Aquarius man goes on holiday

[mvdsteenoven]

The Aquarius man is taking a vacation trip to the land of Kings Quest.

 

I have taken several screendumps from KingsQuest that I found on the Internet, and merged them together to create one scenary. Next I have used the BMP2AQ tool by chjmartin2 to create the Aquarius screendumps and wrote a panning routine.

You can download the attached zip file and run it using the Virtual Aquarius. First use File -> Quicktype to import panscrn.txt, next step is to play the cassette file "quest_a.caq" when the program asks for it. You need an Aquarius computer with 16K additional memory to run this program.

 

panscr.zip

 

You can find the source code and working files in the RESOURCE directory.

Edited January 3, 2011 by mvdsteenoven

[Chuck D. Head]

The Aquarius man is taking a vacation trip to the land of Kings Quest.

 

I have taken several screendumps from KingsQuest that I found on the Internet, and merged them together to create one scenary. Next I have used the BMP2AQ tool by chjmartin2 to create the Aquarius screendumps and wrote a panning routine.

You can download the attached zip file and run it using the Virtual Aquarius. First use File -> Quicktype to import panscrn.txt, next step is to play the cassette file "quest_a.caq" when the program asks for it. You need an Aquarius computer with 16K additional memory to run this program.

 

panscr.zip

 

You can find the source code and working files in the RESOURCE directory.

Nice, can't wait to try it. Oops, guess I will have to wait until I get more memory.

[MattelAquarius]

Too cool, Martin.

 

Thank you for that treat.

 

I think that sets the record for the most sophisticated screen scroll in Aquarius history, at least graphics-wise. H. Spier's helicopter game is the only other scroller I can think of, but that is mostly stars scrolling by.

 

I'm looking forward to more great things to come.

[chjmartin2]

I had already responded but it lost my message. Anyway, this is just fantastic, two thoughts:

 

1. Can you make the scrolling smoother? There are little blips when the screen redraws. I looked at the code and you are loading the char map and then the color map, maybe if you interleaved them it would be smoohter, or if you drew it up and down instead of left and right (i know it is a pain because the memory goes left to right, but it may make it smoother.)

 

2. What if you waited for the VBLANK flag to start drawing?

 

This makes me think that you could create a converter to show 4 screens scrolling in order to convert larger bitmaps - that would be awesome. Like old school Compushow on a CGA monitor. Too many ideas and not enough time! I have to finish my Atari 2600 project first - then back to Aquarius!

 

Great program!

[mvdsteenoven]

I had already responded but it lost my message. Anyway, this is just fantastic, two thoughts:

 

1. Can you make the scrolling smoother?

2. What if you waited for the VBLANK flag to start drawing?

 

I wrote this program as a proof of concept, didn't do any efforts in trying to get it optimized. Waiting for the VBLANK flag would be an improvement.

I do not think that doing a up-down would be smoother as it would require more calculations; adding 40 to the HL register would also require the usage of a second register as you cannot add the value 40 directly to a 16-bit register.

You will probally get the smoothest effect if the screen was first build in an additional RAM area, like a shadow memory. Wait for the VBLANK flag, and then use a LDIR command to quickly copy the shadow screen to the real screen. The main reason is that you wouldn't have to do any more calculations during the copy, but the disadvantage is that it requires an additional 2K of memory (approx, as I am only using 22 of the 24 rows)