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Pogo Cats

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:10 am
by Yggi
Hi.
I'm proud to present you my new game. I hope you like it.

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The gameplay is very simple. You need to jump to upper platforms. Each pixel scrolling will give you 1 point. If you fall down the screen, you'll loose. The goal is to make as many points as possible.
Here is the meaning of the different Items/Objects:
Spring coil: Jumping with the spring coil will give you about 400 points
Coin: Gives 500 points
Flying Heart: If you collect this item, your jump speed and jump size will get increased for a short time.
Tornado: If you come to close to it, it will blow you away. Jumping onto a tornado will make you jump several screens high (gives about 1000 points)
Black Hole: If you come to close to it, it will suck you inside. If you touch it, you will loose lots of points.

There are two versions available. One simple NROM128 version, which saves the highscore to NES RAM and one NROM128 with battery-backed PRG RAM, which saves the highscore there (so the highscore will stay available).

with battery

without battery


Could somebody try this on the real NES?

Edit 20.03.2012:
I changed the mirroring to vertical mirroring for tepples' multicart (the gameplay is still excatly the same. The only change is that the nametable is switched after sprite 0 hit). I also fixed a bug in the background scrolling.

Edit 21.05.2012:
Fixed a bug which caused the game to crash when attempting the highest score possible.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:25 am
by Shiru
Nice little game. The only major problem for me is how the music sounds, it almost hurts.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:42 am
by Yggi
Shiru wrote:Nice little game. The only major problem for me is how the music sounds, it almost hurts.
hm yes, the music is not very well. It was the first time, that i did sound programming (btw thanks to metalslime for his nerdy nights sound tutorials) and also the first time that i actually made nes music. But I'm not very good in music anyway.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 10:49 am
by 3gengames
I like the music, it just seems a little rough. Good game though! I enjoy it, it's a great first attempt. :D

Re: Pogo Cats

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 11:15 am
by infiniteneslives
Yggi wrote:There are two versions available. One simple NROM128 version, which saves the highscore to NES RAM and one NROM128 with battery-backed PRG RAM, which saves the highscore there (so the highscore will stay available).

with battery

without battery


Could somebody try this on the real NES?
What's the 0x01 in the 8th byte of the header doing there? From what I understand that doesn't follow the ines file header requirements. But that doesn't matter much to me. For me to test it out with the NESDEV1 I just need to understand your hardware configuration. So the battery backed version is just 8KB of battery backed WRAM sitting at it's normal location right? I just wanted to make sure because the header didn't make sense to me. I'll try it out this evening assuming it's as simple as it sounds.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 11:25 am
by tepples
I couldn't figure out the hit boxes for reliably collecting coins and winged hearts. Otherwise, it looks like it has potential.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:01 pm
by Yggi
3gengames wrote:I like the music, it just seems a little rough. Good game though! I enjoy it, it's a great first attempt. :D
Thanks :D
infiniteneslives wrote:What's the 0x01 in the 8th byte of the header doing there? From what I understand that doesn't follow the ines file header requirements.
According to the wiki byte 8 specifies the the size of prg ram n 8kb units. That's the reason why I set it. But I'm not sure, if I did unterstand that correctly...
But I just found out, that setting this byte is not really needed if the sram flag (bit 1) in byte 6 is set, because 8kb is assigned automatically.

infiniteneslives wrote:For me to test it out with the NESDEV1 I just need to understand your hardware configuration. So the battery backed version is just 8KB of battery backed WRAM sitting at it's normal location right?
yes, $6000-$7FFF, but I just need a few bytes...
infiniteneslives wrote:I'll try it out this evening assuming it's as simple as it sounds.
That would be great :D
tepples wrote:I couldn't figure out the hit boxes for reliably collecting coins and winged hearts. Otherwise, it looks like it has potential.
Thanks. You need to jump on them with the bottom part of the pogo stick, like on platforms. Collecting them normally by bounding box collision like in SMB would make this game to easy.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:33 pm
by infiniteneslives
Yggi wrote:According to the wiki byte 8 specifies the the size of prg ram n 8kb units. That's the reason why I set it. But I'm not sure, if I did unterstand that correctly...
But I just found out, that setting this byte is not really needed if the sram flag (bit 1) in byte 6 is set, because 8kb is assigned automatically.
Yeah I guess I was just going off the docs on the homepage which say they NEED to be 0x00. I don't think it matters though really. I'll get it configured up and report back this evening. I actually kind of needed something like this to verify that the WRAM battery backing worked. And since I haven't got the MMC1 working yet I couldn't use original roms to test this. So this will work great!

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 5:01 pm
by Banshaku
Good to see a new game. I didn't have the time to try it yet (I don't have access to an emulator right now) but by the explanation, the game is a doodle jump clone, am I correct? Sounds like that to me.

Posted: Sun Mar 04, 2012 9:18 pm
by miker00lz
it's a fun game, but after a few minutes it gets a little repetitive. i played up to about 35k points (after a few attempts). it's a good game though especially for a first attempt. much better than anything i could do. i feel like it would benefit from some sort of extra gameplay mechanic or something though. what that would be, i don't know.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 12:02 am
by infiniteneslives
So I tried to test things out on the NES. I didn't have much luck though. Unfortunately I can't be sure that my WRAM control logic is proper because I've never tested this configuration before. But I do know the physical chip and pcb traces are good because I've played NROM games with my WRAM memory wired up as PRG ROM.

Here's my wram signals in verilog:

Code: Select all

					w_ce = ~(b_prg_ce & b_prg_addr[14] & b_prg_addr[13] & b_m2);		//wram /CE signal
					w_oe = 1'b0;		//wram /OE signal
					w_we = b_prg_rw;		//wram /WE signal
What I see is basically the same thing you see in FCEUX. the block below high score is blue with black cross hatches. When I play in nestopia everything works as I guess you're hoping seeing the value for the highscore.

I'm not sure if fceux doesn't recognize the wram in mapper 0 but I would think that it does. Also for what it's worth I didn't put any logic in for what your header was, I just used the code above for all times in mapper 0. So I'm not sure fceux is more accurate here and that's why I'm seeing the same this as it or if it's just a coincidence and we're both broken.

Let me know if you've got another build or something else you'd like me to test. BTW do the powerpak mappers support WRAM in mapper 0? If so I'm sure someone could test to see if they have the same issue or not.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 1:37 am
by Bregalad
the game is a doodle jump clone, am I correct?
Yes it's exactly that.

It's good to see so many new homebrews released for the NES ! This one is good but there is something wrong with the pitch of the notes I think. You should probably re-compute the pitch table if you're ever writing a revision of the game.

No offense, but I think it's silly to use batteries to save high score. The NES standard is that either you have a lot of data to save, then you use battery, either you don't and you use passwords, and if you just have highscores, the standard is to init them to 5000 (or another value, it doesn't matter), and then have them reset-presistant so that the high scores are preserved when you reset the game, but lost when you turn it off.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 9:32 am
by Yggi
infiniteneslives wrote:What I see is basically the same thing you see in FCEUX. the block below high score is blue with black cross hatches. When I play in nestopia everything works as I guess you're hoping seeing the value for the highscore.

I'm not sure if fceux doesn't recognize the wram in mapper 0 but I would think that it does. Also for what it's worth I didn't put any logic in for what your header was, I just used the code above for all times in mapper 0. So I'm not sure fceux is more accurate here and that's why I'm seeing the same this as it or if it's just a coincidence and we're both broken.
Not sure if I did unterstand you correctly (my english is bad). Do you mean there is a visible glitch inside the main screen? If so, could you tell where exactly this happens? I didn't have any problems with fceux .
miker00lz wrote:it's a fun game, but after a few minutes it gets a little repetitive
Thanks for the feedback. Maybe it's a bit too easy... But for this game, I'm happy with it.
Banshaku wrote:the game is a doodle jump clone, am I correct?
Yes. Doodle Jump was my main inspiration :)
Bregalad wrote:This one is good but there is something wrong with the pitch of the notes I think. You should probably re-compute the pitch table
It sounds a bit outta tune.. I need to fix that. I need to look for a better note table.
Bregalad wrote:No offense, but I think it's silly to use batteries to save high score. The NES standard is that either you have a lot of data to save, then you use battery, either you don't and you use passwords, and if you just have highscores, the standard is to init them to 5000 (or another value, it doesn't matter), and then have them reset-presistant so that the high scores are preserved when you reset the game, but lost when you turn it off.
The battery-version is just for emulator-users to avoid the use of save states. If I'll do a cartidge version I would probably make just a simple NROM-cart.

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 10:13 am
by infiniteneslives
Yggi wrote:
infiniteneslives wrote:What I see is basically the same thing you see in FCEUX. the block below high score is blue with black cross hatches. When I play in nestopia everything works as I guess you're hoping seeing the value for the highscore.

I'm not sure if fceux doesn't recognize the wram in mapper 0 but I would think that it does. Also for what it's worth I didn't put any logic in for what your header was, I just used the code above for all times in mapper 0. So I'm not sure fceux is more accurate here and that's why I'm seeing the same this as it or if it's just a coincidence and we're both broken.
Not sure if I did unterstand you correctly (my english is bad). Do you mean there is a visible glitch inside the main screen? If so, could you tell where exactly this happens? I didn't have any problems with fceux.
This is what it looks like everytime I die on FCEUX and the NES as well. It's not an issue of things being saved after power down, it's an issue of not being able to get them to save in the first place. When I play the non-battery version it works fine on both the NES and FCEUX. I'm Thinking it might be an issue of the RAM initialization data. Nestopia assumes one thing and FCEUX and I initialize differently?

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No offense, but I think it's silly to use batteries to save high score.
You realize he made a version that doesn't save right? So if you don't like the save feature he implemented than you can use the standard one. The other thing is the real point of playing this game is to get a high score, not an adventure killing off baddies and getting points you don't care about in the process. So to me it makes sense if you really enjoyed playing the game to somehow be able to permanently save your high score. Who cares if you "waste" data space or 8KB of WRAM and battery to do it, it's your CHOICE to use them or not. I for one am very happy you chose to implement this option because it gives me a chance to test some things out on my hardware.

Also as far as the game goes I wanted to say it looks really good and clean I like the graphics and artwork. I also like the mechanics and physics of the game especially those tornadoes! It was also a nice touch to have the background move up and down when they jump and land it has a nice way of giving the illusion of jumping. Great job!

Posted: Mon Mar 05, 2012 10:36 am
by Bregalad
It was also a nice touch to have the background move up and down when they jump and land it has a nice way of giving the illusion of jumping
Yeah. I'm impressed at how it did that, it looks like the background scrolled when it didn't, or just by a few pixels. Nice effect !

And I did not realize the save version was wrong, I was just pointing out the very idea of using battery just for high score is silly (so I of course tried the normal version).