new projects in development: games • Re: 🦇 Batman

It's the kind of game I'm absolutely terrible at, but I think that test screen looks amazing! Great work

Its only a screenshot of the nes game with the palette changed to 4 colors but thanks

I've thought many times about making black tiger/black dragon and even wrote a routine to compress the map and draw it back in the 80s, but the horizontal scrolling out me off!

That sounds amazing, black tiger/dragon has always been one of my favorite arcade games

How much do you have going on in the space shooter?

I got as far as the single pixel screen scrolling just throwing 2 random 8x8 tiles per frame to the row that's off screen so that a new row is complete every 8 scrolls
drawing 1 sprite per frame for the player ship and up to 8 enemy sprites and 8 bullet sprites as a background task and this is where the frame rate of the background task really suffered and I hadn't even added player bullets yet

I gave up, its just too slow. If the beeb had a tile basic video mode with sprites just like the nintendo it probably would have been the greatest gaming computer ever

I think that test screen looks pretty good!

For scrolling, since you couldn't possibly do pixel-by-pixel, you might have to do a coarser kind of scroll. Like, when you reach a margin position on the right, the screen starts scrolling in the background at a 4 pixel rate until the character is at a left margin position. Exile does something similar to work around the lack of fine scrolling, and it looks fine and natural, as long as game doesn't just freeze while the scrolling is happening!

I was thinking of something just like this to avoid the jerky scroll

I think the mock up looks really good - certainly unlike any other Beeb game.

I know I'm biased but you could always use NuLA for smooth horizontal scrolling.
It would reduce your audience but having something that only worked on an emulator or NuLA equipped Master would be better than nothing. And it might ease some of your frustrations with the limitations of a stock Beeb.

I often find myself wishing that Acorn had developed a Beeb with 64KB of RAM in a flat memory map...

I was already thinking that I would have to limit this game for Master/Compact only as it is a very large game that will be needing 64K of sideways ram and may require loading the level data from disk
I would also prefer the enhanced instruction set of the CPU

I mean, the Master can get a continuous block of 56k, with video memory in a different bank, so that's not far off.

Honestly, if we're taking about what might've been, I would have loved CRTC + two possible video generation options: Teletext, or a tile-based display with hardware sprites and a bigger palette!

I have ordered and received some raspberry pi pico's because I was thinking that an enhanced bbc micro compatible with the beeb but includes extra features like micro sd card file access, tile based video with sprites with much enhanced color palette, a wave table sound system capable of a much wider frequency range, more channels and the ability of playing background music/ambient sound direct from mp3 files and DVI video output using a HDMI connector

But this project is on hold until I get myself recharged enough to handle it

Statistics: Posted by lovebug — Thu Mar 27, 2025 1:11 am

---