As actual proper coding won't fully start until around 15th October I wanted to show some of what I'll be doing up and around until that point with preparing the graphics for the game.
The sprites that dflrsilver provided were not in any sort of structured format so they all need to be accurately aligned so that the blitter can pick them up and display them, most of the sprites are 32x32 in size so they all need to be put in a 32x32 grid. In the lower part of the screen shot that follows you can see this process... which... is very time consuming as there are alot of sprites in the game. The other thing to note about this is that some sprites need to be mirrored so I need to have flipped copies.
On top of that the sprites need to be ordered in a specific way depending on if they are enemies/collectables etc so that when I come to coding the game I can do efficient collision detection.
In the upper part of the screen you can see how I'm extracting the background on the Rygar levels. For doing this we need MAME and the internal debugger with some cheats. What I've done is disabled the front tile map and sprites which allows just the background showing through. I then move across the level with infinite lives and time set and screen shot the backgrounds, stitch them together to make up the whole scene.
This whole process will probably take me all of August, I will try to keep things updated but rest assured I'm working on it unless you hear otherwise (here).
Exciting times.
Geezer
PS. As requested by Ian if you want to discuss then please post in the discussion thread and reference this post number.