Commander X16

On 9/26/2021 at 10:13 AM, Ed Minchau said:

Test

Quiz

On 9/26/2021 at 10:34 AM, Scott Robison said:

Quiz

Exam?

Heh.  I got a new phone, and couldn't see a way to sign in here, so I figured I'd just write a test post to see if I was in fact signed in.  Yup.

It's almost at the point that I can add the buildings.

Buildings!  Also I go over a very fast subroutine that multiplies a six bit number by26 and divides by another six bit number...in 100 cycles or less.

 

Still plugging away.

 

Wow, with the stars in the background it's starting to look really beautiful.

 

Still not satisfied with the stars, I've kept tinkering and realized I hadn't updated my sprite and palette files.  I kept at it and now Polaris is easily identifiable when viewing from 73 degrees south in Zoom Out view, and the Big Dipper, Orion, and Sirius are easily identifiable.  There's still a small bug with stars bouncing around, but I'll get that sucker too.

I changed the way I do the closeup 3d window, and now instead of using 16 layer 1 tiles it's using a single 32x32 sprite.  This actually saved me about 5 kilobytes of VRAM, in addition to freeing up 16 layer 1 tiles.  It also means that my zoom-in overhead view can use 4bpp tiles for layer 1 without compromising the closeup 3d view window.

Looking at the remaining available memory, I should have plenty of space for everything remaining in the game: the Info button, the Stock Market button, the local area information window at the bottom, the population mood/health/numbers code, all of the Resource information, lots more sprites for things like ships in orbit or perhaps Zoom-In details, music, sound effects, and perhaps 5000 words of text for the messages and newsfeed, and various storyline events.

So next is tackling that last starfield bug, then getting rid of Lorem Ipsum and putting in the actual newsfeed, then the Zoom In view.

The more I work on this, the more I think this machine can do.  I think a DOOM port is possible.  Maybe even Halo, with a 160x120 screen and 10fps frame rate.

 

Orion and Sirius:



 

Big Dipper and Polaris:

Still plugging away.  I wasn't happy with the size of the star code, and kept chipping away at it.  Now there's a single arcosine table, and all the code fits into a single bank (down from four banks) of RAM, with a kilobyte to spare.  The star data stored in VERA went from 13 kb down to 4 kb for the 1022 brightest stars (apparent magnitude 4.6 or less), and there's now recognizable constellations.

I also got started on the newsfeed, adding about 15% of the content and all the code needed to display items in a random order.  Still a ton of work left to do before this is any fun, but I'm getting there.