SpiceWare's Blog

Looking good. Will you be updating the explosion sounds later?

It looks good. What would it look like if you didn't use the lives digits for this, and just rotated through the two scores? It might smooth it out a bit more, as there is just a little bit of jerkiness where the missing digits between lives and score are. Jumping from score to score doesn't seem so bad though.

Yes, all sound effects will eventually be replaced and additional sound effects (like engine thrust) will be added. It'll probably be a while though, my folks are moving in next month so I'm busy making space for them.

 

Dad's company is shutting down their base in Equatorial Guinea, so my folks are moving in while they wait for their household to get shipped back to the states. I have a guest room, but right now it's set up with a couple luggage racks for weekend guests - the closet is jam packed with holiday boxes, camping gear, etc so it's not conducive to long-term company. I've starting going through all of my closets getting rid of stuff and consolidating boxes so I can empty out the guest room closet to provide them with space for their stuff.

 

 

Yeah, was thinking that it was a bit "jumpy" myself, but it was getting late so I wanted to have a stopping point. I already changed it this morning and it looks better w/out scrolling through lives digits. I've also revised the new Color option's asteroid image so there's more asteroids and a better variety of colors, which makes it a lot clearer on what the option does. The player's ships and saucers now follow the color setting, still working on making the score's color bars follow suit.

I forgot your folks were in Trinidad and then Guinea! That must have been quite the adventure! I am envious!

Hia SpiceWare,

 

I just created an account to say thank you for this amazing remake !!

If I must find a fault I'd say that the font that is used for the score and players isn't fitting with the rest of the game style....the menu font on the other hand is exellent !

And they were in Mexico, for 10 years, before Trinidad. Sadly their stay in EQ was cut short so I didn't get to make it over there.

 

 

Thanks kigiam! For technical reasons the "font" in the score/lives display has to be drawn that way in order to get 14 digits without flicker. Omegamatrix came up with the routine. The trick to get the Atari to display 14 digits doesn't leave enough time to also change those digits. The way around that is to draw a bunch of 8's in the shape of a seven-segment display, then use the playfield pixels to hide segments that need to be turned off. Instead of 14 updates to change each digit, only 6 updates are needed to change the playfield. The routine itself is posted here. There's only a single CPU cycle left (out of the 76 cycles per scanline), so there's no way that 8 more updates (at 5 cycles per update, or 40 cycles) could be accomplished. In that routine the extra cycle is "wasted" by using sta.w (takes 4 cycles) instead of sta (takes 3 cycles).

 

The last scores shown in the menu are just temporary - they're going away once I add demo-mode as the last scores will be visible then. That will make room for some potential new menu options.