José Pereira Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 Of course that to get 3 diferent lumas on blue, red and green you have to change, probably, black all screen high into luminance 2. So, you have (as a proposal): -> on luma scanlines: black luma 2 gray luma 10 white luma 14 blue luma 6 -> on hues scanlines: same black luma 2 same blue luma 6 (if you want a darker sky) red luma 4 green luma 4 that turn possible the PAL Blending in the luma scanlines of red, green, blue and black/white as 3 diferent lumas: 4, 10 and 14. Blue have a fourth one, it's own colour: luma 6. This way less cycles/IRQs. You have only 15 colours but you win empty/large screen area on sky/water/... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 @José Pereira It sounds promising! I'll give it a try. I'm thinking that the 5th color could also be used to achieve this, but I'm having trouble thinking through the details at the moment. As for the sprites, I foolishly discarded the full color versions as I was painstakingly creating the black and white images from WinUAE screenshots. I've recreated them somewhat but I didn't clean up the edges. I put the GIMP XCF file on github which has everything as layers if you want to use that. The max width of the sprite frames is 32 pixels, so I'm afraid that as-is, all four players are for the foreground and all four missiles are used as the black background with quad-width. Feel free to shrink as you see fit. Glad to have your expertise! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
popmilo Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 @popmilo Thanks! I owe all inspiration to your first pictures in this thread. Well, inspiration is coming from you now! Shame about A8 128 char limit... You know what you have to do next ? Change charactersets on the fly to get more tiles and room for soft-sprites Speaking of wishes: how much cpu-time is there for stuff like that ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 @popmilo Currently the entire raster period from VCOUNT=4 to VCOUNT=124 is spent just doing the WSYNC color swap kernel. The rest of the frame is fully utilized doing X/Y movement, playing music/sfx, drawing edge tile slices, replacing tiles, etc. For a while, the music player's jitter was giving me pain because it sucks up a lot of cycles when it transitions to the next song patterns. I had to optimize the tile drawing to give it a wide berth. So on most frames there's wasted time. A player with less jitter would be nice to have. With Rybag's HSCROL help, I'm confident that the color swap kernel can be converted to timer IRQ's which will dramatically increase cycles available for computation. The frame rate could also be reduced to provide more time. After all the original Ruff 'n' Tumble is 25fps. But I sure do like full frame rate. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 (edited) Well, inspiration is coming from you now! Shame about A8 128 char limit... You know what you have to do next ? Change charactersets on the fly to get more tiles and room for soft-sprites Speaking of wishes: how much cpu-time is there for stuff like that ? No chance? I'd never blame the A8 for the "128" chars only. The missing part is some better "Sprite system". There's no chance to do something similar to the background interleaving, as simply all colours were too less with the PMg. Edited November 12, 2012 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 (edited) Well, here are XEX fileversions of the latest release of: 1) tiledemo-ntsc a) unpacked, but with as few segments as possible (approx. 68kbytes) and b) packed with Superpacker (using Exomizer Option; approx. 12 kbytes; depacker and buffer use page 4 and page 5) 2) tiledemo-pal a) unpacked as above and b) packed as above The packed fileversions still have the small pixel bug (a single black pixel showing up left of the main character), since I could not find out what causes it to appear / not to appear. Other than that, the demo is still very playable with 128k RAM... -Andreas Koch. tilesn1.xex tilesn2.xex tilesp1.xex tilesp2.xex Edited November 12, 2012 by CharlieChaplin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 (edited) With Rybag's HSCROL help, I'm confident that the color swap kernel can be converted to timer IRQ's which will dramatically increase cycles available for computation. The frame rate could also be reduced to provide more time. After all the original Ruff 'n' Tumble is 25fps. But I sure do like full frame rate. Isn't that the 1st part any coder has to drop on the A8? Full framerate ? As long as simple PMg .... you know the unicolor blocks ... get used , full framerate is easily reachable. Don't get me wrong. It's very cool to see the "high colour" scrolling .... and partially playable demonstration of PAL blending. Edited November 12, 2012 by emkay 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 @emkay Good point. I'll take it as a challenge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+JAC! Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 >IRQ.. which will dramatically increase cycles available for computation Don't underestimate the time required for the additional overhead (save/restore regs/rti). My current work uses simliar kernel in char mode and found it doesn't help that much if you use 40 char wide playfield. In particular, I doubt that there's chance to change 4 regs then. And you need to reducde the music to 3 channels (bad) and 15Khz base clock (worse). Good chances to end up with VCS style music. But let's see. I don't have the time to try because frist I have to keep the deadline, but then' I'll also have a look. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 @JAC! Doh! I forgot about the music. I'm suddenly much less optimistic. Thanks for the hard dose of reality. I'm eager to see what you come up with. Proof is always in the doing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 With a Timer IRQ in this situation the only way to save is by having it as the only possible source (to save having to test status bits), and have the OS Ram switched in so the vector can be taken directly. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted November 12, 2012 Share Posted November 12, 2012 No chance? I'd never blame the A8 for the "128" chars only. The missing part is some better "Sprite system". There's no chance to do something similar to the background interleaving, as simply all colours were too less with the PMg. when someone post here something... When people work so hard and you still cheat with mode7 and 3d and digis... That or this isn't my 8 bit computer... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 Emkay don't destroy others hard work... I hope that the person in 'talking' will continue. I think you have more to say to us just because we two know that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 @José Pereira I take no offence in what emkay is saying. He is just pointing out the limitations of the little Atari 8-bit we all love. The fun is in trying to get good results despite the limitations. 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 when someone post here something... When people work so hard and you still cheat with mode7 and 3d and digis... That or this isn't my 8 bit computer... Then you've got the wrong imagination of the A8, which seems a main problem. There is a "slight" difference in changing some charmode pointer (or the content of some char) , or doing a multiplexed charmode with some software sprite movement. This "slight" you can easily calculate in an exponential formula. So, at the end of the day, there is not 2 or three times more CPU needed.... it's up to 3000 times more cpu , depending on the count of moving objects (for a dedicated game) ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 (edited) Emkay don't destroy others hard work... Not sure, what's more causing "destroying" .... Depending on the knowledge (anyone should look at that simple piece of hardware with it's fixed rules) , it is even more possible to have a fully running "Wolfenstein 3D" than a fluent playable "Turrican" ... Some of your wanted projects never will get finished, just because they take too much developer time and the result isn't really worth all the work. In every "tech demo" or "proof on concept" , a huge part gets missed by the "observer" . As the capabilites of the A8 change like a rubber... Some "Scroller" with a dedicated main moving object is an "easy" part on the A8. So you see it easily done... on and on. So, time gets wasted without any real results... A 3D (looking) action game may take much more time, at the beginning... even before the first thing moves on the screen, but after that, the extense gets low. A "Space Harrier" in GR. 12 with multiplexed charsets and/or multiplexed PMg, would run at less than 1/4 of the framerate.... The resolution of "Wolf 3D" is mainly lower than "160x120" ... even on the PC... it's just that you have to push the framerate to a playable speed. And, as you might know, people from "other platforms" swear that 4 fps is at playable speed... The A8 can do 2-3 times faster there. Edited November 13, 2012 by emkay Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 We really have to do everything in gr7 with digis but of course A8 can do that... But each game it's a diferent type of game. If A8 it's the best and even on the 21st century still have so many new things to discouver then leave that to people that know less or more are doing their best and wastinng their time! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 @José Pereira Here's your swap-only-two-colors-per-line scheme: chroma: 2 blue6 red4 green4 luma: 2 blue6 10 14 tiles-pal-jose.xex Here's a variation of your scheme with the following mods: chroma: 2 blue6 red4 green4 luma: 2 blue6 8 12 tiles-pal-jose-alt.xex Another variation: chroma: 0 blue4 red4 green4 luma: 0 blue4 8 12 tiles-pal-jose-alt2.xex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 @José Pereira Bottom line is that the idea is sound. Artists would have 15 colors to work with, they could tweak the chromas and lumas as they see fit and they could adjust the bitmap as necessary when they created original art for this mode. So one shouldn't necessarily judge the idea based on the aesthetics of the wired conversions in my demo. Well done sir. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Synthpopalooza Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 A suggestion: For NTSC, add in a scanline shift every VBLANK (this is done by toggling the first instruction of the display list between 96 and 112) ... on NTSC machines this will eliminate the blank scanlines and make the display look better. This is for NTSC only of course The demo looks amazing! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Xuel Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 @Synthpopalooza Nice suggestion. Here you go: tiles-ntsc-synthpopalooza-lineshift.xex I don't know how it works since I didn't do anything to swap chroma/luma on alternate frames. I just prepended an instruction slot to the display list and swap between $20 and $30 every frame. Maybe some missed WSYNC deadline just happens to delay the kernel by a line on the appropriate frames because of lower DMA on blank lines? Probably could get rid of the gray line on the top if I really studied it. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 We really have to do everything in gr7 with digis but of course A8 can do that... But each game it's a diferent type of game. If A8 is t's the best and even on the 21st century still have so many new things to discouver then leave that to people that know less or more are doing their best and wastinng their time! Not sure on which planet you live, but on the A8 you see almost all games done the same way... even different games... It's a clear fact, people (still) see what the C64 can do and try the same on the A8 and fail literally. If some of the polish guys had followed that path, we'd never seen something like Numen or Yoomp!. Remember: The A8 was intended to have "ego view" games on the screen, it has been dropped (almost) after people ran behind the C64. If the same progress with the A8 happened as with the C64, we'd have some "Wolf 3D" in the early 80s for sure. And, now, enough offtopic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Heaven/TQA Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 xuel. Can you post the Joystick/Movement Routine because it works perfect and everyone doing jump&runs could benefit from the code? I never managed such fluent Mario-Like controls. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emkay Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 Yes. The controls are very nice. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
José Pereira Posted November 13, 2012 Share Posted November 13, 2012 (edited) @José Pereira Here's your swap-only-two-colors-per-line scheme: chroma: 2 blue6 red4 green4 luma: 2 blue6 10 14 tiles-pal-jose.xex Here's a variation of your scheme with the following mods: chroma: 2 blue6 red4 green4 luma: 2 blue6 8 12 tiles-pal-jose-alt.xex Another variation: chroma: 0 blue4 red4 green4 luma: 0 blue4 8 12 tiles-pal-jose-alt2.xex Xuel try the Blue sky in a lighter luminance. As for the Green, what Green are you using (Grass would go better what? colours 12 or 13?)? And Red seems more colour4 instead of 3 (I would even change it to Wood Brown colour15 or even Pale Green colour14 more Terrain like). Problem is that then you'll have all a little Greenish... Colour2 in darker luminances may fit good for Terrain and lighter luminances can also fit good with Blues for the Enemys and Coins). Yes, probably the best choice for me would be use colour2. P.s.- Out of Topic. Karol nothing special nor any real interesting message but are you receiving messages? Haven't you again your box full? Edited November 13, 2012 by José Pereira Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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