nesdev.com

Here's my late entry...

Flappy Jack. I wrote most of this last year, and never finished it. I've been touching up a few things, adding a few new features. All that's left is to redo the music and do some play testing.

You have to catch the pancakes as they fall from the top of the screen. As your stack gets higher, it's harder to catch them. As the levels progress, it gets faster and faster.

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

My very humble music 'studio'. Time to write some songs.

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

I tried to edit the source code of (famitone) text2data, to allow lower notes, which worked fine for everything except DPCM channel. The table of DMC offsets was wrong, had to manually edit
Then I was getting a weird bug with Noise channel sound effects, that I've managed to fix, but somehow related to the fact that famitone only once writes to $400f, and assumes always a constant note to be playing (sometimes with a volume of zero). Somehow my sound effect (or something) turned off the constant note, after which no noise channel played. Took me an hour to debug and solve. =(
Anyway, it's 99% done, just need to fine tune a few things.

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

And, I'm done.

I thought I would share a tiny bit of code. To play the same famitracker/famitone2 song at different speeds...



And, yes, level $10 is level 10 in my numbering system.

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

Cool! Can't wait to play it.

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Ruling the World One Bean™ at a Time...

I've been doing endless testing and rebalancing. Now I have a weird issue. The word "Flappy's" in the background looks weird on a CRT. It is clearly not dithered on its edges, yet I get this...


See the dithering on the letters? Also the pancakes (color 17) look like nearly the same color as the sign (color 16).

Compare to a random other game, and it has no dithering issues on the same TV.

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

Any color boundary with diagonal lines of slope 2 (26 degrees clockwise of vertical) has a potential for such artifacts on NTSC NES or Super NES because of how pixels line up with the color subcarrier. Unfortunately, this is the common amount of slant for cursive.

No yellow bird? No yellow mole?

That's a very good explanation. Did you know that using a non-round number in an explanation makes it 26% more believable. I just made that number up, but I'm betting that you researched your answer. Maybe I should try a non-slanted sign.



For legal reasons, I'm claiming that any similarly to popular games with similar names are purely coincidental.

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

It looks like 30° angle to me (angle of phosphor dots on CRT).

https://www.google.com/search?q=crt+tri ... c61880M%3A

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

If pixels were square, it would be arctan(.5) = 26.6 degrees. When corrected for the 8:7 pixel aspect ratio, it becomes arctan(.5*8/7) = 29.7 degrees, which I admit is easier to confuse with shadow mask artifacts. But I'm pretty sure this is an NTSC encoding artifact, not a shadow mask artifact, and would appear the same way on an LCD TV (which otherwise has a more Trinitron-like mask pattern). The easiest way to demonstrate that this is an NTSC artifact is to reset the game a few times until you get a different alignment between the pixel clock and the color subcarrier.

Which is better? (16 wasn't working...too close to pancake color.)

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

Or, maybe this...16 mixed with 06. (Nestopia with NTSC filter). Dark enough that the pancakes show up fine.

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

Flappy11 looks less monochromatic, which is a nice touch. Although i like the details on the last one, it may still be too close to the pancakes?

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http://www.frankengraphics.com - personal NES blog

Here's (probably) the final cut...the full game, Flappy Jack.

(link removed, old)

Instructions -
Mostly L + R to move
Holding A or B will boost your speed
Catch Everything
Start to Pause

The game is considered 'won' if you score above 100,000 pts and see the 'good' ending.
You can cheat and press A and B and Start at the Title Screen to see the 'good' ending.
It is technically possible to reach level 99, but not very likely.

Let me know if you think it is much too hard or much too easy. Thanks.

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

Actually, I forgot, I wanted to add a final score on the Game Over screen...here's that version.


(Link removed, see page 3 for newer version)

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