The Sentinel

[rdefabri]

I recall a few years back, someone was working on a port of the game "The Sentinel".  This is a unique game, almost a little like chess with 2 pieces.

 

The game was on both the C64 and BBC Micro, so I have to believe a conversion is possible...does anyone know what happened to that project?

 

 

[+cjherr]

That was a cool game. I remember the suspense as the sentinel rotated.

[Irgendwer]

3 minutes ago, rdefabri said:

...does anyone know what happened to that project?

Deeply frozen on ice.

@Wrathchild initiated the conversion and I offered assistance but due to other projects and time constraints wasn't of any help... 😕

[rdefabri]

5 minutes ago, Irgendwer said:

Deeply frozen on ice.

@Wrathchild initiated the conversion and I offered assistance but due to other projects and time constraints wasn't of any help... 😕

That's too bad, but understood.  Thanks for the update!

[TGB1718]

1 hour ago, rdefabri said:

I recall a few years back, someone was working on a port of the game "The Sentinel".  This is a unique game, almost a little like chess with 2 pieces.

There's an ST Version available on AtariMania, works on STeemSSE

[Wrathchild]

Its more or less a case of reworking the translated rending code as it needs to correctly handle the scrolling.

The A8 screen is awkward as a basically a bitmap translated onto the (Antic 4) char-mode to simulate the C64 pixel layout.

The issue is that the A8 font is 128 chars and so 120 are used for 3x40 char lines. And the whole screen is 25 lines, so 8 sets + 1 line for the power/scanner.

This makes scrolling trickier but hasn't been reworked yet. An alternative if you swap to a bitmap mode which might make things easier.

@popmilo had also offered to take a look but like us all have 101 other things we can distract ourselves with... one day it'll get revisited but again offer that if anyone wants guiding with progressing development then I'm happy to oversee.

 

[+Stephen]

There's always VBXE - 256 characters or a blazingly fast blitter in graphics mode

[Wrathchild]

256 chars still a problem as 40 chars x 6 lines is only 240.

On the C64 the 'bitmap' is 8 bytes down then 1 across (BBC is similarly arranged).

   x 0   4   8  12     152 156
 y
 0   0   8  16  24 ... 304 312
     1   9  17  25 ... 305 313
     2  10  18  26 ... 306 314
     3  11  19  27 ... 307 315
     4  12  20  28 ... 308 316
     5  13  21  29 ... 309 317
     6  14  22  30 ... 310 318
     7  15  23  21 ... 311 319
 8 320 328 336  24 ... 624 632
   321 329 337  25 ... 625 633
   322 330 338  26 ... 626 634
   323 331 339  27 ... 627 635
   324 332 340  28 ... 628 636
   325 333 341  29 ... 629 637
   326 334 342  30 ... 630 638
   327 335 343  21 ... 631 639
16 640 648 656  24 ... 944 952
   641 649 657  25 ... 945 953

So to write on the 9th, 17th, 25th line requires a multiple of 320.

Hence all the data is contiguous but for the A8 'fake' char based bitmap model a few font chars are unused and so the calculations need adjusting to take that into consideration.

With Sentinel this isn't so bad as the game uses a table of "n x 320" as a lookup and so this is why the screen rendering worked.

The issue is the scrolling code block copies and hence can use the assumption of the contiguous areas to do things quicker.

  

Edited February 8 by Wrathchild
added C64 screen layout

[Rybags]

When I was doing the Quadrillion port from Plus/4 (very similar playground mode graphics as C64) to VBXE...

my initial plan was a full conversion to our linear bitmap graphics such that I could then do a legacy version as well.

 

But, a bunch of nasty bugs crept in and essentially ruined hours of work that I'd done so I had to scrap the lot.

 

Plan B (relevant here) - I just had the game render natively to the Plus/4 and used the VBXE blit to do the translation.

For 8,000 bitmap bytes, a walk in the park really.

 

So, yes - for a game where you don't have the time to fully reverse-engineer and port and test it can be a much quicker way to get it done - though severely limits the target audience.

[351cougar]

for real hardware for sure but not in emulation. you could have something out Q & D, and keep working on the other method.