Well, that's it. I've officially run out of things to try in order to stabilise the game speed. Music still gets knocked slightly out of sync, and I just don't know what to do. I'll need to decide whether to continue or not, because I'm wiped out after literally hundreds of failed attempts.

Looks like I'll need that attribute table after all as one of the levels activity requires it. It's still a lot of bytes just set to 0, so will perhaps need to write an RLE type compressor with offsets to where specially coloured tiles are in the map

So I have just enough room for an attribute table, but they'll take up disk space, and I'll have to write a tool to edit the bytes. Any colour added would be minimal anyway, so Is the result worth the graft? I don't get the hate for monochrome anyway. It's atmospheric, and better than garish clash.

Having a rare boozy night in Glasgow this evening with an old mate at the city's premier stinky man pub, the Solid Rock Cafe. Will be nice to talk shop about Boss pedals rather than bits and bytes. Just my luck it's going to be pissing it down when i need to get the bus.

It's amazing what damage a tiny missing comma can do. Was chasing my tail wondering why the game was crashing at a certain point in a spawner, but yeah. Also, fuck IM 1 hijacking IY! It was messing with my key reading routine during a disk swap. 😠

Had bother with the disk system again. Calling DOS INITIALISE wiped all the potential caches, which included the unused ones that I had data in. Fixed it, but what a faff! Wondering if I can just trash +3DOS and use a custom loader to get more memory? Do I even need the +3 then? Decisions.

Starting to feel like a real game now that the spawners are making baddies in waves. Timer is also working, but just wraps when it hits 0. Will need to sort the issue with the SFX locking up the main loop soon. It's barely noticeable, but the music stutter gives it away. Some DMA would be nice.

Need to be careful what I'm listening to when I'm writing music, because it undoubtedly ends up as a big influence in that moment. Had the first three Hammerfall albums on repeat the last few days, but those tunes are pure cheddar and something similar would suit a game perfectly.

Check the content thieves.

AI Watchdog - The Atlantic

The Atlantic's ongoing investigation of the books, videos, and other media used by the world's most powerful tech companies to train their AI models.

theatlantic.com

The He-Man film has some amazing stuff in it, but the comedy needs toned down by at least 75%. Some glorious moments ruined by the incessant need to do a joke skit after almost every line in the script. Could either be bad writing or notes from Mattel, but it became tiresome. Great action though!

I don't know what a bin is doing down there either. Made some good progress lately. A few compromises were unavoidable, but just about everything else made it in. Just one or two technical head-scratchers left and the rest of the music to write.

I put on the Amiga Dune OST while I was working the other day, and it was an ethereal experience! So many memories flooding back, and some of the tracks are still in my head days later. The late, great Stéphane Picq made a masterpiece.

[Amiga] Dune - Soundtrack

YouTube video by Back to the Roots

youtu.be

Disk swap solved. Had to page in Bank 7 and call DOS INITIALISE again to refresh everything before re-trying. The manual wasn't very clear on what was specifically happening with these calls, so it was hard to gauge given the context.

That was a nice read. I wonder what the sprite masking technique was? Don't think Xoring on a 1-Bit screen would work? I'm sure I chucked it through the disassembler not long ago, and IIRC the sprites had interleaved masks but weren't zigzagged.

Iain Mew@superchartisland.com · 2w ago

“As he steps out of the local subway station, he soon realises what a plonker he is to venture onto this turf”. The story of how Ocean successfully translated the first Kunio-kun game onto home computers for the UK. With only one set of legs! New post on Renegade: www.superchartisland.com/renegade

There's a few YouTube clones around, but this looks the most promising. Given the copyright bullshit on YT, alternative sites are sorely needed. There's hardly any old computer content on there, so may be good to set up for Internet: Phase 2.

Have to completely rewrite my spawner as it takes up too much space. Check spawn variable Check screen number Make enemy1 at X/Y/Z in mode 7 Make enemy4 at X/Y/Z in mode 4 Make enemy3 at X/Y/Z in mode 6 inc spawn var Repeat about 15 times. A small loop and loadable table of values seems the way.

Got an extra 1.3k by moving tables into another bank. They're used for drawing energy bars when someone gets hit, so not needed every frame. So, my two other main issues are: -Small CPU choke when a sound effect plays -Occasional speed up when enemies wander off screen -Disk swap Getting there!

Bugger! Out of memory. Only got half a routine left to do, but just got 10 bytes left. Should be ok though. Memory seems to be easy to come by with some rearranging. Still got a few headaches to solve, but I think the finish line may be in sight now.

Seems like FUSE needs a full system reset after inserting a new disk to be able to read it. Bit of a bugger when doing multiloads in the middle of a game. Can't see anything wrong with my code. File is closed on error, registers reloaded before retry etc. Weird shit!

I think people forget that the OCS Amiga did get a very nice Street Fighter II game, but the weird, obsessive focus that Amiga fans have on colours/graphics seemed to overlook it. Yes, the sprites can be a bit rough, but it moves and plays splendidly! The disk swapping was the real bitch.

SUPER STREET FIGHTER II (AMIGA)

YouTube video by Zeusdaz - The Unemulated Retro Game Channel

youtu.be

Had all my documentation linked to WoS, so that seems to be gone. Resorting to a rather crude method of disk swapping where I just feed the loader what disk number the file should be on, and it asks for that if an open error occurs. Not sure if there's a way to read volume name with firmware?

The Amiga community is locked in a perma-cycle of big aspirations from people who are - without fail - not asm coders. You can't know what's possible if you don't understand the system at that level, and no amount of playing Stardust or Elfmania will change that.

Found these old backstory bios for Double Dragon: Legacy characters as I was planning on making a manual with a rogues gallery at the end. There's quite a few. Mostly explaining the newcomers but also revealing what the old mob have been up to for the last 30 years. Might make a YouTube slideshow.

Made this in 2 weeks as a Game Maker challenge, and also as a tribute to the old Amiga ED-209 demo. Just shoved in as much gore and nonsense as possible. I'll need to find the exe file and upload it again.

ED 209: The Revenge: The Revengerer - Game Maker Demo

YouTube video by Prototron

youtu.be

My second Game Maker demo was a bit more ambitious. Tried to combine Shinobi with Kung-Fu Master while giving a "Fuck you" to fox hunters. Had some sort of pixel interpolation on, and the aspect ratio was all over the place, but I'd like to try this again with fresh graphics. Maybe for the Amiga.

The Legend Of Kitsune Mifune : Game Maker PC demo

YouTube video by Prototron

youtu.be

Uploaded videos of my old Game Maker demos. This was way before assembly came along, and it's a bunch of silly ideas that never really went anywhere. The first was this rough and gory remake of Golden Axe II which I did in 2014 a few months after learning a bit of GML.

Golden Axe II Remake - Game Maker Demo

YouTube video by Prototron

youtu.be

Out of disk space, and I still have six bosses and a ton of music to include. Looks like it'd be a 2-disker Lost a design for one of the enemies too, and I can't get the recreated pixel art quite as good, but 2 unique players and 7 baddies + a boss (with no shared parts) all held in RAM is decent.

I wasn't a fan of the 2021 Mortal Kombat film, but I watched the sequel last night and it was a lot of fun. Looked like lot of sets were built, and the fight scenes were top notch! Nice to see a lot of the game's locations recreated too. The 1995 film is a better overall movie, but this was solid!

Loved this! I'll admit to being a tad more of an Amstradian than a Speccian simply cos I had my 6128 for longer. I never had a GX4000, but the + range were genuinely good upgrades to the hardware, so it's unsurprising that it's a decent console.

Kim Justice@kimjustice.bsky.social · 2mo ago

NEW VIDEO! We're looking at the Amstrad GX4000. This console may have failed commercially, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a fine 8-bit machine with a lot of potential, and some good games too - it absolutely deserves a proper look. Enjoy and please share :) youtu.be/WH1f1EcjnkU

Final Edition got a nice 4-page review in Zapp Amiga. Hardly had time to even think about it as I was straight on to the Spectrum after the release, but this is a nice reward.