 0.003 are dead. I could have just named this as version 0.002 but given this version does reuse some of the code I wrote in both versions 0.002 and 0.003...   The playfield has a similar, but greater, resolution as Atari's Adventu
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Coding Days are surprisingly still here.

So the idea I had for adding the playfield is quite a bit more complicated than I originally thought. But then I'm also working on an actual usable system that'll be kept from version to version from this point on instead of a simplified test case. It does use up quite a bit of the ram, but then I'm writing this with the superchip in mind. Not going to use the extended bytes of ram until the rom itself gets more complicated at any rate.   I'm more surprised that I'm still working on thi
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Coding Days Are Here Again

I started coding on the 2600 again recently. I have this horrible habit of starting it, dabbling with it, getting carried away with some aspect of it, then losing interest and dropping everything for months and months. Thus when I get back to it again... I end up not knowing what the heck I was doing.   So I start over.   Usually with some totally different idea anyway.   I have like 4-6 different game ideas in my head as a result, some more hammered out than others, for the most part wi
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