Hi Tricky,

I don't know which version of MAME you are using but in my version you can display de GFX and TMAPS graphics.

If you already have these GFX, just forget them otherwise maybe you can use them.

Greetings
Kees

Thanks Kees, that would have saved quite a bit of time. Now that you point it out, I do remember that feature, although I never got as good results as you just did. I'll try and remember for the next one

22 made birds shoot and game restart if the player is hit (should be pixel perfect).
No score and no diving birds, you will need shift to get past levels 3 and 4 as I still haven't really started them.


URL:http://youtu.be/epVLlqsjfyo

If you fancy trying it, the .ssd attached should work on emulators (beebdroid with wireframe keys seems to have a problem), B, B+ and Master - not tried it for a while on my beebs.

Keys are: Z,X, SHIFT (next level) and RETURN (fire)

I've added scoring and hi-score which updates when you die, .ssd attached, same controls as above. I have also noticed, that the collision has a one pixel wide gap between the eyes and the player ship scroll on has a 1 pixel high bug!


URL:http://youtu.be/ImfsFNndsag

Tidied up end of level, player ship sometimes gets 1 frame of corrupt gfx, I think I have a stray bullet!

Progress has slowed somewhat as I add little bits to avoid the big push to add the swinging aliens or the diving ones.


URL:http://youtu.be/JHPbCdW5qb8

Hi,
Continues to look great. Enjoyed playing through your latest wip. Wife and I both continue to be very impressed at how close it looks to the real thing. I miss the stars a bit when the mothership appears. Had a quick look at the original. The tune sounds a lot like the beeb. I wonder if it used same sound chip?

Since you are showing the most interrest, here is a quick test, got to go to work now


URL:http://youtu.be/ho3R-DUnyTc

Keep up with the great job!

What is the actual frame rate?

50Hz, try the demos above.
The original runs at 60, maybe 50 in the UK - I'm not sure.
The original animates different bits at different rate e.g. your bullets move at 8 pixels per frame, while their's move 4 pixels every other frame.
I am (so far) just doing what the original did.
For carnival, the original moved the targets 2pixels every other frame, but I made mine do 1 pixel per framebbecause it looked smoother.

PS how is your Atom game going, it looks very good. I'm always a little envious of someone who can make their own game instead of pinching someone else's ideas.

added stars to the mothership level (at jbnbeeb's request), including behind the mothership If you kill the mother alien, the level ends, as it does if you kill all the birds on the other levels. I have made it so that you have to stay alive until all the bombs have fallen, so no diving in to a hail storm to get the last bird


URL:http://youtu.be/zbnjq37YyMA

Amazing stuff. Like others I'm quite in awe of the speed at which you're cracking through this.

Can't wait to see you tackle some classic arcade games which were never represented on the Beeb in any form - did I see 1942 previously mentioned?

One which was done a massive disservice on the BBC was Green Beret, but - while the gameplay could certainly be improved upon - there's no way the Beeb could do justice to the visuals. Probably best to just close our eyes and imagine a hybird of Shark & Stryker's Run

Still... what about Spy Hunter? That was another game we really got short-changed on which I'm sure the Beeb could handle in full.

Some others I think could be reasonably ported would be:
Pang, Phozon, Vanguard, Bosconian, Mappy, Dig Dug & Pac Mania

And another I always wondered about was X'aind Sleena. Always remember a Micro User article (with a screenshot) which claimed that some company was close to a release on this... Bah!

But whatever, just keep on working that Tricky magic for us

50Hz, that's awesome! I did watch the videos and did play it on the emulator but I wanted to be sure.



My Atom game project is on pause as real life got in the way and then I guess I have found all kind of excuses to keep away from it LOL, I should try to go back to it and stick to coding something even if it is just for some minutes a day... I even created the topic to see if I would keep focused but it failed... Nice that you asked about it, it can help put me back on track

Nothing wrong with doing version of games, all my other games are versions and sometimes I spend time (I should be using to code!) looking at games from other platforms and imagining how they would look and play on other computers and how I would go about to port them.

Thanks Cybershark,

It is the gfx memory requirements that put me off some of those you mentioned.
Spy hunter for example uses about 16K for the road, 128k for the cars etc and another 8k ish for text with the colours reduced to 4! I think you could do a pretty good job of fitting it into a beeb, but may require loading and/or sw ram for multiple levels. The vertical scrolling could be made perfectly smooth and the car movements tweaked, change it to mode 1 and it would be nice to play.

I did look at Green Beret, but at 32k just for the man (men - I can't remember) without and backdrops, again it was a no.

Pang would make a nice project for someone, you could fit all the important bits in memory and if you were prepared to go to mode 2 with 4 colours for the background and 3 (others if you like) for the foreground, you can use palette tricks (I have a demo from 1981 i made somewhere) to EOR the "sprites" on/off without seeing any interaction between the foreground and background and appearing as if it were masked on/off. you could then load the 256K+ of backgrounds off disc each level.

Phozon - I had never seen this - that looks a bit challenging

Vanguard - I nearly picked this as my last project, it would fit nicely with the Rally-X demo I did (before I disabled diagonal movement), but after all the problems I had with sound on Carnival, I just couldn't face speech The easiest thing about this game, is that when the background gets overwritten with anything other than lazer fire (just EOR it), the game mostly just leaves it black

Bosconian - now I remember that from a seaside arcade (I think), that could also use the Rally-X code, maybe leave the stars as non-paralax (they didn't seem to bothered about them anyway) unless there is project/CPU time left at the end and as with Rally-X, move the radar to the bottom.; again very little happening that isn't "background" and just clear to black.

Mappy - Nice little project - use the horizontal scrolling from Rally-X, it seems solid it you are on an B-Em or have a CRT, but can be tricky if not.

Dig Dug - I thought we had a version of this, on checking, it wasn't as good as I remembered it - not the first time that has happened!

Pac Mania - another smooth side scroller, same problem/restriction as all the others. I never played this much in the arcades, so never really thought of a port. If I did, I would fit it on one screen, making all the "sprites" easier to draw and let the player jump walls while the ghosts were blue - not very authentic, but something my teenage self though should have been in the game.

X'aind Sleena - never seen this, side scroller + massive gfx, I'm not surprised it never came out!

Thanks Cybershark, that was a great walk down memory lane, I feel refreshed and ready to tackle swinging or diving aliens, shame I have to take the misses to Wilko!

Sorry Wood, I didn't notice your reply while I was writing mine

I try to get an hour in after putting our daughter to bed and maybe the odd half hour before work if I had to stop in the middle of debugging something.

I didn't mean that there was anything wrong with porting (or making the game I remembered in my case after stealing the gfx), just that I have great respect for anyone who can "create" a game of their own.

Now that I have learnt how to "quote" someone and copy their wiki for embedding videos etc, I find posting them worth the extra few minutes it takes to make them with beebem and upload to youtube as it gets more comments and any comment spurs me on a little bit more. My daughter also helps motivate me by asking to play "your new game", which is better than my partner who when I asked earlier if she had ever played "this" (Phoenix) in the arcades said, "yes, that's space invaders, but I didn't play it in an arcade, they were just for people to waste their money in"

Off to Wilko then

Guess I presumed your familiarity with the Beeb version here. That ran in MODE1 (although it also had a unique feature which let you toggle between that and MODE5 at any time). Aside from the lack of speech, all the Beeb version really missed out on was some of the enemies. It had all the basics, and the chopper too, but no Dr Torpedo and not sure The Road Lord was represented either.


Bloody hell, that surely sounds excessive. Yeah, obviously all those background gfx would never fit. Stryker's Run did a hell of a job with all those MODE2 sprites & (some measure of) gameplay.


Yeah, the basic gameplay is not anymore complex than something like Meteors. I pictured a version stripped of backdrops but, as you say, there's no reason they couldn't be loaded from disc as required (in the same way that somebody else was doing with a Bomb Jack clone).


Actually, now I look back on it you're quite right. My recollection was muddled with a type-in game whch had a similar-ish premise


Ah, don't even try for in-game speech on the Beeb. The only times you'll ever hear it used are in loaders. But yes, this game is very easy on the backgrounds


Weirdly, this one seems different from my recollection now I look at it again - and God, it's hard!!! Most of these suggestions of mine come from the PSX "Namco Museum" collections, as I didn't start hitting the arcades much before the 16bit era.


Memory plays ze tricks, for sure! Think the Beeb has 2 semi-decent versions of this, but neither are 100%.


Never played this in't arcade myself either, but I do remember playing it on the Archimedes at school. But did you ever see "Perplexity" on the Beeb? It was like Pacmania crossed with Repton, and surely - if that was possible - then Pacmania could be too??


Think the screenshots I saw were in monochrome, and it's a safe bet that all the cut-scenes would have been axed

Sorry, been AFK for a while, got started on swinging level tonight - its a bit too fast for now and I haven't added any vertical movement yet, but hopefully it will give an idea of where I am going. They can't die yet, but the collision code "just works"


URL:http://youtu.be/o0XSk66t2GQ

Haven't had much time, so another quick fix/mini feature.
Tweaked the swinging bird animation system, saved a bit of memory and slowed down the eggs. Added hatching the larger birds, they seem to have an eye missing!
I may have to re-visit the large bird drawing code as even this size, I am using nearly half a frame (but haven't done any optimising yet!)

URL:http://youtu.be/8y3a9Nc5pvQ

Not got much time at the moment, but did a quick test for swinging birds, still only horizontal and can't die!

URL:http://youtu.be/Y5OepebeKpU

Incredible to think that it's just a beeb moving all of those giant sprites around at the same time!!

Well done on the super-sonic progress being made on Phoenix, Richard!

Sorry for not posting - I've been all over the place with events (currently in Newcastle, then onto London next week). But I have been checking this thread on an almost daily basis - usually on my phone - in fact it's generally the first site/thread I check every day and has been for the last month or so! Have also been trying the demos on B-Em my laptop as they appear! Keep em coming!

Thanks Dave, I was beginning to think you didn't like Phoenix
I suppose I will have to try a bit harder this weekend, although I am out for most of it.

EDIT: I am currently drawing 8 birds * 48 pixels (12 bytes) * 16 pixels ( 16 bytes) at 50 fps plus blanking the previous frame and it is taking most of the available time, which makes it very hard to draw with no flicker or tearing (hard to see on a 25 fps video ) I have an idea, I'll give it a try.