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Atari projects, Mac mini DVR, and other things

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Medieval Mayhem

Disappearing Bricks

Got a few changes going the past couple days. I'll be entertaining a friend from out of town for a few days so there won't be another update until next week.   The "dragon" launchs a fireball in a random direction when it crosses the center of the screen. It then disappears for the rest of the round. The fireball routines were also modified to support "not on the screen" and the other 2 fireballs are now disabled until king killed routine is written.   The scores on left are
SpiceWare

SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Paddles moving Shields

The paddles now move the shields.   The fireball speed/direction tables were taking up too much room so there's now seperate NTSC and PAL BINs.   I'm off to a cook-out, so type to y'all later!   Source Medieval_Mayhem.zip   NTSC BINmmNTSC.bin   PAL BIN mmPAL.bin
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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

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

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<--+--
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SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem

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Medieval Mayhem

Vanity, take three

Was all set for a productive Medieval Mayhem weekend when I ending up working until 9 last night and another 6 hours today We have a "label station" at work that's hooked up to 6 Zebra printers to generate labels. Each printer is loaded with a different size label and the software I wrote accepts a work order # and prints out all the labels required to build the finished product. The computer started to "not see" the printers, but was inconsistent as to which printer it couldn't see. Tried all
SpiceWare

SpiceWare 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

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

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

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

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

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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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

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

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

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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

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
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Guest 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
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Guest in Medieval Mayhem

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jEdit

Edit Mode rev 2

I made some more changes to the Edit Mode file and am pretty happy with how it works. All the 6502 opcodes1 mnemonics highlight as keyword1, DASM commands as keyword2 and the constants for all the Atari specific variabels as keyword 3. Numbers correctly highlight for hex using $ format and binary with %. I included octal rules, though I don't know if DASM supports octal or not. Numbers starting with 0 are traditionally considered octal so 012 = $0A = 10.This will probably be it on jEdit for a wh
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jEdit

jEdit for IDE?

I started messing around with jEdit to see how it well it would work for coding an Atari game. I've begun writing the syntax highlighting rules(the attached xml file) that currently highlight as shown in the screen capture. To use the syntax highlighting, put the assembly-6502.xml file in the MODES directory of jEdit. Then edit the catalog file in the same directory and add the following. <MODE NAME="assembly-6502" FILE="assembly-6502.xml"    FILE_NAME_GLOB="*.asm">  
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Warlords

Warlords Status Update 3

Didn't get as far as I'd like due to being laid up with a sinus infection; but, I'm down to 2 RAM variables to decipher and have 125 labels renamed with 197 to go. Warlords_Source.zip
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Warlords

Warlords Status Update

I'm down to 8 RAM variables to decipher and have 108 labels renamed1 with 214 to go. A couple interesting finds:   each player's paddle is only read every 4th frame. There's a couple subroutines, that I named SmoothXmotion and SmoothYmotion, that are used to smooth out the motion over the 4 frames between paddle readings. As a test I changed subroutine to NOP the smoothing and the motion was very jerky.   Paddle usage had me confused for a little bit: Paddle 2(INPT1)
Guest

Guest in Warlords

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Warlords

Found a bug that can kill you

During the Vertical Blank the program converts the paddle reading to x-y sprite coordinates as well as setting the X sprite position of the top players and calculating the X positioning values for the bottom players. However, the sequence isn't in the correct order. It's not a major deal, unless you have captured a fireball. If you're holding a fireball then you run the risk of killing yourself even if you've not lost a single brick!The program does the following: 1) Positions the X position o
Guest

Guest in Warlords

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Warlords

Updating 2600 Warlords

I'm working on enhancing Warlords for the 2600. I plan to convert it to 8K then start hacking away. I'm currently on step 1 and have attached the source with my first weeks worth of commenting in case anybody would like to review it.   1) Document Source 2) Convert to 8K 3) find RAM for new routines (rewrite of wall routines should free up 32 bytes) 4) Hack away - changes in no specific order:   The Launch Dragon More angles on the fireball Game
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