The new JessCREATIONS logo...

[Jess Ragan]

I'm here to announce that I'm bringing a Sega Genesis kind of swagger to the ColecoVision experience. That begins with... a title logo! A really neat one, with animation and special effects and everything. The smaller one just has the "Jess" in JessCREATIONS pop up, while the larger one literally spells it out with a brief (but laborious to produce) animation.

 

The problem is that the big one takes 4K, and probably more than that when sound effects are added. That's like, 6K I can't put in the game itself. It's not a biggie; the game I have planned next is more visually restrained than Whack 'Em Smack 'Em Byrons was, an adaptation of Rock-Ola's Eyes.  However, this WILL be a problem for my future "big swing" release, Ask Questions Later. The plans I have for this epic fixed screen shooter will almost guarantee that I'll have to bankswitch like a son of a bitch to make it work on the ColecoVision.

jc_logo.rom jc_logo2.rom

[artrag]

I've given a quick glance to the ROM data. You can probably compress your logo in less than 2K. The last 900 bytes in the logo rom are highly redundant (I guess colors) and can be encoded as RLE

Same as for the last 1000 bytes in logo2.

If you do not want to do anything fancy, just use the fact you use as background color 1 for everything and pack the foreground colors two per byte.

 

Edited June 24 by artrag

[Jess Ragan]

Thanks. I realize I could do this, but I didn't use pletter because it locked me into a specific palette. When I tried changing the palette on the fly for the shine effect (a line of white passes through the "creations" half of the logo) all the colors went cookoo nutty, and I wound up with a candy cane striped Byron. If you have any suggestions on how to fix this, I'm open to them. The only way I can fathom fixing this is to create eight new palettes, and of course pletter introduces access time that would slow the animation way down.

[artrag]

What do you mean by"it locked me into a specific palette" ?? I cannot see how. Once you have the VRAM address of your tiles in the color table (i.e at 2000h) you just use

DEFINE VRAM PLETTER VRAMADDRESS,NUMBYTES,label

to update the colors of your tiles.

Do that using the different data and you will get the effect you have now

 

Actually you can use:

DEFINE VRAM PLETTER VRAMADDRESS,NUMBYTES,label

WAIT

DEFINE VRAM PLETTER VRAMADDRESS+1,NUMBYTES,label

WAIT

DEFINE VRAM PLETTER VRAMADDRESS+2,NUMBYTES,label

WAIT

etc etc

to make your colors scroll

 

Try aiming to a tile before the one where your title starts

Edited June 25 by artrag

[artrag]

The color data for CREATIONS are from 2C10h to 2C4Fh and from 2C68h to 2CA7h

Write there to animate the colors

[Jess Ragan]

Thanks, I'll keep it in mind.

[artrag]

This is uncompressed but gives an idea of how "compress" colors

 

	' TMSColor 2.2.1 Mar/29/2024
	' Command: ..\tmscolor.exe -b logo.bmp logo.bas logo 
	' Created: Tue Jun 25 08:23:19 2024

	MODE 1
	DEFINE VRAM $0000+32*8*2,8*8,logo_bitmap1
	DEFINE VRAM $0000+32*8*3,8*8,logo_bitmap2

	' this is for the static logo
	for i=0 to 7
		DEFINE VRAM $2000+32*8*2+i*8,  8,logo_color1
		DEFINE VRAM $2000+32*8*3+i*8,  8,logo_color2
	next

	DEFINE VRAM $0000+32*8*8,8*8,logo_bitmap1
	DEFINE VRAM $0000+32*8*9,8*8,logo_bitmap2
	
	' this is how to animate it
	while (1) 
		for j=0 to 7
		for i=0 to 7*8 step 8
			DEFINE VRAM $2000+32*8*8+i,  8,VARPTR blink(8-j)
			DEFINE VRAM $2000+32*8*9+i,  8,VARPTR blink(j)
		next
		wait
		wait
		wait
		next
	wend


logo_bitmap1:
	DATA BYTE $00,$3c,$7e,$e6,$c2,$c2,$c0,$c0
	DATA BYTE $00,$fc,$fe,$c6,$c2,$c6,$fe,$fc
	DATA BYTE $00,$fe,$fe,$c0,$c0,$c0,$f8,$f8
	DATA BYTE $00,$38,$38,$6c,$6c,$c6,$fe,$fe
	DATA BYTE $00,$fd,$fd,$31,$31,$31,$31,$31
	DATA BYTE $00,$9f,$bb,$b1,$b1,$b1,$b1,$b1
	DATA BYTE $00,$21,$b1,$b1,$b9,$b9,$bd,$bd
	DATA BYTE $00,$9e,$bf,$b3,$b1,$b8,$9c,$8e
logo_bitmap2:	
	DATA BYTE $c0,$c2,$c2,$e6,$7e,$3c,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $f0,$d8,$cc,$c6,$c6,$c6,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $c0,$c0,$c0,$c0,$fe,$fe,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $c6,$c6,$c6,$c6,$c6,$c6,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $31,$31,$31,$31,$31,$31,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $b1,$b1,$b1,$b1,$bb,$9f,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $b7,$b3,$b3,$b1,$b1,$30,$00,$00
	DATA BYTE $87,$83,$a1,$b3,$bf,$9e,$00,$00

logo_color1:
	DATA BYTE $10,$90
blink:
	DATA BYTE $60,$60,$60,$60,$60,$60,$60,$F0,$60,$60,$60
logo_color2:
	DATA BYTE $60,$60,$60,$60,$60,$90,$10,$10

 

output.rom

Edited June 25 by artrag