New Game: [insert title here]

[ImmortalA1000]

I wish you all the best Spud

My Amiga Buck Rogers game lies dead on a hard card from my second Amiga 2000 to die in 12 months and the frustration with irreplaceable hardware just drove me over the edge. Working on a PC via WinUAE and a 1080p LCD monitor with 100hz update is not suitable for my game as I needed to see how much I could drop the texture palette and make it up with tight copperlists. It was meant to look great on CRT tubes using SCART/RGB cables on real Amigas.

Ah well not much I can do about it now after searching for a single sane ebay seller with a replacement for months. I am now working hard on producing an iconic Commodore 64 game using DirectX 11 for PC though, and have the support of a 3D artist who worked on Prometheus. Writing games is awesome, had great fun getting those 3D textured floors with lovely depth cue effect working on a bog standard Amiga OCS machine though. Good feeling

[Kola]

Hi SPud. If you need any sound effects done give me a shout.

[spud]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I wish you all the best Spud

My Amiga Buck Rogers game lies dead on a hard card from my second Amiga 2000 to die in 12 months and the frustration with irreplaceable hardware just drove me over the edge. Working on a PC via WinUAE and a 1080p LCD monitor with 100hz update is not suitable for my game as I needed to see how much I could drop the texture palette and make it up with tight copperlists. It was meant to look great on CRT tubes using SCART/RGB cables on real Amigas.

Ah well not much I can do about it now after searching for a single sane ebay seller with a replacement for months. I am now working hard on producing an iconic Commodore 64 game using DirectX 11 for PC though, and have the support of a 3D artist who worked on Prometheus. Writing games is awesome, had great fun getting those 3D textured floors with lovely depth cue effect working on a bog standard Amiga OCS machine though. Good feeling

That is sad news indeed. I fear my games don't need quite so precise timing, so the UAE development environment is fine for it

Any clues on what the iconic C64 game is?

Originally Posted by Kola

Hi SPud. If you need any sound effects done give me a shout.

Thanks for the offer, Kola I do have a musician on board, though he's working on his own projects so who knows, may come a-knocking when the time comes. Before I consider that though I need to figure out how to slot in some sort of interrupt (presumably) driven mod player. All part of the fun though :-)

[Cammy]

Originally Posted by spud

Before I consider that though I need to figure out how to slot in some sort of interrupt (presumably) driven mod player. All part of the fun though :-)

Try this one: http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/ptplayer

[spud]

Hey Cammy, I shall have a look at that, thanks :-)

I've just stuck a placeholder subsection on the blackjet site if anyone is interested. I can understand if you're not

http://blackjet.co.uk/amiga/lost-disks-of-amiga/

In theory news and a demo .adf should be added in due course. Game title is still subject to change - it's not about collecting disks at all, but aliens/space invaders. (or something).

[spud]

Originally Posted by Cammy

Try this one: http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/ptplayer

Well, try as I might I can't glean any understanding from that player code. As great as it looks it is way over my head, I can't figure out how to get it to assemble with vasm, let alone convert it into something I can use with my devpac environment. I'm going to stick with the standard pro-tracker replayer (or something like it at least), that at least assembles inside my code with devpac without modification, and seems to work well enough so far. It might not be optimised, or have all the bells and whistles but it doesn't make my mind melt.

[Mrs Beanbag]

one way I optimised my own ProTracker playroutine was to take out all support for fine tuning. Those period tables were just taking up too much space! And I always make a point of tuning my samples properly anyway.

What I always wanted to do was use the Copper to handle the repeat pointers, but I never got it to work. DMA wait loops are so ugly. I might just rewrite the whole thing someday but it's not a high priority.

[spud]

That sounds like a good tip, and probbaly within my level of capability. I shall have to give that a go. Thanks Mrs B :-)

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by spud

Well, try as I might I can't glean any understanding from that player code. As great as it looks it is way over my head, I can't figure out how to get it to assemble with vasm, let alone convert it into something I can use with my devpac environment.

phx, the guy who made it (for his port of SQRXZ) is in this forum, so you may want to message him or bringing him into this thread!

[Leffmann]

You just type vasmm68k_mot ptplayer.asm, that's it. If you specify -Fhunk -nosym you also get it in smaller size in Amiga Hunk format. It's very neat and easy to use, just have a look at the functions and they will say exactly how to call them.

[spud]

HI Leffmann,

Thanks for that, your advice and reading the vasm manual helped, but also I needed a kick up the arse to understand what linking actually was and how XREF and XDEF relate - I am an absolute beginner at this stuff. So now I can assemble stuff in vasm and/or devpac and link it all together with blink or vlink. Calling functions from modules such as the ptplayer work fine, I just need to understand how to get the player to do what I want without corrupting stuff on screen, I presume I am calling the functions with the wrong parameters. I'm not entirely sure what "AutoVecBase" refers to for example.

Perhaps this will be revealed in the HW Ref manual or some other dev tome, yet nothing is returned from the Amiga Dev Docs search on amigadev.elowar.com, so I wonder if this is some colloquialism I'm not privvy to.

Thanks again for the nudge in the right direction, though.

[Leffmann]

The replayer is written to be modular and easy to call from C, that's why it looks like this. (what I assume from looking at it at least)

The AutoVecBase refers to the vector base, the base address where the M68K exception and interrupt vectors are. On 68000 it's always 0, on 68010 and up it can and may be located elsewhere.

The NearDataBase is the base address of the small/near data section, it will be called _LinkerDB. This stuff is more or less automatically handled in most Amiga C compilers and linkers.

EDIT: here's an example

          section   code

          xref      _LinkerDB
          xref      mt_init, mt_music, mt_install_cia, mt_end, mt_remove_cia, mt_Enable
          near      a4

start     move.l    4, a6
          lea       getvbr, a5          ; determine the vector base
          jsr       -30(a6)

          lea       $dff000, a6
          lea       _LinkerDB, a4       ; near data section in A4
          lea       module, a0
          jsr       mt_init

          move.l    a3, a0              ; vector base in A0
          st        d0                  ; PAL
          jsr       mt_install_cia

          st        mt_Enable(a4)

wait      btst      #6, $bfe001
          bne       wait

          jsr       mt_end
          jsr       mt_remove_cia

          moveq     #0, d0
          rts


getvbr    sub.l     a3, a3              ; assume address 0
          btst      #0, 297(a6)         ; check AttnFlags in exec to see if
          beq       .done               ; we have 68010 or higher

          movec     vbr, a3             ; read the vector base register

.done     rte


          section   data_c

module    incbin    speris_end.mod

[spud]

That's interesting, I wasn't expecting the smalldatabase to be that, I assumed wrongly I should reserve a chunk of memory at runtime to hold it and use it.

Again, thanks

[spud]

Hi All

Thought I'd stick a demo up of the game, hopefuly you'll find it fun and give a good taster of what the final game might be like. IT lacks a lot of features scheduled for the full game such as powerups, some enemy types, other hazards and mechanics. Plus some fine tuning needed (masking on the enemies for example, presentation screens etc).

So it's a very cut down, basic game but I hope you enjoy.

Grab it from:

http://www.blackjet.co.uk/downloads/...goatlizard.zip

I've been able to test it on my 4000 and 1200, both appears to play it fine. Emulated A500 via winuae seems to work too, but it is slightly less smooth and I find it bugs out more often on 68000 than other cpus, but that should be reoslved eventually as my coding and understanding improves

Basic instructions are to use the joystick to move left, right up and down. You can only go up and down on the teleporter pads and if you go to the edge of the screen you wrap around but going off left moves you upand right moves you down a platform. Avoid the enemies and grab all the little random space invaders to progress to the next level. Exit the game from the title screen with left mouse button. You have 4 lives (though there is no indication of this in-game yet).

[Predseda]

anus.adf?

[spud]

Yeah, sums up my coding skills nicely

[Predseda]

Could you provide it to us as an amiga .lha archive as well? I would like to download directly to my real Amiga.

[spud]

Yep, here you go

http://www.blackjet.co.uk/downloads/moby.lha

[Amiga1992]

500 - Internal server error.

[spud]

Oops. Fixed now Web config breakage after a mime type change to permit .lha downloads.