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Rybags

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Blog Entries posted by Rybags

  1. Rybags
    Welcome to my 'blog.
     
    Entry to catchup on what stuff I've been working on in the last 8 months or so...
     
    October 2008 - was around about this time started with the Pole Position voice additions. DLI modified and playback IRQs via the DLI and Pokey Timers. Works nicely. Only problem is, the game experiences a near hang condition... this project dragging on, have to get back onto it... other stuff keeps popping up and taking over.
     
    Christmas 2008 - made a demo with music thanks to Sal (kjmann). Used my CIN+ mode which allows 96 colours in 160 x 120. Not real happy with the pic, rush job but got the thing finished in reasonable time.
     
    January 2009 - happy with the CIN+ mode. But, it uses a heap of RAM for the pictures. Most of it for the character sets of which only 2 bytes of each 8 are actually used for anything.
    Started some planning and experimenting for doing a CIN mode which has PMG underlays and performs horizontal reuse. Shows some promise, but you're looking at a slightly narrower screen. Possibility of 7 luma values on a scanline with restrictions.
     
    February 2009 - another distraction. But this one resulted in what I feel is one of the best softmod graphics tricks around. Interlace on Atari discovered.
     
    March/April 2009 - still playing with Interlace. Ended up buying an oscilloscope to help out. Cycle counting and guestimating stuff is a right pain.
    The 'scope probably saved me a month's frustration, and also allowed to gain insight of just what goes on between Antic and GTIA.
    Modded my XEGS temporarily to monitor the AN0-AN2 lines. Gained a bit of knowledge there that came in handy.
     
    May 2009 - Started on the MemoPad 480i demo. Got lazy, took twice as long as it should have. The design of Fonts probably kept me off it. Ended up only having to design one. Swiped one or two from old console games. Made the little fonts by just copying and modifying the default character set within the program itself.
     
    June 2009 - more playing about with Interlace stuff. Did a few bitmaps. Nothing released there, not really astounded enough by what I made to release it. Tried Interlace in APAC. Sadly, it doesn't really benefit. Just doing a pic and alternating the luma/colour sequence in normal mode looks better.
  2. Rybags
    Did a little more looking at Pole Position + voice. Not a great amount of progress. I feel it should be an easy one, it's just that annoying bug that's discouraged me from finishing it.
     
    Another sidetrack. Now working on a game mod. Improving some of the graphics of an old commercial game with interlace mode.
    But that alone's not enough. Rather than these boring, non animated objects, imported them into Photoshop and spruced them up.
     
    Double the resolution, bit of editing to take advantage of the extra rez. Then make 15 extra rotations of each at 22.5 Degree increments.
     
    Photoshop kinda sucks at bitmap. Disables rotation and lots of other features. Seems that Gimp is happy to rotate stuff for you in bitmap, even turns out better than Photoshop. Ended up just sticking to photoshop. Got all the graphic assets done, and had to fix the mess it made by hand.
     
    All that remains is the coding part. Shouldn't be more than 1.5 - 2K worth. Of that, probably half will just be near identical blit stuff to move the character definitions into the character sets.
     
    4 character sets, 2K for each because we're using interlace. Bit of a waste though considering only 10 characters are actually being used. Total of 16 objects to animate and move data around for. Has the potential to use a ton of CPU if everything wants to cycle at once.
     
    Made decision to do animation for 2 charsets per frame - halve the potential workload. Should be fine... the animation doesn't even need that speed. Would probably get away with 8 frames per second. Animation speed will be unique for each object anyway.
     
    Hoping for a release on Sunday or Monday.
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