Prototron

What did programmers BITD do when they were employed to make a game but hit bugs so insanely stubborn that it was eating up all the devtime? Deadline looming, no sign of resolution, paycheque on the line.

Was there help? Was the game just compromised and released? Or did they get fired/replaced?

I didn't really get any online presence until daemon in around 1997, but I remember the early days of chat rooms before SM.

On another note, it's never ok to bully anyone. Ever. Old or young. Even those who you 'think' are the bad guys, becasue that definition can change with a tacky headline.

Red Dwarf was a big part of my growing up. Even my Mum loved The Cat. I liked series 7 and 8 a lot too, but it was hard to ignore that something was missing.

RIP Rob.

One tumour per day is enough, ta!

I've painfully learned that every cycle counts on the Speccy.

Getting stuff up and running is easy, but getting it fast enough is a nightmare!

Yeah. Stack pops off image and mask bytes at the same time, does the AND/OR thing, then just tears through all the lines of the sprite. No stopping to reset/add to source pointers at the end of a line, and just some small stuff to move down the screen.

Old news to seasoned Speccy coders I'd wager.

Discovering zig-zag sprites is an eye opener!

----> Draw sprite line
↓ Move down screen
<---- Draw sprite Line
↓

All fine, but realising that sprite lines have to be consecutive in memory, and every 2nd one has to be in reverse order (but not bit flipped) is making my brain fry!

Very few I'd imagine.

Maybe 48K sized games which don't use the extra banks for storage, so just flip Banks 5 and 7 for double buffering.

IIRC the 128k CPCs could select any screen locations from &4000-&C000 and page extra banks into any range. Much nicer.

The Spectrum 128k screen paging seems like more hassle than it's worth. Locking S2 to one of the banks at &C000 while sprite/tile data is in one of the others either means a lot of bank swapping per read/write, or caching graphics data in the lower ranges. The +3 maps don't solve this either.

Odd!

ENGINE9000 Debugger #5 - Elfmania - How Does It Work ? YouTube video by alpine9000

I always wondered how the Blitter Objects sat on top of the line scrolled floor without being skewed themselves.

Some great tools being made these days. #Amiga

The screen copy from Target Renegade is interesting. Looks like it does the left side of the screen first then the right. Using inc h / inc iyh to move down lines fast, then a few checks for character/third boundaries.

Copied the code into my game and it shaved about 2 vbl passes off the main loop.

I only played with it for 20 minutes but it looks the biz! So much potential for seeing how stuff works.

Dream come true!

There should be one of these for every retro system.

Been trying out Spectrum Analyser.

Proper disassembler, memory inspector, debugger etc. I'm quite handy with command line stuff, but I'll take a nice GUI every single time.

Great stuff! Shame I have to bolt off for the weekend.

Another great video from DG.

Back to the ZX Spectrum today.

Just making sure things run, and refreshing my head about where I left off.

Lots of new ideas to try which will take some graft, but should be worth it.

Game Boy was my jam! Had so much fun with Fall of the Foot clan, Double Dragon, and SML.

My pal had a Game Gear with GG Shinobi, and it was awesome too.

He-Man was by far my favourite cartoon when I was a kid, so I'm excited for the new film.

Rewatched a few episodes, and it's not as goofy as folk make out. The BG art and music is about as sinister dark fantasy as it gets, and there's good purpose to the mini-stories.

Plenty to expand on.

I recall reading that screenshots used to be taken with a camera pointed at the monitor (hence the lovely scanlines), but later the method switched to a screen grabber of some sort between the console and the TV?

There's a noticeable lack of scanlines in shots from about '92 onwards in C+VG & NMS.

Ran into a few issues on real hardware which don't happen in WinUAE for some reason. Might be the Gotek running everything form DF1, or could be some alignment issue that the emulator just lets happen.

It seems contained to the intro at least, but will need to take a few more days to look at it.

The Final Fight revision is almost done. Code is complete, so just extra goodies now.

Took 8 months to figure this low-level stuff out, but it's working. There's about 600 bytes left out the 2MB, so it was a tight squeeze (was about 2.35 with the OS taking up space).

Should run on hacked OCS too.

Happy new year folks.

Back home and feeling suitably bloated after a week of snacks and having the cold.

Best dive into projects and get some shit done.

William Higinbotham made Tennis for Two on equipment that he didn't own. Same with Pajitnov and Tetris. No one commissioned anything, so maybe that's the deciding factor of "indie".

Regardless, the ZX Spectrum had more devs worthy of the indie crown, but country-centric thinking maybe blinds that.

Watched Tron: Ares last night, and I thought it was great!

Looked amazing, stellar soundtrack, and way more fun nods to the first film than I was expecting. Jodie Turner-Smith was top-notch as Athena.

Jordan Catalano was fine too, and his moody vibe actually worked for a man playing a bit of code.

The Super Famicom was the stuff of legends, and it felt like an age waiting for it to be released here. I probably bigged it up a bit too much in my mind, but F-Zero, Contra III, Final Fight, and Link to the Past were just amazing!

Streetfighter II took it to another level though. 98%...phew!

I still love Shadow Warriors on the Amiga.

A rare instance of an arcade beat 'em up being good on the system, and developers Teque did a great job. I don't even care about the slowdown when the screen gets busy. It's great!

A shame that the audio had to be either FX or music though, but still.

Final Fight on the ZX Spectrum was one of the most glorious oddities ever created. Virtually unplayable, yet endlessly fascinating for the sheer gall of it even existing.

I doubt anything could improve it bar some sprite tidy ups, but reducing size starts to look weird.

10/10 for the coder(s).

Ahh my wee 14 year old PC bit the dust today.

Blank screen. No Bios or MOBO splash at all. Did the RAM Reseat, CMOS battery, cable change etc. No biggie. Just used it for watching films.

Surprised the ancient Gigabyte motherboard is still in production, but ordered a new one for buttons.

I rarely engage in forum discussions, becasue 90% of the topics are "what ifs" or people desperately trying to prove that their system was the best.

In saying that, the EAB being down the last few days has been a killer, becasue searching the coding forums is one of the most valuable resources.

Another feather in the cap.

Reading the Amiga keyboard using bare-metal routines is more cumbersome than it really needs to be, and as usual there's a shocking lack of examples in official documentation/books.

Will add a page to my ever growing Amiga coding guide.