A simple animation - is there a better way?

[chaos]

Hi everybody.

I'm trying to do a simple animation (the classic spinning ball, of course ), which after the initial setup, should be able to run with just the copper and the blitter, without CPU intervention.

I have a basic version ready (thanks partly to Photon's nice video guides!), but the copper lists are pretty long, and I was wondering if there is a smarter way to do this?

Basically, I'm using copper to setup the blitter to copy the ball's two bitplanes to screen, and I need a 5 frame delay for each frame of animation, so that's 8frames*5 different copper lists.

Is there a better way to do this?

Oh and another question - how can the executable from this source be only 404 bytes big, if just the ball data is much bigger than this?? Does AsmOne use some sort of compression, or am I missing something?

EDIT: the animation data that is INCLUDEd into the source is definitely missing in the executable, it seems the only reason it worked was that all the data was already loaded into the right place and luckily wasn't overwritten. After restarting WinUAE, it stopped working. I have no idea how to convince ASMOne to include the required data in the executable, is this a common problem?

[phx]

Some quick notes:
- the source starts with 44 bytes trash
- SECTION and ORG should not be mixed
- where is boingball_data.s ?

[chaos]

Ah, thanks!

1. Yes, I saw the garbage at the beginning when I tried to compile it with vasm. Didn't see it in AsmOne ...
2. Ups, didn't notice the second ORG, I only fixed the first one :S I guess that is why it didn't work Also found out how to fix it: (http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=71291), but it's too much work to fix this test program. Doesn't matter though, for what I will need this requires absolute memory addresses anyway (bootup screen for minimig, when there is no kickstart or even CPU available).
3. Attached!

[phx]

Originally Posted by chaos

Basically, I'm using copper to setup the blitter to copy the ball's two bitplanes to screen, and I need a 5 frame delay for each frame of animation, so that's 8frames*5 different copper lists.

Is there a better way to do this?

To do it with the Copper alone is certainly an interesting approach, but in a real project I never found a reason for it.

An improvement would be to use interleaved bitplanes, so you can blit the ball with a single Blitter start.

Oh and another question - how can the executable from this source be only 404 bytes big, if just the ball data is much bigger than this??

I know nothing about AsmOne's internals, but I guess that everything after the ORG directive was missing, and written directly into memory instead.

[chaos]

Originally Posted by phx

To do it with the Copper alone is certainly an interesting approach, but in a real project I never found a reason for it.

An improvement would be to use interleaved bitplanes, so you can blit the ball with a single Blitter start.

Yes, I would imagine this would be much simpler with the CPU, but like I said, this must be able to run without kickstart & CPU.

I might try the interleaved bitplanes approach, thanks for the hint!

I know nothing about AsmOne's internals, but I guess that everything after the ORG directive was missing, and written directly into memory instead.

Yes, it seems that is what happened. I'm really more or less a beginner here, so this was completely new to me

Anywayz, I added a logo, and this is more or less how I want the bootup screen to look, with the bootup text below the logo:

[ Show youtube player ]

[Codetapper]

Another tip for you, if you're unrolling a loop for speed you can do this and make your code more elegant!

REPT 64
move.w (a4)+,(a3)+
ENDR

[chaos]

Great, thanks for the tip!