KevKelley

Put my name down for a cart as well.

Still on as in being worked on? It is almost finished up. I was testing to make sure there wasn’t any crazy bugs that were somehow missed but I haven’t experienced anything. I still have to double check on hardware regarding the last time I tested I had some issue. I was also playing around with some art for labels but not sure where I will go from there. I had about 7 or 8 projects I am wrapping up simultaneously, some more complete than this. I had completely forgot about one of the above mentioned bugs but I was hoping to finish soon but I doubt I will get done by end of year, as we now approach my busy time at work, and that is usually when I program.

It looks great.

Wow that looks great

So I moved the qtcontroller code later to before the drawscreen command. This fixed most of the issues. No more graphical issues. I then changed which controller port went to which paddle to make plugging into the QuadTari more uniform if using this in a team setting. I didn’t realize at the time of programming this how the ports were separated on the QuadTari. Now that the QuadTari portion worked I noticed the Joystick portion wasn’t. This was because when I screwed up the original code, since I only set the qtcontroller once, I also screwed up another portion so I never noticed it didn’t work when testing on my computer since the screw ups kind of worked in tandem. So now after testing on hardware, I will say that the program is now fully functional.

So I finally dug out my Quadtari and my old laptop files to give the program a look. It appears that my main mistake I had made was I did not define the qtcontroller for both frames it was on, so I always had it equal 1. I also realized I did not drawscreen afterwards. After I added a drawscreen my test seemed to work better (in software) but I did have some graphical issues with the missile so I just need to tighten some things up and do a final test on hardware.

I just ordered a couple Panther guns for the Sega. I figured I can make a little DB9 converter to try and test some things out in the near future.

I wasn’t certain with how it detects. I was wondering if it is like the paddles or has its own quirks.

Since seeing the latest @ZeroPage Homebrew show, I was wondering if there is a way to program for bB?

Did a little more testing since my last post and while there are still scanline jumps I had started to go through and strip more audio from the game (namely the crash and spawn code) and have noticed remarkably less jumps so I will undergo a process of removing the sounds and then work to find a way to make some new sounds with no issues.

So after some playing around I hammered out some scanline issues. The main culprit was the audio when you would crash. But after playing around with that now the audio is not as nice. I uploaded a new playable version. I still need to clean up some of the audio and then the only real main issue is the asteroids occaisionally speeding up whe you shoot them.

Here are a couple of options I meant:

There are probably other ways but I just know using the score. Even using the hex digits for more and other score kernels like the 2, 4, or double stacked so there are plenty of options.

Awesome! While over my head it was very interesting to read the technical comments up above. I am always amazed at what people come up with on this thing!

If you are not using the score you could create custom sprites for the numbers and have an inventory that way.

That’s usually what I’ll do. I will play until I see a jump and then do my best to replicate it and when it happens again I go into the debugger and try to see what was being done. I’d look at things like controller inputs or sprite locations or whatever else and compare to each scanline issue. Then I go back to my code and try to narrow down the cause. Sometimes I feel I have no clue what I’m looking for but I feel I’ve gotten better at it.

I put the developer settings on so I see the scanlines on the top corner. And in some programs where it happens so infrequent that I try to find the issue I may add a break in the command line in Stella to kind of pinpoint things.

not really… but I suppose it is good to have a general idea of what things do or what some best practices are. I think there are some threads in this forum that do say what uses more (i.e. gosub vs goto). I have found my programs usually don’t run afoul of the scanline issue until I do something that conflicts with another part of the code and then I go on a trial and error hunt for the culprit.

That did the trick. Thanks! I completely overlooked those!

And as another possibility, I had noticed in my grab code I reposition the sprite… but I removed the change in y-coordinate because I already reposition it in another section.

So after some observation I noticed it occurred when certain things would happen. One instance would be when I would use my “cheat” to test the game. But the other time was when I would grab a balloon. The balloon boy and lives would disappear (when I was testing the toolbox did not appear yet). So I went to the balloon grab code and the only thing I could think of was I added a “drawscreen” in there. When I removed that drawscreen I didn’t see the sprites disappear in further extended tests. So I wonder if it is because when I grab the balloon I reposition the sprite so when drawscreen is initiated, my moving the sprite and immediately using drawscreen messed with the sorting algorithm. So now I will have to test to see if there is any benefit to the drawscreen command and if the trade off of a couple sprites disappearing for a frame is worth it.

I’ve been trying to find a pattern. In the two images, the boy and toolbox disappear (I think that the bird and top balloon just flickered). I know I have flicker, but I also try and keep the bottom pretty separate from each other and when the balloons go off screen or reappear I have them go above the boy and man on the sidewalk. I had noticed that the bottom sprites disappeared when all 3 balloons were on screen, so I don’t suspect it is due to them causing the sprites below to flicker. My best guess, and I will have to check, is that when I have some sprites share a horizontal plane (i.e. the bird, spark, and balloon) it messes with the flicker management in DPC+ kernel. I don’t know much about it under the hood so I will see if I can pinpoint a cause. I do find it interesting and if I am close I will just try and make creative ways to reduce the flicker. For instance, I just added the balloons reduce size when flying off screen. Or maybe I reposition some things subtly, like have the boy move. This isn’t a big issue but since it is almost complete I am trying to polish it off and learn in the process.

After chancing on this topic and going through my program this solved my problem that I had been wracking my brain on for days. Thanks guys!

I had noticed that on occasion some of the sprites (not all) disappear for one frame. I tried getting picture to demonstrate. While my game does have some flicker, I had noticed sometimes a couple sprites that have no overlap, like the Balloon Boy and the Toolbox (both copies - player4 and player5) would flicker off for one frame. I am not sure if anyone had ever noticed something like this before or if there is something I am missing that may be contributing to some disappearing..

Interesting. I was kind of curious as to turning off sound. Not necessarily SECAM but I tend to add audio as I go along and in some of my programs that are years old I get some conflicts that cause that crackling. I had usually set AUDV0 to 0 but I didn’t think about setting the AUDC0 as well