nesdev.com

This reminds me of an old arcade game,good fun.

I noticed that Flappy Jack is NROM-256, but roughly B560-EFEF,F3A0-FFF9 are unused. How hard would it be to rebuild the game as NROM-128 with the stuff at EFF0-F3A0 moved down to, say, B5F0-B9A0? This would allow it to share a 32K bank with another NROM-128 game. The more contiguous PRG ROM space we free up, the more category 2 bonuses we can include.

Took me about 10 minutes. NROM 128. Filesize 24,592 bytes. Does your mapper allow swapping the C000-ffff banks ?

EDIT: Oops, forgot you need $FFD0-$FFF9 blank. Give me a minute.

EDIT2: Done.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Yes. I can mirror either half of a 32K bank to both $8000-$BFFF and $C000-$FFFF by (ab)using its UNROM (2) and UNROM (180) simulation modes.

There is much more blank space in Rock Paper Scissors. Do you want an NROM 128 of that, or is that one not making it on the cart?

Never mind, you already answered it in the RPSLS thread.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Fun! The 32-wide protagonist feels un-NES-like, which is good. I like the slipping-on-butter and sticking-to-syrup bits, though it feels like missing them nigh-guarantees a later flapjack miss.

The hitboxes feel good. (The butter and syrup are narrower, right?) The music speeding up is nice. Does fall speed decrease as your stack grows, or are the last flapjacks in a stack just lower reflex time?

The higher your stack, the less time you have to get in position (because the vertical distance from top of screen to top of stack has shrunk). Speeds don't change, due to stack size.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Yeah, I just didn't feel like I really had any problems there, so…I'd wondered if it did compensate.

Guess the difficulty sawtooths then!

Testing on real hardware there appears to be an issue on with the initial screens. There are some garbled graphics when switching between the first few screens, but it's only momentarily so not that big of concern. However on the "LEVEL #" screen there's garbage tiles scattered randomly through out the screen. I'm not certain if they're background, or sprites. But they stay in place the entire time the LEVEL # screen is displayed.

I'm not sure what may be causing this, but curious if you'd be willing to go back and attempt to correct this so we have a bit more polish for the action53 vol3 cartridge. Let me know if you need more info on the issue or help testing repairs.

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If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

It works on my machine.

That is...I've done extensive testing on a real NES without issue.

It might help if you provided me with a screenshot of the error. I'm not seeing one.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Could this be the problem?

My NMI routine consists of exactly this...



And between levels, there are no writes to sprite DMA. For 4 seconds.

It's just a loop that calls a subroutine called "wait" about 200 times. All that does is wait for "waitNMI" to change.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

So it’s only happening on the first “LEVEL #” screen which follows the instruction screen. Doesn’t matter what level I start at either (still happens if I skip to level 11). But it doesn’t happen on the level screen that displays after beating a level (ie LEVEL 2 displayed after beating level 1). So maybe it’s more related to the instruction screen, or the transition between instructions and level #, as the level screen is fine when beating a level.

I recall seeing this same problem when testing on NROM cart while judging the entries last year.

Additionally, I don’t see this issue on my cheap clone. Just original front loader.

Here’s an image. I checked and it’s identical between tries. So while the trash looks random, it’s the same exact trash in the same spots everytime.

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If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

Try this.

It's exactly the same, except the "wait" subroutine also pushes sprites with a DMA every frame.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES

Sorry for the delay on testing.. Looks like that fixed up the LEVEL screen issue. Although there is a bit of a new strange issue. On some cold power ups, and some resets, the back ground of the first 3 screens is blue instead of black. Seems like it's about 25% chance of this happening. Everything still looks okay, just not the color you intended I assume. Are you making pallette writes to the PPU overly early? ie not waiting atleast 3 NMIs?

The shade of blue doesn't appear to be the same shade as the background of the level screens. It looks like the same shade my NES typically powers up with when there's no cart inserted which leads me to believe your back ground pallette write isn't sticking.

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If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers

I don't know about the wrong color, but here's a version with a few extra v-blank waits at reset before doing anything.

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nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES