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Better CHR packing? There's always that Codemasters codec we discussed a few weeks ago.

My scheme ended up compressing almost as well as the Codemasters codec, always loosing by a few bytes, but the decompression code was so complex and bloated that I kinda gave up on it.

The cool thing about the Codemasters codec is that not only it already compresses very well, but we were even able to think of a few ways to improve it. I'm too busy with my current project though, and after spending so much time cracking that compression scheme I don't feel like loking at it again so soon.

Looking through some old threads the other night I found the LZSS tokumaru posted. Haven't tested it yet, but I'm sure it will work out really well.

Mostly though I want to see if there were any more games or demos anyone wanted to get into the cart.

I would have liked to put something on it but for now I have been focusing on my MM9 proof of concept and this cannot be put on the garage cart for legal reason.

Hopefully I will have something original for the next garage cart. I should have gained enough experience (and suffered enough..) after that MM9 project.

What's the exact deadline? My raycaster is almost working. The walls are correctly detected and the texturing seems to be working fine. I have to adjust some coloring stuff, write the whole thing to the name tables (I'm currently seeing the frame buffer on FCEUXD's hex editor!) and add movement.

It shouldn't take long to implement those things... I'm not asking of you to wait for my demo though. I just thought that it could be an interesting addition to the cart and I was wondering how much time we have until production. If I can't make it, so be it.

EDIT: Just got the display working. Good news: chances for decent gameplay are high, because rendering a complete view takes 4 frames (meaning it runs at 15 fps). After some optimization it should still be pretty smooth once the game logic is added. Of course, this is all without objects, just walls.

Production will be next year for sure, so there's a couple months at the very least. There's still some things to work out, but I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

It would be great to have a raycasting demo on there. It would also be cool if I could get a beta or placeholder ROM to know how much memory it'll use.

If you can make an intro out of your raycaster, and a whole bunch of people make other intros, try making a demo out of the intros.

Oh, that's good! I should have a clean walkable room much sooner than that.


Even if it's just a room where people can walk around (much like "Stuck in Castle Nessenstein", but with better rendered walls that are textured)?


A single level should fit in 32KB just fine. The data tables are not so big (they are slightly over 2KB, so I don't need a bank just for them or anything). It uses CHR-RAM, so you don't have to worry about packing the CHR separately yourself.

I will upload something soon and make a thread for it. It's just that the current program is missing initializations and other important things because I wanted to see the results soon, so it needs a good deal of cleaning up.


I must be slow today, 'cause you lost me again! O_o

tokumaru: Have you ever watched High Hopes?

Yup. I'm more awake today, and I can make more sense out of your sentence now.

Are you suggesting we gather a bunch of effects coded by different people and put them one after the other in a way that looks interesting and make that a non-interactive demo?

IMO, a non-interactive raycaster is very boring, and not as impressive, since a non-interactive video could probably fake a better looking raycaster.

It could be organized like a typical demo, or it could be organized as a teaser trailer for coming attractions. Either way, letting the player take control of the demo at times would be a nice easter egg.

Yep, it can be as minimal as possible and it'd still be cool.



I will set aside 32kB for it, then.




What would be funny is if the raycaster itself was part of the menu for the other stuff. Walk into a room, it'd say the name of the game/demo on the status bar, and run it when you walked through a door. It should be optional though, since some people will get "wolfenstein syndrome". But it'd be like walking around inside your NES. Kind of.