I must be insane - Dandy 2600 mockup

[happymonster]

I always liked Dandy more than Boulderdash. In fact it's one of my favourite games. Since NotBD shows off that this kind of engine is possible, I decided to do a mockup of Dandy on the 2600. Since the player needs to see more tiles than in Boulderdash I used 3 x 24 playfield gfx (no sprites at all to save time) to get more tiles on the screen (that would mean more processing, and probably make this impossible though, as well as the 3 rather than 4 bit wide gfx). I only alternate between bright orange and blue to get the white as well, which is good enough for the original game.

 

Of course, the whole thing is totally ridiculous and some of the gfx has big problems when tiled next to each other.

 

Still I enjoyed fitting the original (admittedly simple) gfx into 3 x 24 sizes. I found it quite relaxing after a week at work!

[vdub_bobby]

Going from 4x21 PF tiles to 3x24 gets you fewer rows and only 3 more columns, at a big hit to performance and visuals.

 

I'd stick to 4x24 or 4x21.

 

And sprites don't really cost you that much processing time, might as well keep one.

 

I'd suggest you remock with one sprite and 4x21 tiles.

 

And how many tiles are there in Dandy? Are they animated?

Edited February 1, 2008 by vdub_bobby

[happymonster]

Your probably right, but due to the nature of the game I'm not sure 10 x 8 is a big enough view..

 

There are only 16 tiles, not-animated.

[happymonster]

You might be able to get away with the small view area if we made the monster sprites move on a pixel rather than tile basis. If we used 4 x 21 tiles, and we preshifted the 3 monsters, we would need 12 special monster tiles to get horizontal and vertical movement. That's not too bad, but not sure it would be doable or break the game feel..

 

Any idea?

[Bakasama]

Dandy? Isn't that what Dark Chambers is based on?

[happymonster]

Dandy is the inspiration for Gauntlet, created on the Atari 800XL and using Boulderdash style tile mechanics with smooth scrolling and upto 4 players. It's faster and better than Gauntlet IMHO, despite being simpler.

[supercat]

Since the player needs to see more tiles than in Boulderdash I used 3 x 24 playfield gfx (no sprites at all to save time) to get more tiles on the screen (that would mean more processing, and probably make this impossible though, as well as the 3 rather than 4 bit wide gfx). I only alternate between bright orange and blue to get the white as well, which is good enough for the original game.

 

The only way 3-wide tiles would work at all would be as a bitmap. The poor CPU is going to have a big problem scrolling things at any reasonable speed.

 

Flicker blinds might help quite a lot, but they'd probably be visually annoying. To prevent them from being really horrible, you'd probably have to go with a three-line color pattern and two-line flicker pattern. If you did that, you could probably manage a decent portion of the scrolling and draw logic in-kernel.

[happymonster]

What's wrong with 4-pixel wide Playfield tiles, with two colour alternating lines and preshifted monster gfx for per 'pixel' rather than tile movement?

[Shannon]

Crazy thing about Dandy is even though it inspired "supposedly) Gauntlet, it plays more like Dark Chambers...

[vdub_bobby]

Crazy thing about Dandy is even though it inspired "supposedly) Gauntlet, it plays more like Dark Chambers...

Well, isn't Dark Chambers just Dandy, rewritten?

Edited February 5, 2008 by vdub_bobby

[Bakasama]

So would that make trying to port Dandy a bit pointless since it was already done as Dark Chambers?

[vdub_bobby]

Well, the original Dandy is sort-of different from Dark Chambers.

 

Different enough that it stands on its own. I don't know how well the differences would port to the 2600, though - you might start out trying to port Dandy, distinct from DC, and end up with just another version of Dark Chambers.

 

I'm not real familiar with Dandy, but I do know that it supports 4 simultaneous players - which is undoubtedly the first feature that would be dropped in a 2600 conversion...

[happymonster]

Dandy is nothing like Dark Chambers. Dark Chambers and Gauntlet use slower per pixel movement. Dandy uses tile based movement (i.e. like Boulderdash) and can be extreemly fast paced due to this. It feels and plays differently.

[Shannon]

I'm mostly referring to how the monsters change when you shoot them instead of dissapearing right away.

 

You can carry more objects than just potions.

[ZylonBane]

Dandy is nothing like Dark Chambers.

No, Dandy is nothing like Pole Position. On the other hand, it's quite a bit like Dark Chambers.

[Shannon]

Dandy is nothing like Dark Chambers.

No, Dandy is nothing like Pole Position. On the other hand, it's quite a bit like Dark Chambers.

 

 

 

Uh, sorry.... Where were we?

Edited February 6, 2008 by Shannon