Robin Gravel's Blog

Name table uncompressed is 768 bytes for each room. 32,768/768 is enough for 42 rooms. My game Rockcutter have 67 rooms. I made a meta tile system that will print 2x2 8x8 tiles in a group like how NES does their tiling to print on the screen 16x12, which takes 192 byte uncompressed. Once I finish a level or 2, I compress all the room data by using pletter. I have the room data to unpack into the 4KB of unused portion of the VRAM and have the game pull the data from VRAM to the 192 bytes of RAM for the WriteScreen routine to run. The Pletter compressed room data takes up 1.99KB of ROM. Uncompressed is 11.9KB. The game is at 32KB, it have to have enemies graphic, behavior, game logic, sound, and etc.

 

Developers I believe back then had to be creative on how they make the rooms without expending a lot of ROM space for them.

If a room would takes only 192 byte uncompressed, it would have 170 rooms in a 32kb and have only 38 byte left for the rest. Not a good idea.

 

I get it.

 

Maybe I should make a simpler game to learn how to make a colecovision game, not to make a complicate game too soon.

 

I noted the ICVGM303 can corrupt data.

 

 

Is it a glitch or icvgm cannot handle so many sprites/patterns?

 

Here the topic.

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/256041-arrgggghhh-video-corruption/

 

Rockcutter reminds me a gameboy game. It looks nice.

 

Is this game available to download?

 

If I need more tips, I'll ask to the forum.

 

 

Thanks for this comment.

I started with a graphical text adventure for my first Colecovision project to get the feel for the system and learn how to load graphic. Dealing with sprites and etc. And then makes something more complicated with Star Ocean with it own RPG game engines. You can play the games, http://atariage.com/forums/topic/237437-2-adventure-games-text-adventure-and-star-ocean/?hl=%2Btext+%2Badventure+%2Bkiwi&do=findComment&comment=3356494

If you open ICVGM303 and it looks like

 

It should work fine. I did make about 150 tileset using this program. It works fine under WinXP and Window 7, which are the operating system I have. The screen shot, I think it is using the incorrect .dll to run the program. The screen, the tiles, and the tileset should fit and fill the empty space. The hexidecimal numbers next to the char editor should have 2 number/letter and not 3. I'm unsure what's going on with digress's ICVGM, so hopefully they'll figure that out. I'm not sure if it'll works correctly under Window 8 or 10, so that's might be the possiblity of the error.

 

Rockcutter, I do want to do a box release of this game. I just converted the game to 128 KB Megacart format to add music to the game. I'm stuck with the music part of the game. I'm unsure when this game will be finished.