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First test with stais.
When she's running downstairs, she does not look as elegant as Simon Belmont... (needs some tweaking)

Simon Belmont knows you shouldn't run down stairs - maybe stairs could affect the running speed by some small amount?

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I really like the way the camera has to follow the player.

It looks "modern"

In handling going down the stairs (in reality, bouncing from edge to edge) you might want to add a bit of a grade period to allow a jump after the player has left the ground. Donkey Kong country has an absurdly long jump timeout in this style, but you can probably get away with ten frames or so. That way there isn't a frustration point where the player finds themselves unable to jump while going down the stairs sometimes.

Battletoads has this problem somewhat. On the ice level, if you run down a slope (instead of just walk) you will likely be unable to jump.

Haunted: Halloween '85 had a problem with jumping from stairs or ramps. It was solved in the sequel by buffering an A press while descending and no more than 8 pixels above the floor. If an A press is buffered, the character jumps the moment he lands.

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Zolionline requested a door; here we go. So yes, you will face indoor-action and outdoor-action in the game.
What's the usual procedure to enter a door? Pushing up? (should be Cave Story compatible)
Also, the stair handling should be ok now. (jumping while climbing the stairs works as well)

"up" and "contextual action" buttons both have a chunk; up is more common on NES.

Just don't use the down button like Blaster Master did. I remember as a kid it literally took us hours to figure that out.

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Yeah, up is conventional. It's rarely used for much else in a platformer where you don't fire projectiles upwards (castlevania comes to mind as a counterexample, but even simon's quest used up for doors, iirc). It's also geometrically self-explaining. Looking at your controller, 'up' is pointing away from you/towards the distance.

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

I actually really liked Cave Story's use of Down to enter doors, but that was only made obvious because I read the README before playing. No matter what you use, there's no harm in a little 8x8 arrow sprite appearing above the character in front of a door to clear up some ambiguity.

Button reminder thought bubble (five 8x8 tiles)

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Not sure why you tapered the bubble. The bottom portion works well enough mirrored. I'd do 3 tiles, over 6 8x8 sprites; then you can easily replace the content of the thought balloon, which enables a wealth of options. ! ? Z X

Yes, "up" to enter a doors seems to work fine.

I've managed to setup CHRRAM and bank-switching. (using the codeseg and rodataseg pragmas of cc65)
Here's an example of calling a function from another bank:

This works... (at least if I call Bank1Test(); from bank 3, the fixed bank)
It looks a bit complicated, though. Is there an easier way? How do you handle the banks?

The latest cc65 version includes support for trampolines, added by me, which make for transparent bankswitching.



It stacks and even allows for code in a switchable bank to call code in another switchable bank, returning to where things were afterwards (if you write your trampoline to do so, of course).

Ok, I've managed to put famitone and test-music into bank #1 and the exomizer decruncher with crunched data into bank #2. Hopefully, I won't need any trampoline-functions for the remaining 32k. But it might be handy for bigger games.


Finally, I've discovered the reason why my DPCM-split code failed: It does not like famitone. Continuing with a standard SPR0 split. Also working: Slow status display update.

By the way, did anyone modify the exomizer decruncher to depack to CHRRAM directly? Currently, I am using RAM as a intermediate buffer and copying the data to CHRRAM in a 2nd step.