Evening all.
I started a thread over at stardot recently asking about learning to program and the outcome of that is that I'm going to teach myself assmebly programming by writing a simple breakout clone. jbnbeeb linked to his jsnake dev diary and I'm considering doing something similar myself.
I've setup beebasm and syntax highlighting on gedit and will hopefully be starting in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I'm going to be studying the advice given here as well as articles in beebug and micro user as well as the user and advanced user guides.
Wish me luck!
Simon

Good luck

Good luck Simon! If its an Elk version can you add plus 1 joystick support? My kids (and i) absolutely love Breakout

Good luck Simon, been toying with a breakout clone myself lately, but I'm not known as the fastest kid on the block

Simon,

When you reach the point where you've got a beta version or you have something that can be screenshotted, you're welcome to drop me a PM if you'd like to make it an RS project!

Sam.

I made a start on his yesterday, mainly writing down my thoughts and geting a design down on paper. I've also got a long plan of action - I've broken down the project into lots of very small chunks so I can focus on one small thing at a time.



I'm planning on using mode 2 so I'm not sure if the elk will be up to it. I'm not going to be doing anything fancy so I think it should work on an elk just notat the right speed. I'll look at producing an elk version once(if?) the beeb version is finished. I'll definitely be adding a joystick option.




Will do. I've just finished a course for work so will have a bit more spare time and mental capacity to devote to this. I'm hoping to have something to show in the next fortnight.

well I beat you when it comes to not being fast. I'm still busy on my adventure...............

I did start on this back in November but real life got in the way.
I was at the Wakefield show on Saturday and met jbnbeeb and Tricky and had a good chat and played jsnake and Carnivale. This has inspired me to get on with my breakout game and you'll be pleased to hear I have a yellow blob on the screen! Woohoo!. More importanly I understand how and why it's there!
I should have some free time on Monday evening so I hope to have a yellow blob moving around and bouncing off the edges of the screen by Tuesday. The blob might even look like a ball by then.

Go for it simonh! It is very rewarding if you keep at it and start to see tangible results. I went from plotting a single pixel to a completed game with Jsnake. I'm now slowly but surely battling through creating a dogfight game which will get a dev diary once I have a bit of sprite animation to show.

And keep posting, I have found that even just saying you have done a little bit makes me want to do some more.

Breakout was one style of game I could never learn to love.

But keep at it nonetheless!

Won't be able to work on this on Monday as I'll still be in Blackpool!
After playing Carnivale and seeing how close to the arcade original it is I have decided to try to make my game as like the arcade version of Super Breakoot as possible. There are not many colours and the screen is 224 x 256 so it should fit nicely on a mode 1 screen.

Feel free to grab the timer/palette code to make the different rows different colours.

That's a good idea! I'm going to post evertime I do any kind of additition to the code and I'm even going to post when I have ideas! Should hopefully keep me focussed on this!



I'll definitely be needing it. I need 6 colours in total, any I've had a bit of a search on the forum and can't find this code. Could you point me in the right direction?

Here's a picture of what I'm aiming for:


What I've got done so far:
A yellow border the same size and position as the arcade machine.
....... and that's it!

I've only entered data for the blue block - which is displayed as yellow in the default palette - and I was able to build the border from this data. Once the other colour blocks are set up I'll have the border coloured correctly

I need to set up the palette so that colour 0 is black, 1 is white, 2 is blue, 3 is red. I'll then use Tricky's palette changing code to change coloiurs 2 and 3 to green and yellow.

After that I'll set about getting the ball on screen and moving. Then the same for the bat which is fortunately the same sprite as a blue brick. Unfortunately this will require extensive playtesting of super breakout on mame. I may be gone a while!

I'm going to spend an hour or so now getting the graphics for the bricks set up and I might post a screenshot of the 'arena' when I'm done.

The original game was black and white with coloured translucent plastic stuck on the screen!

To make the maths easy, you can change the screen to 256x256 (only drawing 224x256) this gives inc high byte = move down a row in mode 4 or use mode 1 (high byte += 2 moves down a row) to allow four colours per row.

I will pull the palette changing code out and tidy it up a bit, then post it in the sample code with an explanation, but probably not for a week or two.

If you upload as jpg, they will be visible inline without "downloading".

I'm back....again!

I had a couple of weeks off work and found some time to play around with this again. I've been given my wifes old laptop so I've installed swift and pretty much started from scratch as most of what I'd done no longer made much sense to me. I've used the sprite plotting routines from the creative assembler book as I've been studying this for a while and feel quite comfortable with it.

At present I have most of the boundary walls drawn, a bat hovering mid-screen and a ball whizzing wildly across the screen. I may be asking a few questions in the next few days and hopefully should have something worth looking at in a couple of weeks.

edit:

I was going to ask a few questions now but when I began typing I remembered the answer was in 'Creative Assembler'. I just had a quick flick through it and most of what I need is in there. It seems I've given too much attention to graphics and sprites and forgot to look at the rest of the book in detail!

How much of zero page can I use? I searched the forum and spotted a link to this:http://mdfs.net/Docs/Comp/BBC/AllMem

Which shows &0000 to &009F being used by Language - BASIC I presume - and Econet. Can I use that?

If you still want the is running, which does make sound easier, &70..&8F

Ok. Still lots to do but I've got a basic 'arena' set up and the ball is moving around quite well. Next up will be finishing off the arena then keyboard controls, collision detection between bat and ball. I've not thought much further than that. Here's a small clip on youtube.

http://youtu.be/5qZIFt9pdzQ

Thanks for the offer of the palette switching code Tricky but I think I'd like to have a go myself first.

I have added controls: z - left and x - right. I grabbed the code from JSnake and rejigged it for my needs - hope thats ok Jason,I've credited you in the source!
I've also added some rudimentary collision detection between the ball and the bat so it is in some small way playable!

Note the attached file in an ssd not a zip. Just rename it beebout.ssd