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Hi there!

 

I have to make two sets of each bug animation - horizontal and vertical. This is due the the 2600 not using square pixels. So that will take some doing.

 

Aha, so it can only have monochrome sprites, since turning the colorschemes by 90° would be impossible.

 

I generally think it must be a nightmare for an artist to do sprites for the VCS, considering all those weird limitations you have and even weirder instructions from programmers like "I need 8 explosion frames but in sum they may not use more than 60 scanlines" and stuff

 

Greetings,

Manuel

Aha, so it can only have monochrome sprites, since turning the colorschemes by 90° would be impossible.

 

I dunno. I was thinking he could do something where every time you turned 90°, you'd just flip your TV set on its side. Sort of a "Merlin's Walls" type solution. But more frequent.

 

I generally think it must be a nightmare for an artist to do sprites for the VCS, considering all those weird limitations you have and even weirder instructions from programmers like "I need 8 explosion frames but in sum they may not use more than 60 scanlines" and stuff

 

Now... who would go and ask for something crazy like that?

 

I don't think nightmare is the right word... but it makes for an interesting challenge. I'm always fascinated by how others have worked around those limitations (or have chosen not to). I like the challenge of trying to get as much recognizability out of a handful of pixels as I can. It's a lot of fun when it works. I think LadyBug is going to be quite the challenge though.

I have to make two sets of each bug animation - horizontal and vertical. This is due the the 2600 not using square pixels.

I suppose just vertically duplicating the pixels wouldn't meet your standards?

Hmm - may have to get with you when I'm ready to add the dragon in my hacked version of Warlords.

 

As an aside, I tried running Warlords under MacMame but it didn't run very well at all. The graphics were messed up and the motion was very jerky. Have you ever tried it?

I suppose just vertically duplicating the pixels wouldn't meet your standards?

 

I think I see what you mean... and that would work if they were 8 x 16 (I'd just treat them as 8 x (8 x 2), and then I could rotate them 90° easily). But they're 8 x 14, so it's going to take some tweaking to make them look good.

 

As an aside, I tried running Warlords under MacMame but it didn't run very well at all.  The graphics were messed up and the motion was very jerky. Have you ever tried it?

 

Just tried it here. Works fine under MacMAME .103u2.

Thanx for checking - I'll trouble shoot it tonight.

 

EDIT -

 

this thread has an image of what I'm seeing, along with the cause and solution to the problem.

 

http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showt...o=&fpart=1&vc=1

I see now. I was using the non-artwork version (with the color graphics). I gave up on MAME's artwork system since it makes everything run dog-slow.

It looks much better playing w/out the background graphics! It still has the jerky motion problem, though I found that by holding down a key on the keyboard it starts to play fine.