SpiceWare's Blog

Very nice work! The diagonal enemy shots look a little strange, but I guess there is no way around that? I hope you have space for some more sprite animation frames?

 

Chris

I tried this with Stella 3.4.1 and got some weird message about "Thumb ARM emulation fatal error." which is especially interesting because previous versions have worked.

Thanks!

 

Strange? you mean how they're drawn horizontally? If so, yeah, there's no time to HMOVE the shots to draw them diagonally.

 

Animation's coming back, I just haven't migrated the animation routines from pre-reboot code yet.

 

Another issue with the animation is that after I dropped the speech samples we went a overboard with the animation: 13x2 frames for the explosion (explosion is 2 sprites wide), 16 frames for the humanoid running up/down, 8 frames for humanoid left/right, etc. I'm planning to add back the the speech samples based on what we learned while working on Chun-Li (namely GroovyBee's tip about dropping volatile from the variable definitions - that shrunk Chun-Li's ARM code by 1K and sped it up). One thing I can probably do to help with the ROM usage is to use a single player explosion with 2X pixels as I can now control both NUSIZ0 and NUSIZ1 in the new kernel.

You need to use at least Stella 3.5. Prior versions of Stella crash if MAMCR was accessed. I have to set MAMCR to partially disable the ARM chip's cache to stop the weird random crashes that used to occur.

 

Before Stella 3.5 I used to release "stella" and "harmony" builds, like you can see in this post.

Stella 3.6 was recently released, you'll probably want to install that version to be current.

Thanks! Strange? you mean how they're drawn horizontally? If so, yeah, there's no time to HMOVE the shots to draw them diagonally.

 

Yes - I think they might look a little better if you could reduce the width when they were moving diagonally, i.e. x1 for vertical, x2 for diagonal, x4 for horizontal?

 

EDIT: or you could use two single width missiles to draw a single diagonal missile (where the missiles are offset by 1 pixel from each other)

 

Chris

Using different sizes is an idea, though I'm planning to use x2 missiles for a "smart missile" option (fired by the tank robots). The smart missiles are the lower 2 in this screenshot^*

 

I do plan to make the smart missiles 3 scanlines tall though, so that might be an option if I leave the normal diagonal shots 1 scanline.

 

Shots can't be repositioned mid-screen like the players, so using 2 objects to draw one shot would cut the number of supported shots in half to just 3.

 

EDIT: can't add another comment for some reason, so I added the following to this comment:

I tried the 2x1 diagonal shot during lunch and like how it turned out, thanks for the suggestion!

 

 

^* hmm, can't directly use a prior blog entry's images.