Bob's Blog

Slick! Does anybody else see Satan's Hollow in this?!?

Or Galaga, at the very least. Or... this would work really well for some of the waves in Juno First, too.

 

Nice demo, Bob!

I bet a really interesting original concept that was Galaga-ish could come from this...

Hm... not sure about Galaga... maybe if it had a Galaxian kernel on the upper half...

Last night I realized why sometimes bullets passed through enemy ships - because I was only checking bullet-to-enemy collisions every other frame.

 

Since bullets moved every frame, that caused some problems.

 

So, new problem:

Checking bullet collisions every frame takes too long with 4 bullets and 16 sprites. It fits with 12 sprites, but 12 seems...too few. Especially since 2 are taken up by the player sprite. Maybe it's ok, though.

 

So I can check bullet collisions every other frame and accept that bullets will pass through enemies or I can reduce the number of bullets or sprites (or both).

 

Not sure what to do here. Not really sure I want to take this any further, actually.

Last night I realized why sometimes bullets passed through enemy ships - because I was only checking bullet-to-enemy collisions every other frame.

 

Since bullets moved every frame, that caused some problems.

 

So, new problem:

Checking bullet collisions every frame takes too long with 4 bullets and 16 sprites.  It fits with 12 sprites, but 12 seems...too few.  Especially since 2 are taken up by the player sprite.  Maybe it's ok, though.

 

So I can check bullet collisions every other frame and accept that bullets will pass through enemies or I can reduce the number of bullets or sprites (or both).

 

Not sure what to do here.  Not really sure I want to take this any further, actually.

 

If you decide not to take it any further, it'd be nice to see the source on [stella]!

If you decide not to take it any further, it'd be nice to see the soruce on [stella]!

Ehhhh. It's so freaking ugly. We'll see.

If you decide not to take it any further, it'd be nice to see the soruce on [stella]!

Ehhhh. It's so freaking ugly. We'll see.

 

Heh. I have a few projects like that.

 

Too bad there's no cheap way to do Superchip games, since an extra 128 bytes would probably be very useful here.

 

For a game like Satan's Hollow, I find myself thinking that what's needed might be a way of combining RAM and ROM display lists. Many of the monsters in that game move in fixed patterns, so it might not be necessary to hold all their positions in RAM. The difficulty would be overlapping the ROM-based movements and RAM-based ones. The closest thing I can think of to practical for doing that would be to have 30Hz flicker between the formation-flying birds and the other birds. The formation birds would use NUSIZx as appropriate (some clever adjustment of the formations would be necessary to make this workable) and the diving birds would have their motion rules set up so that at most two were on a scan line (probably by using rules similar to Commie Mutants).

 

Some interesting possibilities, but perhaps too tricky.

Too bad there's no cheap way to do Superchip games, since an extra 128 bytes would probably be very useful here.

Wouldn't cannibalizing common SC games work?

I really hope you're not talking Dig Dug here?

I really hope you're not talking Dig Dug here?

Why not? There more than enough of them.

Wouldn't cannibalizing common SC games work?

 

Awfully labor intensive. The parts budget for my 4A50 cart is quite reasonable; it's assembly labor that's the killer (unless you know somebody with nothing better to do who'd like to assemble them for free). Unsoldering the SuperChips from Dig Dug carts without damaging them and then re-soldering them into other boards seems like it would be rather time consuming.