New demo uploaded: Spinning Intro

Yazwho · Post by **Yazwho** » Thu Apr 15, 2021 6:26 pm

Spinning Intro

Another small intro. Sadly still no audio.

If only it wasn't so painful to debug audio and if I had any sort of musical talent...

Thanks for looking!

Spinner.zip

Submitter

Yazwho

Submitted

04/15/21

Category

Demos

Ed Minchau · Post by **Ed Minchau** » Fri Apr 16, 2021 2:50 pm

That scrolling text is really smooth.

Yazwho · Post by **Yazwho** » Fri Apr 16, 2021 3:50 pm

59 minutes ago, Ed Minchau said:

That scrolling text is really smooth.

60fps or nothing! ?

DrTypo · Post by **DrTypo** » Sat Apr 17, 2021 2:08 am

I'm very curious about the transparency effect. It seems to be very cleverly done, especially the colored transparency under the Bitmap sign.

I guess most of the magic happens in the palette design then you OR the background and foreground. Would you mind elaborating on your secret sauce? ?

About audio, yeah, we definitively need some kind of synthesis tracker routine and format.

ZeroByte · Post by **ZeroByte** » Sat Apr 17, 2021 3:26 am

1 hour ago, DrTypo said:

About audio, yeah, we definitively need some kind of synthesis tracker routine and format.

M00dawg is working on that as far as unique CX16 sound goes.

Using Deflemask to make YM2151 tracks is immediately doable, and with some preprocessing, you could strip VGM down to something barebones like IMF which is very low overhead to play back.

Yazwho · Post by **Yazwho** » Sat Apr 17, 2021 9:33 am

7 hours ago, DrTypo said:

I'm very curious about the transparency effect. It seems to be very cleverly done, especially the colored transparency under the Bitmap sign.

I guess most of the magic happens in the palette design then you OR the background and foreground.

Even simpler, its passive so takes no cpu. The palette offset for the background tiles is set at startup, and the 'pixels' themselves are a tile of solid colour from 1-8. (not zero!) So by only drawing the 'pixels' we get the transparent colour for free. (Set the Vera to step on by 2 bytes per write.)

Below is a grab without the foreground layer which makes it more obvious.

So all you need to do is create a overlay that lines up to the 8x8 tiles.

DrTypo · Post by **DrTypo** » Sat Apr 17, 2021 12:58 pm

Thank you for your explanation Yazwho

I've not yet looked into the tile system of VERA. This is going to be the next tutorial in Matt's series I'll look.

ZeroByte: It's good to see people working on audio solutions. I'll take a closer look at M00dawg's work.

Yazwho · Post by **Yazwho** » Sat Apr 17, 2021 5:16 pm

I've uploaded the source. You'll need Visual Studio Code, cc65 and obviously the emulator. To build you'll need to edit build.ps1 to set your paths correctly.

There's a C# Visual Studio project that calculates and creates the data tables for the background.

DrTypo · Post by **DrTypo** » Sun Apr 18, 2021 2:01 am

I installed VSCode, edited build.ps1 and built your project successfully! Now I'm considering switching to VSCode for my projects, it looks pretty nifty.

Yazwho · Post by **Yazwho** » Sun Apr 18, 2021 9:27 am

7 hours ago, DrTypo said:

I installed VSCode, edited build.ps1 and built your project successfully! Now I'm considering switching to VSCode for my projects, it looks pretty nifty.

If you install 'ca65 Macro Language Support' you'll get syntax colouring and the like. The extension can add tasks to compile and link, but I prefer to do it all on f5 so I used the ps1 file. (Unless I'm missing something, its my first VSC project as well!)

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tlgkccampbell.code-ca65