Tinyus - An arcade quality Amiga OCS port of Gradius/Nemesis

[mc68060]

Fantastic!

[manossg]

Awesome way to start the new year!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by aros-sg

You can do Y-flipping with blitter by using negative modulo for source and mask.

You do not necessarily need 5+5 planes for every object. You can still blit some objects (if there are only a few of them on screen at once) plane by plane with one single mask plane. Then gfx for some could also be only 4 or 3 planes. And remaining planes all cleared or set using mask plane.

You should not be using horizontal screen doubling/mirroring technique for scrolling.

This works but trades CPU time to save space. I think Battle Squadron worked this way (it has 25hz BOB updates). However, with many tiny blits your blitting becomes this way much slower on A500. So it was not an option for us. If you have a game with few and large blits then it may be an option.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Konami + Abyss feels like a match made in heaven. Looking forward to this – and a trainer; Gradius is hell to play.

Yes Gradius is very tough. Therefore the options menu in Tinyus allows to set lives and credits to your skill level.

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by jotd

3kb? are you using the OS? (killing it saves space)
have you got the best compressor for your real-time frame decompressor ?

just some ideas...you probably thought of that. The game looks great. I wonder how you can pull so many excellent titles in no time. Superb!

OS is disabled but you can return any time. For compression i use Doynax (like in Tiny Bobble) which is a good tradeoff in speed/size.

[jotd]

then compress the lower OS pages to back it up and use this space. Uncompress when quitting.

That can fail but with all the zeroes in the first OS pages you can save a few kb.

[malko]

OMG!!! A dream comes true !
Feel free to ask me for a hand on play-testing it !

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by jotd

then compress the lower OS pages to back it up and use this space. Uncompress when quitting.

That can fail but with all the zeroes in the first OS pages you can save a few kb.

haha.. nice idea ..

well, i think there are more controllable solutions that also have more leverage. For instance, a simple solution is to convert images to 8bit chunky, instead of planar. This gets you usually much better packing ratio. For images like the title screen this is an option. I used that trick for almost all graphics in the CODA intro, otherwise it would have not been possible in 64k.

[ross]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Also i need to find room for ~3kb... this will be the biggest challenge.

Hi pink, 3kb in which configuration? A standard KS1.x 512KB+512KB machine?
Have you tried an utility similar to my addchip? (a custom boot block that give you maximum chip memory at start)

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by ross

Hi pink, 3kb in which configuration? A standard KS1.x 512KB+512KB machine?
Have you tried an utility similar to my addchip? (a custom boot block that give you maximum chip memory at start)

Thanks for your help, good idea, but i want to have the game executable on A500 without extra startup.



It's not a big issue, there are still opportunities to get those 3kb in code i think.

[ross]

EDIT: Sorry! I don't want to risk derailing this thread, that is in the News section.
It's better to avoid technical stuff

[ross]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

Thanks for your help, good idea, but i want to have the game executable on A500 without extra startup.

I forgot! Congratulations for this new project, incredible as usual

[WayneK]

This looks great, and that title screen is superb. Thanks for all the hard work creating these "tiny" games Pink!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by WayneK

This looks great, and that title screen is superb. Thanks for all the hard work creating these "tiny" games Pink!

Thanks The title is really outstanding. Fade1 and 32 colors is a dream team!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

haha.. nice idea ..

well, i think there are more controllable solutions that also have more leverage. For instance, a simple solution is to convert images to 8bit chunky, instead of planar. This gets you usually much better packing ratio. For images like the title screen this is an option. I used that trick for almost all graphics in the CODA intro, otherwise it would have not been possible in 64k.

The chunky compression trick freed almost 7kb.

For coders here some compression stats comparing LZ compression for a detailed pixeled image in planar or 8bit chunky format:

Source:
256 x 224 (5 Planes, interleaved)
Size: 35840 bytes

Doynax compressed
Ratio: 36% reduction

8bit Chunky
Doynax compressed
Ratio: 55% reduction

tldr:
Use 8bit chunky for compressing planar images if you need ~50% better compression ratio. Non interleaved may yield differerent results.

[lmimmfn]

Looks fantastic, cant wait

[vulture]

That's excellent news!

[Havie]

This is very exciting news. If I am doing games like this in a years time then I'll be a happy bunny - you are coding machine!!!

[pink^abyss]

Originally Posted by Havie

This is very exciting news. If I am doing games like this in a years time then I'll be a happy bunny - you are coding machine!!!

Thanks, but without the help from Fade1 and Bartman none of these would happen at all.

[Antiriad_UK]

Originally Posted by pink^abyss

tldr:
Use 8bit chunky for compressing planar images if you need ~50% better compression ratio. Non interleaved may yield differerent results.

I'd read that in your Coda scroller. Hannibal's Kingcon had an option for saving chunky but it doesn't appear to be implemented. Before I try and edit the source to do it what did you use to convert to chunky?