New game - Driar

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lidnariq
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by lidnariq »

Three pages of 16384 bytes all 255s, two half pages of 8192 bytes, one 255s, one 0s. So, yes, absolutely nothing was cut.
3gengames
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by 3gengames »

As it sits, would it be possible to easily change it to CNROM?

ETA: Not easy, uses CHR-RAM tricks to help animations have a little more spice and timing differences, so not easy. Oh well, 64KB UNROM is good enough. :)
lidnariq
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by lidnariq »

The levels, chr animations, title screen, are completely uncompressed. I don't know how MUSE stores its data, or how optimized its engine is for space. There's somewhere around another 20KiB or so that are obviously just padding still. Chances are good that the full game could be stuffed into 32kiB + CHR RAM.
Counted by hexdump's output, there are ≈30000 bytes of sequences of 16 bytes that are an exact repetition of the previous 16.
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thefox
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by thefox »

lidnariq wrote:I don't know how MUSE stores its data, or how optimized its engine is for space.
Let's just say space usage wasn't a top priority when making it. :) In this case, it looks like the music/sfx data takes about 7.5 KB and MUSE itself takes 8 KB. As a "funny" detail, MUSE doesn't seem to be aligned to a 256 byte page like it should be (the alignment is off by 8 bytes). There's a multiplication table right at the beginning of the page so the lookups are shifted a little, but apparently not so much that it would cause any major havoc.
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jayminer
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by jayminer »

thefox wrote:
lidnariq wrote:I don't know how MUSE stores its data, or how optimized its engine is for space.
Let's just say space usage wasn't a top priority when making it. :) In this case, it looks like the music/sfx data takes about 7.5 KB and MUSE itself takes 8 KB. As a "funny" detail, MUSE doesn't seem to be aligned to a 256 byte page like it should be (the alignment is off by 8 bytes). There's a multiplication table right at the beginning of the page so the lookups are shifted a little, but apparently not so much that it would cause any major havoc.
I noticed the problem with MUSE not being aligned properly when we started working on our next project, some songs sounded really odd, I think it was pitch-bending that messed up :P

All in all, we didn't spend any time compressing anything, since we had the space and we just wanted the game finished to move on with the next project, so there are quite some sloppy things in there. I think it could have fit in 32kB PRG if we had spent time on compression.
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lidnariq
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by lidnariq »

Jayminer mentioned that the NTSC build loses its NTSC state when you pause, so the attached build fixes that. I figure I should get this out there before it's incorporated into Action 53: Part 1.

I also fixed the NES2 headers to actually specify 8KB CHRRAM, oops

I've been working on packing this down smaller, and have a functional NROM-368 (+CHRRAM) build right now, but I'm trying to get it smaller and am now fixing bugs I've introduced.
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DriarMiniUNROM.7z
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jayminer
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by jayminer »

Nice!
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lidnariq
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by lidnariq »

Hello everyone!

After the UNROM hacks I made, I requested the source from jayminer to see if I could do any better.

I could! Three weeks of playing with it has enabled me to pack the entire game in NROM, as well as add the following features:
  • Automatic NTSC/PAL detection, used for compensating palette and in MUSE
  • Vertical calibration for NTSC sets (previously it was fixed to 8+224+8)
  • Enemies' border color is no longer $0D
  • Little easter egg on the "you win" screen
EDIT: don't download this one! Download this one instead.

Replacing the chrram-uploading animation with something that would work with NROM was somewhat hilarious, and you might be amused to look at RAM from $04E0-$0895.
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DriarNROM(UE).7z
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Last edited by lidnariq on Mon Sep 30, 2013 3:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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thefox
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by thefox »

Very nice job. :)
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by tepples »

lidnariq wrote:you might be amused to look at RAM from $04E0-$0895.
$0895? I thought RAM was $0000-$07FF. Or are you overwriting half of the zero page?

I'll try it after work this evening.
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tokumaru
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by tokumaru »

tepples wrote:$0895? I thought RAM was $0000-$07FF. Or are you overwriting half of the zero page?
Apparently, he is! $04E0-$0895 appears to contain unrolled code (lots of writes to $2006 and $2007) to animate the stars.
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by 3gengames »

On the 32KB version, I got it to crash by standing during the beginning of the 2nd level, and then when I want to move the background just went all weird and sprites froze. I'm using FCEUX 2.1.5 to play.
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by infiniteneslives »

3gengames wrote:On the 32KB version, I got it to crash by standing during the beginning of the 2nd level
What do you mean by 'standing' exactly?
If you're gonna play the Game Boy, you gotta learn to play it right. -Kenny Rogers
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by 3gengames »

Just not pressing anything. I minimized the emu to do something, was about 30-45ish seconds. Brought it up, pressed right and jumped and it froze. Needed to reboot.
lidnariq
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Re: New game - Driar

Post by lidnariq »

Reproduction instructions? I can't get that to happen with either nestopia-1.4.0h nor fceux-2.1.5 on debian sid.
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