Game Title & SpiceWare Logo in place
I was able to get a 2 color 48 pixel routine going while working on Chun Li last year. I decided to use it for displaying the game title in Frantic as I thought it would be cool if the humanoid was used for the I. This is a rough logo I threw together this afternoon, if anybody cares to contribute something else I would not be offended in the least, though please maintain the humanoid I aspect of it (there's no need to keep this specific humanoid image). The humanoid could even be taller and facing/shooting at a robot standing above the first few letters of Frantic The current image is 17 rows, it can easily be made taller.
The way the 2-color routine works is by inverting the graphics used in the sprites. The sprites are colored black, while the background is used for the primary image color. The secondary color is filled in using the Playfield and/or the Ball. When using the playfield, the width of the secondary color must line up on 4-pixel boundaries. The ball can be used to line up on any pixel, but is limited to a width of 1, 2, 4 or 8 pixels. The humanoid in Frantic does not line up on the playfield boundries, so I'm using an 8 pixel wide ball. In Chun Li I used both the playfield and the ball so I could have the secondary color span the last 14 pixels of the image.
The playfield pattern and the ball position must be set before calling the 2-color routine. As such, the 2nd color appears as strips going down the image. both colors can be updated on every scanline, the rows with the solid colored stripes just have both colors set to the same value. There's 5 cycles left in the routine - in Chun Li those cycles are used to update the 3-voice music on the title screen. It would be possible to use those 5 cycles to update one of the playfield registers to modify the position of the secondary color on each scanline.
To prevent the background and playfield/ball color from appearing on either side of the 48 pixel graphic, the 8 pixel wide missiles are positioned on either side of the image, and VBLANK is used to turn the video output on/off. There is a minor tradeoff with using VBLANK, it's creates a noticeable effect if the brightness on the display is set too high (I had to disable the color bars to take the photo as they were too bright and confused the camera).
The SpiceWare logo and the score are getting cropped in Stella - do they look OK on a real PAL set?
The original SpiceWare logo routine was pretty lengthy, so I rewrote it to take advantage of what I've learned since writing Medieval Mayhem (as well as DPC+). The tricky part is extending the lines on either side of the logo.
The ROMs are made for the Harmony cartridge. If you don't have one, I highly recommend you buy one. There's also a custom build of Stella that you can run it on. You can find that here. The official build of Stella will be adding ARM support in the near future.
NTSC
PAL
Source (note: includes both ROMs)
edit: Screen Layout in PDF form. It's been updated to show the Frenzy room layout
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