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Atari projects, Mac mini DVR, and other things

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Medieval Mayhem

3 fireballs

I now have the 3 fireballs bouncing around most of the playfield. I haven't rewritten the lower castle routines so the fireballs disappear while they traverse the lower 1/4th of the screen.     I also made the left castles have a checkerboard pattern to make sure my updates to PF0 and PF1 are happening when they should. As you can tell by the purple castle, the original code wasn't quite up to spec   There's also a few things odd with the fireballs X position
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Medieval Mayhem

I decided to roll my own Warlords instead of hacking the original so that we can have cartridges made   I spent a few hours tonight and have got the score going. The score's going to be on a single line to allow me to have a larger playing area.   The scores make more sense if you know how my players will be set up.   Player 1 = Top Left Player 2 = Bottom Right Player 3 = Top Right Player 4 = Bottom Left   Warlords has some extra logic
Guest

Guest in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Main Menu

Oh well, I thought the Main Menu was pretty much done; but, in reviewing my blog entry I noticed I left out an e in medieval I'm going to post this anyway as a friend's going to be in Houston this week so there won't be any updates for a while. Update: Got home earlier than expected so I fixed the missing e. I also added just the BIN down below Update2: graphic revisions   Use your paddle to highlight the option. Either tap or hold down your fire button to
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Music

Title Screen/Attract Mode Music, Druid Chip by moderntimes99. Easter Egg(works, but is not finished) Minor fix to prevent captured fireballs from wrapping around the screen I'm using Paul Slocum's Music Kit 2.0 for the background music. To get it to work, I stripped out the visual display from songmain.asm(attached) to figure out the RAM requirements. Only 3 bytes are required to be preserved between calls to the music routines. Another 4 bytes are used as temp variables and c
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

4 International Kings

There's now 4 kings, plus PAL support! Set TV Type to Color for NTSC and Black & White for PAL. I tried to keep the colors as close as possible for the 2 TV systems.   Here's the bin. For those with Superchargers, Cuttle or Krok Carts I'd appreciate any feedback on how this fits on your TVs as I'm attempting to use 200 scan lines for the displayed area. mm_2006_03_11.bin   Version with Green brightened up mm_green_changed.bin   Updated sour
Guest

Guest in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Research

I've decided to play Warlords in MacMAME today to get some ideas on how the game dynamics should work. An example of what I'm researching is what happens when a fireball is released:     A fireball is only released perfectly straight (up or sideways) when you are nearest an edge of the screen. When you're at the corner of your castle you'll release at 45 degrees. Anything between will be released at a different angle depending on how far you are from the edge. I still need t
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

There be Kings

Here's a test of using the SCORE setting (bit D1 of CTRLPF) to colorize playfield drawn kings. I suspect I'll want to swap the scores (1 with 4 and 2 with 3) to break up the colors in the corners a bit.   Here's the source for the current version: Medieval_Mayhem_2006_03_09.zip
Guest

Guest in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Vanity, take two

I recalled reading about hitting HMOVE at weird times and had an idea on how to extend the left/right edge of the SpiceWare logo using it. It worked surprisingly well! I took the ball, make it 8 pixels wide, then positioned it to extend the right of the logo by 8 pixels. I then unrolled the graphic 48 loop and turned the ball on for the first line, off for the next. I then used a late HMOVE and shifted the ball over 56 pixels over course of 4 scanlines(yep, shifted by 14 pixels per line). I then
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Paddle reading is done

I've redone the dragon routines so only 1 fireball is visible while the dragon's onscreen. I've not yet written the "dragon not there" code, but that should be pretty easy.   With this change I was able to keep the dragon routine with 2 double wide sprites at single line resolution w/single line shifting and still squeeze in enough time to read 2 paddles every other scanline on each frame. The following macros are used to read the paddles. The value of Paddles2Read is either 0 or 1. Du
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Fixed the jitter

Before the fix, when three AI players were alive, INTIM would have 1 +/- remaining at the end of VB when one fireball was in the air. When the second fireball was released there would often be insufficient time and the screen would jitter.   After the fix, with three AI players alive, INTIM has 7 +/- remaining when one fireball is in the air, 5 +/- when two are in the air and 3 +/- when three are in the air.   What's amazing is this was accomplished by commenting out a single
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Attractive

Attract Mode is now in place. I've set it to start after 20 seconds of idle time on the menu(button not pressed, mouse not moving). It currently returns to the menu after 75 seconds(utilitizing the 2nd fireball's launch timer). You can also return by hitting Game Select or by pressing and then releasing Paddle Button 1(the button release is required else options will inadvertently be modified). Hitting Game Reset during attract mode will start a new game. I'm debating making it play a full round
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Uho - game's resetting

I was playing a round after splitting the menu into 2 ROM banks to make room for extra graphics and the game reset to the main menu with all the options initialized to the power-up values. It doesn't happen all the time. I just check the version from 10-14 and it did the same thing. Anybody notice this on a version prior to 10-14?   The IRQ vector points to the same place the RESET vector does, so I suspect a BRK is being hit. I haven't coded a BRK, so this would imply data is being tr
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Bankswitching and Paddle Driven Menu

I know I'll need to bankswitch since Warlords was a packed 4KB game. So, I've spent the past few days getting the bankswitching framework set up. To test it I put the beginnings of a paddle driven menu screen in one bank and split the current routines amongst the other 3 banks. As you can see, the menu is quite primitive at the moment   However you can select the sole menu option and hit your fire button   to "start" the game   I've also set it up
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

0
Medieval Mayhem

dragon drawing routines

While I don't have dragon graphics, I have updated the routines that draw the dragon to use single line resolution & shifting with double wide pixels.   It's a really slick effect - but it's taking a lot more processing time per scanline than I was expecting, not leaving much time for the processing of paddles. Any input?   Source Medieval_Mayhem.zip   BIN mm.bin
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Some revisions and a text question

Made a few changes fixed problem where players 1 and 3 could move too far up the screen causing the graphics to be corrupted. Maxed out the fireball speeds when all human players have died so the current round will end quicker. fixed AI Catch to release the fireball if an AI player is killed while holding the fireball. Redid the AI Catch Button routine. Old routine used ROL to shift the Catch Bit State of AI player 1 to AI player 2(and so on). New routine uses AND and
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Shields

The logic to show the shields is now in place. The shields are not yet tied to the paddles - they currently move around by themselves. Now that I know positioning ranges for the shields I can figure out how often the paddles need to be read, which determines the frequency I'll be able to use. In Warlords only 1 paddle is read every screen update, yielding 15 spspp(samples per second per paddle). A "smoothing" function is used to smooth out the action over 4 frames to make it look better. If I'm
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Revised graphics

The converter seems to be working OK. I still need to add the generation of the "flipped" HMOVE table so I can fly the dragon in either direction.   I've also changed the shield graphics to make them look less blocky. mm20060521PAL.bin mm20060521NTSC.bin Medieval_Mayhem.zip
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Descriptive Speed, To Do List

Just a few changes. Fixed the reset-game bug. The menu routines expanded into a 2nd bank of ROM so we now have descriptive labels of Kids, Slow, Fast and Medieval instead of 1 thru 4 for the values of Speed. AI players on the Kids level are slower than before. AI speeds swapped - player 1(grey) is now fastest AI and player 4(purple) is the slowest. This makes it so 1 player games can be made more difficult by picking a corner other than grey. The To Do List (in no
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Fireball revisions

Many thanx to supercat for his even-odd suggestion and to vdub_bobby for the better positioning routine without the hiccups! With their input the "few odd things" I listed before have been resolved   The lower castles are still not rewritten, though I did add a cycling option to fireballs for flickery flamish look. I'm not sure what I think about it yet, but I do know it will be pulled if I need additional processing time to handle 3 fireballs. To enable the cycling set your Left Diffi
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Vanity

I spent today getting the 48 pixel graphics working so I could get my logo to show   I've had my logo for quite some time and the 48 pixel width on the Atari comes pretty close to the one I used in Alien Invaders for the C= 128 back in the 80s. http://home.houston.rr.com/spiceware/images/c128-1.png   I plan to add 2 more rows of pixels so it's not so squished looking, plus I'm going to try using quad-wide or oct-wide missiles to extend the left-right line so it looks
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Fireballs revamped

I rewrote the fireball movement routines to use less RAM. I tried out REALbasic in order to create the direction/speed tables. It's a little qwerky, but it got the job done.   The direction/speed is now stored in a single byte for each fireball. When viewing the bits as 76543210, bits 765 control the speed while 43210 control the direction. This yields 7 speeds(speed 0 flags a not-moving fireball) and 32 directions. The directions are set up like this: 0 ^ |24<--+--
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Directional Release

Released fireballs will now travel in a direction that's based on how far from the edge of the screen you are as shown in this picture from my blog entry titled Research.     I also found and fixed a bug that was causing the fireball to occasionally pass through the lower shields as well as fixed a couple sound-effect glitches caused by using LDA SoundEffect instead of LDA #SoundEffect   Note - I replaced the BINs with an update that adds back the "english" bouncin
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

It's safe now

The dragon's no longer gassy     I've added some "english" to make the fireballs occasionally bounce a touch off-center to hopefully prevent a fireball from being stuck moving left/right or up/down. I'm sure I'll need to fine tune it.   Also tweeked the sound effects. Medieval_Mayhem.zip mm20060425NTSC.bin mm20060425PAL.bin
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Lower castles updated

Finished updating the lower part of the screen. The screen grab catches one of the fireballs changing colors from grey to purple. That change will have to occur a bit further up the screen once the shields are added in. Another thing to note is the lower castles are in a different ROM bank so I gave them a different king shape. Due to playfield reflection, each king's shape can now be "unique".     Source and BIN Medieval_Mayhem_2006_03_22.zip   Anyhow I'm tired so
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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