Denial

tokra wrote:If you want the cart to sell in numbers however you could also use the 3K-area and even the 2K IO2/3-area, making the game +37K effectively. Only people with UltiMem or very special expansions would be able to soft-load such a game into their VIC-20

ROM in RAM1..3 would render the cartridge inoperable in my VIC-20 though.

Pixel, before you start cramming data into somewhat obscure corners of the memory range, I'd suggest you just use a simple banking scheme for BLK1..3 controlled with registers in the I/O area ... if you need to go beyond +32K, that is.

Mike wrote:[
Pixel, before you start cramming data into somewhat obscure corners of the memory range, I'd suggest you just use a simple banking scheme for BLK1..3 controlled with registers in the I/O area ... if you need to go beyond +32K, that is.

OK, to release the tension a bit, it's going to look like that:

* ROM in BLK1, 2, 3, and 5
* RAM in RAM1, 2, 3 (not sure what to use that for yet)
* Hiscores in IO2 and 3 (yep, battery-powered hiscore table)

No banking required yet. Guess the animation sequences will make it into the rest of ROM.

No online Hi-Scores using an ESP8266 then?

Just played the latest version. Not too sure about the digitised sound, seems to kill the frame-rate and sounds very scratchy.

.. but apart from that looking good.

beamrider wrote:No online Hi-Scores using an ESP8266 then

Yeah, that really spoils my days, too.

pixel wrote:

beamrider wrote:No online Hi-Scores using an ESP8266 then

Yeah, that really spoils my days, too.

Indeed....

Looks like the sounds are made of rectangular waves exclusively, so perhaps in-game sounds can be decompressed with no bit shifting.

EDIT: At 4 bits. Am mixing 1-4 bit samples at the moment.

Played revision 716 some more - seems pretty stable now. No crashes or glitches encountered and the sprite movement seems very fluid!

I had a go yesterday and found a glitch. I had a Laser and catched a B-block. I was firing the laser when going into the break. Then the next level was full of what looks like laser-shots where there are usually spaces.

I actually just tried again and got the same situation.

Just tried playing with the digi-sound. While it may work for the music in the game, the in-game sounds sound really harsh and cause ear-bleeds after about a minute or so. Furthermore, they decrease the frame-rate considerably so that you can hardly follow the ball. When you get 3 balls it's absolutely impossible.

While these digi-sounds may be technically brilliant, they actually make the game seem worse in this state. Since the rest of the game is so polished, they really stand out.

Maybe the quality of the samples can be improved and the speed of the standard-audio retained. Otherwise I'd probably leave out the digi-sounds for in-game-effects and use the space to make the digi-music sound as good as it can.

That being said, the VIC-20 original music was really good to begin with

tokra wrote:I had a go yesterday and found a glitch. I had a Laser and catched a B-block. I was firing the laser when going into the break. Then the next level was full of what looks like laser-shots where there are usually spaces.

I actually just tried again and got the same situation.

That is SO awesome that you've discovered this! Thanks! Am really wondering what it is with those lasers...

tokra wrote:Just tried playing with the digi-sound. While it may work for the music in the game, the in-game sounds sound really harsh and cause ear-bleeds after about a minute or so. Furthermore, they decrease the frame-rate considerably so that you can hardly follow the ball. When you get 3 balls it's absolutely impossible.

True. The samples could use some proper editing in the first place. Also, the player and decruncher get out of sync at times. There're also terrible delays for the decruncher inits. Aaaand the decruncher is still to slow to play natural audio at full 4-bit.

I just couldn't resist anyway.

The laser problems seem to be gone.

Yes, seems so. In my playtesting I just ran into this:
Some "dirt" seems to have remained at the bottom after the last level was completed. Also "High Score" at the top is missing a letter. I have also uploaded a VICE-snapshot here, so you can verify memory contents:

http://www.tokra.de/pixel/aruk.vsf

Two more things I noticed:

The extras come at a very different rate than the arcade. For example the "B"-extra is extremely rare as far as I remember, but appears all the time in your version (good for testing though).

Also I'm still missing the sound-effect when actually using the B-extra and escaping with the vaus to right through the break.

Also just noticed the laser can fire through the gold-bricks again, don't think it can on the arcade.

And another test-play with more "dirt" on screen where it doesn't belong. Happened just after entering the level with a B-extra.
VICE-snapshot: http://www.tokra.de/pixel/aruk2.vsf

Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot, tokra1 Which revision did you check? The break mode sounds seems to appear on my side.

If you want to jump to the next level just press 'N'.