Skip to main content

Homebrew game for C64 part 7 - revival

R
evival of the project, that is. It's not a resurrection-based game.

Following a hiatus due to realising that my original concept was rubbish, I had a different idea. It's nothing particularly original; sideways scrolling, and the sheep following one another like a snake. There will be things to collect, and things to avoid.

Avoiding the enemies will be more difficult, the more sheep are following the one you're controlling. The idea is that you start with one, and accumulate friends as you go along.  They may be dispatched by enemies, and there will be a maximum of four because of the way I've used two sprites to get hi-res with multicolour effect.

There are no collectibles or enemies yet, but here's the basic action, which I'm really happy with.



The sound you hear on the video is being played by a breadbin 64. It's my most recent tune for this game. The video is captured from VICE

It was my first go with the 64's scrolling capability. I cut my teeth on Vic20, and later spent some time with z80 machine code on a Spectrum +2.

It was straightforward, and it's very effective. The bulk of the work to actually move screen data only has to be done once in 8 frames. And limiting the actual scrolling images to half a dozen rows on the screen means that it doesn't take long, and I can use the character set, simply rotating 240 characters in screen memory.

I plan to make sets of sprites scaled to slightly different sizes, to give a better perspective effect - they'll get smaller the higher up the screen they are (ie further away).

So for the scrolling hills in the background,  did I generate them by algorithm? Or draw them electronically and write routines to pack and unpack the data? Did I heck.
I got out graph paper and coloured pens. Oldschool!

Each screen-width of data packs to 3-4 hundred bytes. I've made three screen-widths before it repeats. If that's  good enough for Fred Flintstone.....






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RC2024/10 - my entry

A while ago I made this MIDI module for RC2014: It works but a better design would have its own serial chip and port decoding.  As it is, it provides the MIDI interface and a clock signal for the second SIO2 serial port. This means that it requires a little setting up and will only work for RC2014s with an SIO2 (and port B not already used). I think people might reasonably expect it to be plug-and-play and self-contained, ie do all the serial itself. My challenge to myself is to:  learn how to connect a serial chip (probably 68B50 ACIA) to receive the incoming MIDI and to serialise outgoing MIDI design the module, including the port decoding write a library so that it can easily be used on any RC2014. Potential applications include a MIDI sequencer and using incoming MIDI to trigger notes on the AY or SID sound chips. Entering the Retro Challenge 2024 (aka RC2024/10)  has given me an incentive to get on with this! I'm happy to see several more entries in the RC2014 catego...

IM53 8080 birthday cake

 Each year I've been trying to get more creative with ideas for Spencer's birthday cake. The plan this year was to incorporate LEDs in place of candles. I eventually settled on an Altair / IMSAI / PDP -style computer since those are the type of computers that inspired his RC2014. The IMSAI 8080 has the most colourful switches as well as a name that I could twist. The thought that it could show randomly flashing lights (as if the computer were running) and that it could also play a game of 'kill the bit' was very appealing. A plan formed to use a capacitive touch pad on the cake itself. The first job is to bake the fruitcake. I often use a 7" square tin and one of those cut in half and rearranged makes a cake of suitable proportions.  Even after taking a slice off the faces to make them nice and square, there are still some rounded corners, so after putting on the marzipan, I used more marzipan as a filler to flatten the whole thing. Even though I wanted to end up w...

New MSX graphics / sound / joystick module for RC2014 / RCBus

I'm impressed at what Les has packed onto this standard-sized module. It contains an FPGA replacement for the TMS9918A, a YM/AY sound module and joystick interface.  The project is open-source and is here . In MSX terms this is the VDP (vidio display processor) and PSG (programmable sound generator), thus being an alternative for both the J B Langston TMS9918A video module and Ed Brindley's YM/AY sound module and adds two joystick ports to boot. All on a single module for RC2014 or compatible computers. There's no room for the d-sub joystick ports, so headers are provided so that these ribbon cables can be used.  This is a neat solution for those wishing to take advantage of Les' MSX8 system , which loads most MSX rom files along with a modified MSX BIOS from CP/M on a ROMWBW RC2014.  It is hard-wired to the MSX ports for the sound and video, so it won't be suitable for those wanting to run Colecovision ROMs, for example. I'm torn myself between the real TMS ...