Playtesters needed
Entry posted by SpiceWare
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I built a special version of Space Rocks for a tournament to be held at the Classic Game Fest next weekend.
The menu is gone, it's been replaced with this:
And every round starts out with 12 large asteroids
Left Difficulty controls a game timer: A = ON, B = OFF
Right Difficulty controls how long, A = 2:00, B = 5:00
Status of the timer will show up in the scroller:
If on, the timer will display on the right side:
The scroller will also show the score of the last game played:
What we needed tested is:
- the timer options work as expected - if enabled the game should end when the time runs out, if disabled the game should end when you run out of lives
- confirm the "last score" value shown in the scroller is correct
ROM:
Swapped out the DPC+ driver with the Encore compatible version. See Reply 609 if you'd like to know more about this.
ADDENDUM
I had a couple issues crop up while testing, one game had a screen roll and another crashed. Both happened right after starting a new game. In both instances I noticed the score display looked odd, thought it corrected itself after the screen roll. The score kernel is controlled by reading this datastream:
Score8: .byte PLAYER1_COLOR ; 0
.byte PLAYER2_COLOR ; 1
.byte WHITE ; 2
score color .byte zz___XXX__ ; 3
.byte zz__X___X_ ; 4
.byte zz__X___X_ ; 5
.byte zz__X___X_ ; 6
.byte zz__X___X_ ; 7
.byte zz___XXX__ ; 8
.byte zz__X___X_ ; 9
.byte zz__X___X_ ;10
.byte zz__X___X_ ;11
.byte zz__X___X_ ;12
.byte zz___XXX__ ;13
.byte 0 ;14 ends the score loop
.byte PLAYER1_COLOR ;15
.byte PLAYER2_COLOR ;16
In DPC+ all the datastreams are in RAM, so I suspect the .byte 0 was somehow changed to another value, which would cause the score loop to run for an unknown number of additional scanlines.
If you're testing in Stella please enter the debugger (hit the ` key, the one just to the left of the 1 and above tab) and enter the following in the Prompt:
breakif { _scan > #262 }
If typed correctly, Stella will reply with
Added breakif 00
Hit the ` key again to exit the debugger. Stella will enter the debugger again if too many lines are drawn on the screen, so if that happens take a screenshot and post it over in the Space Rocks homebrew topic.
ADDENDUM 2
Great idea by Thomas Jentzsch - if Stella enters the debugger, save the state and post that. See reply 559 for more info.
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