Spire of the Ancients (WIP)

[+wavemotion]

Looks amazing from the screenshots and videos I've seen!

I'm working on a 7800 Emulator for the DS (based on Prosystem) and it supports Super Cart Large (the 144k stuff) and it has no problem with Donkey Kong XM, Popeye (2.7f, 2.8 or 2.9) and commercial games like Crossbow which are also Super Cart Large (type 2) and 144kb.

 

But for some reason, SotA will not run. I get the intro screen with the text and then part of the splash screen but then it's all garbled up and won't run any further. I can sometimes hear what sounds like in-game title music but I'm far from sure.

 

As this runs on other emulators, I'm sure the problem is me

 

But to give me some clue... is there anything unusual about SotA in terms of utilization of the banks or RAM or similar? Something I can follow a lead on?

 

Thanks!

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by llabnip

[+SmittyB]

The title screen changes the background colour each line to create the ground and it finishes fairly close to the bottom of the screen. I suppose if the emulator doesn't get the timing right and tries to wait longer than the visible screen that could mess things up.

 

If you can get a photo of how it look when it crashes I'd like to see it. I'm curious as to whether I could figure it out.

[+wavemotion]

Yeah, it's probably timing related!  There were a number of bugs in the original Prosystem emulator timing that got things wrong (especially in the cycle stealing department) - tried to correct most of them but obviously something is still not right. 

 

On the plus side, I think we've discovered a lovely little Bear-Moose in the corrupted graphics

 

Edited January 5, 2021 by llabnip
clarification

[SlidellMan]

I think you should have based your emulator on Pengui.net's BupSystem, but don't know if that's open source.

[+wavemotion]

I think I figured it out... by default I set all carts to "steals cycles" since most carts do... I have a lookup table (by MD5SUM) that can override any settings - but I hadn't put your latest builds into the table so it was using defaults.

 

When I turned off cycle stealing it comes up and runs. It's only running at about 40FPS but I can work on that part

[+SmittyB]

Yeah that's definitely the background not changing line by line as it's supposed to. The coloured area should be compressed and finish in line with the mountain graphics. The black area would then be where the text is, and below that the ground. I change the graphics mode mid-screen hence the corruption.

 

Even if it got past the title screen it would look rubbish in game as well because I do the same thing to draw the HUD, floor, and ceiling.

[+wavemotion]

19 minutes ago, SmittyB said:

Yeah that's definitely the background not changing line by line as it's supposed to. The coloured area should be compressed and finish in line with the mountain graphics. The black area would then be where the text is, and below that the ground. I change the graphics mode mid-screen hence the corruption.

 

Even if it got past the title screen it would look rubbish in game as well because I do the same thing to draw the HUD, floor, and ceiling.

Appreciate you looking into it! Spire is running now - and is playable though it's really going to be difficult to play on the screen resolution of the DS. I've got 256 x 192 pixels to work with... the walls, gates, monsters, keys, etc. all look fine but the text is going to be hard to read. I can zoom in a bit but the HUD is pretty wide and it starts to cut off rather fast...  I'll see what I can do about adding some scrolling via the shoulder buttons which might just make it playable!

[+SmittyB]

3 minutes ago, llabnip said:

I've got 256 x 192 pixels to work with

After you able to render to a 320 x 224 buffer offscreen and then draw that shrunken down, at least in width? It shouldn't affect the 160A graphics very much, and if antialiasing is possible the 320A modes should still be vaguely readable.

[+wavemotion]

Yes, in fact, the DS makes that trivial. But the problem is that the DS will decide what line and row of pixels to drop... which isn't always the best choice. 

 

Here is what I'm facing... I've done my best to zoom in to 300x220 - so some of the pixels top and bottom are off screen but there wasn't anything really useful there and I've zoomed in as much as I can and still keep the HUD fully visible.

 

It's playable... but not ideal. But that's my problem - the game is great!

[bikeguychicago]

On 8/29/2016 at 5:49 PM, SmittyB said:

Update 2020/05/28 - As you can see it looks a little different 4 years on.

It reminds me a bit of Shining in the Darkness on Genesis or the original Phantasy Star

 

[+SmittyB]

They're 2 of the main inspirations actually, alongside the Dungeon Master games on Amiga and the Catacomb series on PC.

This style of game is something I've done before because the basic concept is a fairly simple programming exercise (which this started out as) and a few of the ideas including the name come from previous similar projects that never got past the initial demo stages.

 

I haven't given up on this. My employers have just been making a lot of stupid business decisions which have left me too exhausted in the evenings to give this the attention it deserves.

[SlidellMan]

I feel for you, Smitty. For the past two months, I was working on graphics for phoboz' game project.

[Cousin Vinnie]

On 5/14/2021 at 2:56 PM, SmittyB said:

They're 2 of the main inspirations actually, alongside the Dungeon Master games on Amiga and the Catacomb series on PC.

This style of game is something I've done before because the basic concept is a fairly simple programming exercise (which this started out as) and a few of the ideas including the name come from previous similar projects that never got past the initial demo stages.

 

I haven't given up on this. My employers have just been making a lot of stupid business decisions which have left me too exhausted in the evenings to give this the attention it deserves.

I'm not trying to push ya, but i finally started getting into this game tonight and I stopped about 30 minutes b/c I didnt wanna get to the stuck point and not know if I was being a dumbass or if  you stopped coding the game. How finished is it... and as a fan, how long do you want it to be?

 

 

[+SmittyB]

5 hours ago, Cousin Vinnie said:

How finished is it... and as a fan, how long do you want it to be?

It's been ages since I've been able to work on this so I've forgotten how things were left off, but I'm fairly sure the last couple of builds do pop up a text screen when you get far enough in and that can be considered the ending of what's there.

 

It's hard to say how finished it actually is because I would have said that what's there is about a fifth or sixth of the map I'd planned, but at the same time there's a lot that needs improving. Now that I have a dragonfly cartridge I can expand past 144k which was limiting what I could do so with that I will probably also end up refactoring a few things to make better use of the new space.

I still aim to make this really show off what the AtariVox can do so the extra storage means more phrases.

 

Life is still getting in the way. I aim to finish Plumb Luck DX and another project on the back burner first to get them out of the way, then after that I can focus my attention on SotA. It might end up being a decade late and absolute rubbish in comparison to what others will come out with in that time, but I'll be damned if I don't finish it.

[Cousin Vinnie]

2 hours ago, SmittyB said:

It's been ages since I've been able to work on this so I've forgotten how things were left off, but I'm fairly sure the last couple of builds do pop up a text screen when you get far enough in and that can be considered the ending of what's there.

 

It's hard to say how finished it actually is because I would have said that what's there is about a fifth or sixth of the map I'd planned, but at the same time there's a lot that needs improving. Now that I have a dragonfly cartridge I can expand past 144k which was limiting what I could do so with that I will probably also end up refactoring a few things to make better use of the new space.

I still aim to make this really show off what the AtariVox can do so the extra storage means more phrases.

 

Life is still getting in the way. I aim to finish Plumb Luck DX and another project on the back burner first to get them out of the way, then after that I can focus my attention on SotA. It might end up being a decade late and absolute rubbish in comparison to what others will come out with in that time, but I'll be damned if I don't finish it.

Plumb Luck is a badazz thing too. Im pulling for you!

[+Karl G]

The nice thing about homebrews is that they are never "late".  

 

[Nightengale]

Deserves a comment, even after all this time.  This is fabulous.  I have been looking for something along these lines since I really like TI Tunnels of Doom.  Fantastic and thank you for all the work put into this 👋

[+SmittyB]

Thanks very much. I do intend to finish this one day with everything I've learnt in the past 8 years of 7800 development even if it means tearing up a lot of what I've done previously.

[Jinks]

I remember testing this years ago. Something about the colors of a crt and you fixing that in the status zone which worked great so it had black and white. 

This game is amazing and will never forget it. 

 

[Ecernosoft]

On 8/29/2016 at 6:49 PM, SmittyB said:

Update 2020/05/28 - As you can see it looks a little different 4 years on.

 

'lo all,

 

I've recently been working on a Dungeon Master-esque maze game in 7800 Basic with the intention of maybe turning it into a basic first person roguelike but I just flick between different projects and never finish anything.

 

Instead of letting it go to waste I thought that if I upload it here somebody can learn from it or use it as a starting point for another project.

 

For the sake of making something quickly all the walls are large banners rather than being made of tiles so it wastes a lot of space in memory and I've had to put the plot commands in subroutines as the closest wall graphics are too big for an IF statement to jump over the draw calls.

The best improvement would be to switch to using a tilemap for each wall to reuse graphics and save space for other wall graphics and/or monster/item graphics etc.

 

The HUD would also need a lot of adjusting to make it more efficient and I've not been able to get the text to work properly in the time that I was making this.

 

Hope somebody finds this helpful.

3D Maze.zip 11.28 MB · 526 downloads

 

 

 

 

I suffer from the same issue. But now, basically all my coding has SOMETHING to do with the ICT series. Working on ICT3 (7800) right now! (ICT1 is on 2600 and 7800 and ICT2 is on 2600, the 2600 versions are finished, and ICT3 will ALSO be finished.)

Edited October 23, 2022 by Ecernosoft