English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Can you write 100% CDTV games with AMOS/Blitz?

ImmortalA1000 · 05 June 2021, 09:13

I was wondering if somebody knew if either AMOS or Blitz BASIC allowed control of playing audio tracks on data+CDDA CD-ROMs on a CDTV rather than just loading files from the data track via CD0: accessed by AmigaDOS commands to load data files instead of HD0:

I always wanted to write a Cinemaware style game for the CDTV (so no shit hypercard ropey things like Psycho Killer etc) BUT I want to have speech in the game and background ambient sound/music stored as various audio tracks.

For speech it becomes complex because I need to be able to play a specific track from a specific point as the total number of tracks is limited (max 99?) so I would need to be able to tell the CDTV to play track 03 from 9 minutes 22 seconds to 10 minutes 5 seconds AFTER it has finished loading in any data for the scene (backgrounds, anims, ambient sound effect like crickets chirping to get a particular character to say a specific thing all sync'd up.

Doing graphics today is so easy because everything is already in a digital format, it takes minutes to grab screenshots from Alien Syndrome arcade and make almost perfect copies in EHB mode today vs 1980s pissing about with digitisers and composhite video quality or even lighting of yellow lightbulbs for background images to be grabbed. Blitz is no slower than the framerates of action sequences in things like It Came from the Desert when you are trying to shoot the ant's antennas and 1mb is quite a lot of memory if it is mostly going to be used for a static background and a 12.5fps anim brush of the characters in the scene moving talking style graphics (so no need for CDXL just Dpaint anim files and an IFF background image etc) and CDDA tracks are played realtime so just a seek time issue on the single speed CDTV drive to account for when starting the speech.

I suppose you could still load in speech samples as required via IFF SVX files but 1mb is not that much memory really and you need to load the entire speech segment after already loading the anims/data for the scene and that's going to be like playing a Cinemaware game with loads of disk swapping so I would like to keep blank screens while stuff loads to a minimum.

(although if you were doing a space game you could have a shot of a space ship over a colour cycling background while you load the next level a bit like in Stargate Atlantis when they are using FTL to get to and from Atlantis cut scenes)

05 June 2021, 09:13	#1
ImmortalA1000 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2009 Location: london/england Posts: 1,347	Can you write 100% CDTV games with AMOS/Blitz? I was wondering if somebody knew if either AMOS or Blitz BASIC allowed control of playing audio tracks on data+CDDA CD-ROMs on a CDTV rather than just loading files from the data track via CD0: accessed by AmigaDOS commands to load data files instead of HD0: I always wanted to write a Cinemaware style game for the CDTV (so no shit hypercard ropey things like Psycho Killer etc) BUT I want to have speech in the game and background ambient sound/music stored as various audio tracks. For speech it becomes complex because I need to be able to play a specific track from a specific point as the total number of tracks is limited (max 99?) so I would need to be able to tell the CDTV to play track 03 from 9 minutes 22 seconds to 10 minutes 5 seconds AFTER it has finished loading in any data for the scene (backgrounds, anims, ambient sound effect like crickets chirping to get a particular character to say a specific thing all sync'd up. Doing graphics today is so easy because everything is already in a digital format, it takes minutes to grab screenshots from Alien Syndrome arcade and make almost perfect copies in EHB mode today vs 1980s pissing about with digitisers and composhite video quality or even lighting of yellow lightbulbs for background images to be grabbed. Blitz is no slower than the framerates of action sequences in things like It Came from the Desert when you are trying to shoot the ant's antennas and 1mb is quite a lot of memory if it is mostly going to be used for a static background and a 12.5fps anim brush of the characters in the scene moving talking style graphics (so no need for CDXL just Dpaint anim files and an IFF background image etc) and CDDA tracks are played realtime so just a seek time issue on the single speed CDTV drive to account for when starting the speech. I suppose you could still load in speech samples as required via IFF SVX files but 1mb is not that much memory really and you need to load the entire speech segment after already loading the anims/data for the scene and that's going to be like playing a Cinemaware game with loads of disk swapping so I would like to keep blank screens while stuff loads to a minimum. (although if you were doing a space game you could have a shot of a space ship over a colour cycling background while you load the next level a bit like in Stargate Atlantis when they are using FTL to get to and from Atlantis cut scenes)