PRGE build of Frantic

Entry posted by SpiceWare in Frantic October 16, 2023

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Here's the build of Frantic that was shown at PRGE. Al needed the demo ROMs at the start of October so he'd have time to build all the carts.

frantic_20231002_PRGE.bin

Changes:

Fixed issue where room sometimes changed color during transition to next room.
Revised robot death sequence - when hit the robot's shape is now briefly color cycled (like the humanoid's death sequence) before the explosion sequence starts.
Revised Otto logic for Frenzy variation. 1st hit slows down Otto, 2nd hit slows down Otto more, 3rd hit returns Otto to start location with a faster speed.
The 2 slower Otto speeds use new neutral and frowning images. Haven't seen @espire8 around in 2+ years so I modified the smiling image to create these images myself.
Revised initial robot count per room, minimum now 5 instead of 1.
Fixed issue with tank colors being off by 1 scanline.
Revised difficulty progression.
Hopefully fixed screen jitter/rolls that were occurring at higher levels.
Stress test routines (difficulty switches to A) were removed for the demo.
Tanks and robots used to share the same missile offset table for missile position when initially fired. They now have their own offset tables. I'm hoping this resolves an issue where the Tank's homing shot would sometimes appear on the other side of a wall.

I broke out some graph paper to figure out the missile offsets:

The x and y offsets are in the program like this:

const signed char missile_x_offset[3][8] =
{
    // E SE  S SW  W NW  N NE
    {  7, 6, 3,-1,-4,-2, 3, 7},       // humanoid
    {  7, 7, 2,-2,-2,-1, 3, 6},       // tank
    {  7, 6, 3,-1,-4,-1, 3, 6}        // robot
};

const signed char missile_y_offset[3][8] =
{
    // E SE  S SW  W NW  N NE
    {  3, 9,16, 9, 3, 1,-5, 1},       // humanoid
    {  5,12,13,12, 5,-2,-3,-2},       // tank
    {  6,12,13,12, 6, 0,-5, 0}        // robot
};