In the making: Arukanoido – an Arkanoid clone

[pixel]

Mostly unnoticeable changes but one very important one: Mike was missing in the credits! Sorry, Sir! Could you make it spit?

Was actually spending most of the time hacking a new tape loader that focuses on durability by injecting a reference pulse between the bytes. All I got so far are headaches. Probably a good idea to forget about the VIC for a day or two and make some miles.

Still artwork to do. Will probably look like the British box cover of Gianna Sisters. Any super-simple ray-tracing software one can recommend for Linux? Am wondering how others make their graphics and import pics and sprites if it's not with the VIC Screen Designer (which I am using) anyhow. Just curious.

EDIT: Fixed nasty low-level bug with unknown effect.

[beamrider]

What music should be playing then? Whilst entering the name?

There used to be a song that played when you finished the game - I think you removed it to be played only on achieving a high score? Having been invited to enter my score, I assumed it would play.

I attached an old version with said music.

[pixel]

beamrider's hiscore table tune will refresh enthusiastic attitude with this one.

[beamrider]

nice

btw, I see there is a new Atari 2600+ coming soon and brand new paddles are being manufactured for it to fit d-type connectors.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Atari-Cartridg ... V4WT&psc=1

Assuming these would work okay with it? I have some Vic paddles but they are old and jittery...

[pixel]

Assuming these would work okay with it? I have some Vic paddles but they are old and jittery...

Tried to un-jitter things but I lack logical reasoning. Messed up the game play.

[pixel]

Now a TAP and WAV is included. Show a temporary splash screen done by tokra. Cannot test the WAV on real hardware at the moment but I won't throw myself between you and your tape recorder and C2N. For reasons yet unknown original arcade sounds crash when using the tape versions.
The tape loader is quite straightforward. Nothing special, no error checking. At ~2000bit/s which should do pretty well for a couple of years.

Have fun!

[pixel]

Late night surprise: faster sprite code. %p Good night!

[tokra]

Tried to un-jitter things but I lack logical reasoning. Messed up the game play.

Some years back when Mike did his Paddlescope-program I de-jittered two Paddle-games (Clowns and Super Smash), but never released them. The idea is to take the middle of two consecutive values and use this as the new Paddle-value:

Code: Select all

.C:aea2  AD 08 90    LDA $9008
.C:aea5  18          CLC
.C:aea6  6D 3C 03    ADC $033C
.C:aea9  6A          ROR A
.C:aeaa  8D 3C 03    STA $033C

In this case $033c would store the Padlde-value that the game uses. This improves jitter, but will not completely eliminate it, only make it much more tolerable.

Regarding paddles: Atari-paddles will not work on the VIC-20 as they use different values for their potentiometers. I don't remember whether you get just a smaller area or the paddles are way too fast. Either way, Atari-paddles are no good on the VIC. Jittering paddles on the VIC are also mostly *not* due to the paddles themselves, but something inside the VIC itself, which has not been fully understood I think. A good solution is the latest Micromys V5-adapter from ICOMP which can use a PS/2-mouse to emulate paddles. And this makes it completely jitter-free. The other way is to use some de-jittering as mentioned above.

[akator]

Amazing work on this!

[beamrider]

Late night surprise: faster sprite code. %p Good night!

Amazing, can't wait to try on real hardware.

Addition of the hi-score tune gives it more of that arcade vibe.

[pixel]

Some years back when Mike did his Paddlescope-program I de-jittered two Paddle-games (Clowns and Super Smash), but never released them. The idea is to take the middle of two consecutive values and use this as the new Paddle-value:

Code: Select all

.C:aea2  AD 08 90    LDA $9008
.C:aea5  18          CLC
.C:aea6  6D 3C 03    ADC $033C
.C:aea9  6A          ROR A
.C:aeaa  8D 3C 03    STA $033C

In this case $033c would store the Padlde-value that the game uses. This improves jitter, but will not completely eliminate it, only make it much more tolerable.

Odd. Did pretty much the same thing. But probably made the mistake of doing more than one thing at once. However, your code is better and I've put it in this new demo. The game play doesn't seem to be affected. Thanks!

[pixel]

The good deed for today: less flicker when the ball hits the Vaus.

Good night!

[beamrider]

nice

1443 was pretty sweet

can't be much left on your to-do list?

[pixel]

can't be much left on your to-do list?

There are some nasty bugs in those 12,000 lines of code and the Amiga version still has better graphics.

I have removed the original arcade sounds and just left the tunes in as the CPU overhead tends to turn the thing into a slide show even in joystick mode. Also fixed some stuff which is not in the demo.

Code: Select all

Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 11,955
Development Effort Estimate, Person-Years (Person-Months) = 2.71 (32.48)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Person-Months = 2.4 * (KSLOC**1.05))
Schedule Estimate, Years (Months)                         = 0.78 (9.38)
 (Basic COCOMO model, Months = 2.5 * (person-months**0.38))
Estimated Average Number of Developers (Effort/Schedule)  = 3.46
Total Estimated Cost to Develop                           = $ 365,653
 (average salary = $56,286/year, overhead = 2.40).
SLOCCount, Copyright (C) 2001-2004 David A. Wheeler

That's how software companies went down thanks to piracy.

[pixel]

No new demo today. Went to the fitness centre to get rid of back pain and to engage more in the healthy living thing. It worked. My back is fine now but everything else hurts.

Bored enough I used the border colour to show what is eating up the CPU on NTSC (as the IRQ/game logic is always running at 60Hz) and I'm quite astonished.

The light blue part is the IRQ which is doing all the thinking. Drawing on the screen, no matter what (except removing bricks) is done in an endless main loop. Purple is the time when sprites are redrawn and white is the phase when the remains of the sprites in the former frame are cleared.
I was under the impression that the game logic would drag it all down. Obviously not. So what part of the sprite routine is nibbling away at the cycles?

In this one pink is the calculating values required all along the drawing and character allocation. Green is when those chars are filled with graphics and black is when they are being plotted onto the screen.

Now that hurts too. The last resort would be to NOT let sprites overlap to get more rage out of it. Look-up tables wouldn't do much. Probably best to leave it as it is.