simonl

The sample chapter looks great, really looking forward to the finished product By the way, one proofing mistake I noticed in the preview - Neil Armstrong's name is misspelled as "Neal". Cheers, Simon

The real pain with things like Twitter is that everything's moving over to OAUTH authentication rather than username/password, which requires SSL/TLS. I'm guessing the ip65 implementation doesn't provide this. Cheers, Simon

Hey, what settings did you use to make the filtered lead voices in the last two tunes? That's a great sound. Cheers, Simon

Depends on the map, but if it's some large repetitive and irregular shaped one like a NES platformer then yes, lots. Also, some tile map editors support exporting the map in that format. So if you want to uncompress a line of 48 chars from 3x3 tiles that's 16 tiles which may be all or partially the same, and if the tiles are stored so you can look up the char data from row 0,1,2 then it's pretty efficient. Cheers, Simon

When you say "RLE horizontally on a tile map" do you mean the tiles are RLE compressed or the map...? Oh, just the map (i.e. x number of tile y) even I'm not OCD enough to compress a 3 byte wide tile Cheers, Simon

Yes, "flyback" scroll by writing the data twice is generally more sensible, however using RLE horizontally on a tile map may mean unpacking data in long rows is easier in some instances. Cheers, Simon

Well, it's not quite that good, in the above scheme you'd have to copy the current 48 and write the remaining new 48 chars from the row when it wraps, but then for that row you essentially have nothing to do until next time it hits the end other than update the LMS occasionally, and only one row can wrap per 4 frames. It depends how your tile uncompression is optimised, if it's optimised for horizontal lines you're laughing. Cheers, Simon

The LMS-per-line is the simple way starting from De Re Atari and everything after. This way the entire screen is always in memory. All the published tutorials from back in the 80s that I recall only expected to scroll around a limited map a couple screens in each direction. I don't remember any scrolling tutorial that presented the scroll-forever problem. (Though, I can think of a couple games from the 80s that did this effect, but never dissected the code to figure out how it was being accomplished.) The one-LMS solution is a non-obvious, head-slap moment. It seems like anarchy to think about it, but in the end it works almost like magic. Although if you do want to use an LMS per line for some reason, it may make sense to store your square screen as a parallelogram shaped window onto the RAM buffer - this means only one line "hits the buffers" at a time and needs to be copied to the other end and the new character added. E.g. if you had a regular width (48 byte) window into a 96 byte wide buffer that you were unpacking the background into: Cheers, Simon

Looking great, definitely in the same ballpark as an original Mac, so should be good in use Cheers, Simon

...Yes, It looks to me that you may be very "confuzed"... I'm sure you wouldn't be the first person to surmise that! Yes, I think I had you confused with JamesD as he pointed out. Hope you get one or the other soon anyway, Cheers, Simon

What they said, but see attached for the formula in "dummy proof" form as requested 10 GRAPHICS 8:COLOR 1 20 REM CENTER IS 50,50 30 A=50 40 B=50 50 REM RADIUS IS 25 60 R=25 70 FOR X=-R TO R 80 REM (Y-B)2 = R2 - (X - A)2 90 X2=X*X 100 R2=(R*R) 110 Y=SQR(R2-X2) 120 PLOT A+X,B+Y 130 PLOT A+X,B-Y 140 NEXT X Cheers, Simon

Hmmm... there seem to be a few people doing a lot of flaming on this thread who didn't order anything from Zaxon - the people who did are all competent adults and probably don't need anyone stirring the pot on their behalf who doesn't have a stake in the outcome. Sorry if this sounds unduly critical, but passers-by piling on with the accusations (and occasional insults, slurs etc.) toward someone who is clearly in over their head on something is not likely to help this sorry affair to a satisfactory conclusion for anyone. Likewise. I've bought plenty of stuff from Zaxon in the past without any problem, and I would hope to again in future if he can resolve this particular disaster. I thought you got a refund for your SIDE order, or am I confusing you with someone else and you're still waiting? Regards, Simon

Two words - Jay Motherfuc^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hiner Given it's providing windows etc. for the A8, how about calling it "Atari800Win"? That should avoid any confusion.

I finished the Eidolon when it came out - I seem to remember the last battle finished off my spacebar on my 800XL though I could describe/spoil the final cut scene for anyone who's interested, but it's one of the few games of the time that actually has an ending worth playing through to. Never finished Koronis Rift as it always seemed to crash when I got near the end. Cheers, Simon