Slowly but surely

Entry posted by SpiceWare in Medieval Mayhem November 13, 2006

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Been a busy couple weeks, sadly not much of it's been spent on Medieval Mayhem. A puppy, for my folks, was dropped off at my place on the 4th. Cute dog, but not-potty-trained teething puppies are a handful. My Grandma Lavota, who lives near San Antonio, got quite sick and was in the hospital for a week. She's been released and is currently in a nursing home for rehab. We're hoping she'll be able to return home in a few weeks. I headed out there to see her Thursday(which was also my 40th). My folks drove up from Mexico and I delivered the puppy to them. I came back to Houston on Saturday and stopped and had a nice visit with Keilbaca on the trip back. Today I bought a steam cleaner and spent a bit of time recovering from the puppy's visit.

In Medieval Mayhem I optimized the easter egg routines and was able to shrink the font graphics from 2 ROM pages down to 1 by overlapping character shapes as shown below for M, H and W. The lines starting with a ; are "commented out" so they overlap with the graphics from the character below.

m	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte XXX_____
;	   .byte X_X_____	  
	
h	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte XXX_____
;	   .byte X_X_____
;	   .byte X_X_____
	
w	   .byte X_X_____
	.byte XXX_____
	.byte X_X_____
	.byte X_X_____
	.byte X_X_____

I've also been working with espire8 on the dragon animation. There's some minor issues with the graphics that the converter doesn't flag as a problem(I'll have to fix that, though it'll most likely be after MM is done). The Atari's pixels are twice that of a GIFs, plus I'm using double-wide sprites which means 4 adjacent pixels in the GIF must be turned on/off to represent a single pixel on the Atari. Here's a close-up of the dragon's head from one of the frames were we have a minor issue that causes a "growth" on the dragon's neck in the last row where the red 0's are part of the pixel turned on by the preceeding pair of 1s.

Original Image

In-Game Image

11 11 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

00 00 11 11 00 00 00 00 00 00

11 11 00 00 11 11 00 00 00 00

00 00 11 11 11 11 00 00 00 00

00 00 11 11 00 00 11 11 00 00

00 00 11 11 11 11 11 11 00 00

00 00 11 11 11 11 11 11 11 11

00 00 11 11 00 00 00 00 11 11

00 00 11 11 00 00 00 00 00 00

11 11 11 11 00 00 00 00 00 00