Re: XOR now completed!
It says: Domain http://cookingcircle.co.uk/ not found. Aley -Původní zpráva- From: Balor Price Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 3:00 AM To: sam-users@nvg.ntnu.no Subject: XOR now completed! Hello everybody I'm proud to present my conversion of the 1987 Spectrum game XOR. I finally kept my promise to my teenage self to finish a SAM game! You can download it for free from the revived http://cookingcircle.co.uk I hope you enjoy it (and yell in frustration). It's 25 years old and still as rock-hard as I remember. Any feedback/initial bugs found would be greatly appreciated. :D Cheers Howard - Mgr. Aleš Keprt, Ph.D. private: a...@keprt.cz, www.keprt.cz office: Moravian College / Moravská vysoká škola Olomouc, ales.ke...@mvso.cz
Re: SimCoupi
On 25 Apr 2012, at 15:23, Andrew Collier wrote: > I don't have a copy of K&R to hand, but I reckon this is ambiguous (i.e. the > value of g_dwCycleCounter&7 depends on the whether this is evaluated before > or after the += 4. Honestly I'm a bit surprised that the left hand side is an > lvalue at all…). I don't remember how it came to be like that, but I'd suspect it was fastest with VS6 back in the day. It was pretty nasty, so good riddance to it. Thanks for the fix! :) Si
Re: XOR now completed!
On 25/04/2012 15:48, da...@properbastard.co.uk wrote: Quoting Balor Price : Thanks for the feedback chaps! I had LOADS of fun making it and will probably do another in a few months. Take that, Lana del Rey! Nice work Tobermory ... :) Nice to see this done - great work! You know what this reminds me of slightly as well Maziacs :) Marvellous, it reminded me of it too a bit. I'm certain Tumblr has decided not to forward to my cookingcircle.co.uk domain name, so the alternative is cookingcircle.tumblr.com Typical. Maybe in another 10 years it'll be easy to make a website - so far I'm regretting not just hacking together a few kb of HTML :)
Re: XOR now completed!
Quoting Balor Price : Thanks for the feedback chaps! I had LOADS of fun making it and will probably do another in a few months. Take that, Lana del Rey! Nice work Tobermory ... :) Nice to see this done - great work! You know what this reminds me of slightly as well Maziacs :)
Re: SimCoupi
On 16 Apr 2012, at 16:28, Simon Owen wrote:
> On 16 Apr 2012, at 16:13, Andrew Collier wrote:
>> It still amuses me that the biggest side-effect of my contributions to
>> the Sam scene was to necessitate accuracy in the emulators :)
>
> Getting the textured scroller right in part 2 of MNEMOdemo1 was definitely a
> grail moment, where everything had to be right. Even now, if you build
> SimCoupe on the Mac and use Clang rather than gcc the scroller is wrong!
> I've not put any effort into tracking that down yet, but it's almost
> certainly a compiler issue (gcc and MSVC are fine).
I was intrigued by this, so I had a look:
CPU.cpp: 84
#define PORT_ACCESS(a) { (g_dwCycleCounter += 4) += ((a) >= BASE_ASIC_PORT)
?abPortContention[g_dwCycleCounter&7] : 0; }
I don't have a copy of K&R to hand, but I reckon this is ambiguous (i.e. the
value of g_dwCycleCounter&7 depends on the whether this is evaluated before or
after the += 4. Honestly I'm a bit surprised that the left hand side is an
lvalue at all...). Substituting a clearly non-ambiguous version cleans up the
problems, so I've checked in the change.
Andrew
Re: XOR now completed!
Thanks for the feedback chaps! I had LOADS of fun making it and will probably do another in a few months. Take that, Lana del Rey! Yes it was one of those 'work it out as you go along' games back in the day. I have found and tweaked the original inlay, it can be found on cookingcircle.co.uk now. It stayed rigidly in Mode 4, despite the 8*8 blocks of the circle algorithm. Most of the front end hits a smooth 50fps and the 'full-screen' scrolling usually manages 17fps. I actually had to slow it down with simple mazes when it suddenly jumped to 25fps. Dying seems to be inevitable in this game, which is why there are infinite lives and no 'reset' button. Also... if anybody takes a look at the code... let's just say it gets pretty ugly in there. I just wanted to complete something for a change. :D As for the Wolfenstein attempt, years ago I managed to get a bunch of bitmap vertical walls running at about 12.5fps, it didn't seem that sluggish compared to Freescape or something. Ashamed to admit I lost the original, but that's what happens when you insist on using very old computers all the time... Howard On 25/04/2012 07:18, war...@wdlee.co.uk wrote: Just been having a quick play!! Love that it works so fast. :-) very cool to see another new SAM game. How many is that now, in the last few months? Dave Invaders, Garden Centre of the Universe and now XOR... :-) What next??? :-D Those making them, should see about getting them mentioned in Retro Gamer magazine. They've got a section in the magazine about new games for all the old machines, with mini-reviews etc. Definitely worth a bit of free promotion and seeing your game in print on the shop shelves. :-) Quoting James R Curry <8...@itdoesntsuck.com>: I remember ordering the original from one of those ZX Spectrum mail order places. They were never able to deliver it, for some reason, and offered me the choice of another game, instead. No idea what I wound up buying. Now I can finally play it. Looks good! Is it in Mode 4? On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Thomas Harte wrote: I played it for five minutes and it all looked very impressive. That being said, I don't actually know the original game so I was quite lost. Looking at the incredibly sparse World of Spectrum inlay scan though, I think I'm meant to work things out for myself? On 24 April 2012 18:00, Balor Price wrote: > Hello everybody > > I'm proud to present my conversion of the 1987 Spectrum game XOR. I finally > kept my promise to my teenage self to finish a SAM game! > > You can download it for free from the revived http://cookingcircle.co.uk > > I hope you enjoy it (and yell in frustration). It's 25 years old and still > as rock-hard as I remember. > > Any feedback/initial bugs found would be greatly appreciated. :D > > Cheers > Howard -- James R Curry 8...@itdoesntsuck.com
Re: XOR now completed!
*Watches as stuff flies over my head* Oooh, purdy colours!!! :-D I could do graphics and level design for it lol! Very cool to hear how you'd go about it... Wouldn't it be a wonderful big finger to all the naysayers who always said the SAM couldn't compete? ;-) Warren Quoting Thomas Harte : Being one of my favourite topics... the Wolfenstein algorithm is actually incredibly inefficient. It's a linear search for every column and then a couple of multiplies, an add and a divide to get scale. If you instead used a combination forward/backward renderer with portals and convex sectors, you could do significantly better for any sort of geometry you'd expect on that level of device. Assuming I've thought this through, costs Wolfenstein doesn't incur would be: per visible sector you'd end up at a quadrant test, a divide and a small table lookup per vertex, a divide, two multiplies and three adds per visible wall. But you'd then be looking at (much the same) two multiplies and an add every 8 or 16 columns and just two adds per column. So you're spending a little on setup to save a lot per column. You'd draw front to back, zero overdraw for the world. Sprites would be sorted per sector and I guess you'd want to walk back to the front in sector order to paint them in, making it a stack-type thing rather than merely a queue. Walls could be any angle, and costs would increase as geometry complexity increased, whereas in Wolfenstein they increase as your rooms get larger. But freely angle walls would probably allow you to keep the geometry simple. Disadvantages would be indeterminate, and usually larger, level data sizes, and the need to create a proper editor rather than just editing in TextEdit or Notepad or whatever. So, yes, I'm good at bluster. On 24 April 2012 23:18, wrote: Just been having a quick play!! Love that it works so fast. :-) very cool to see another new SAM game. How many is that now, in the last few months? Dave Invaders, Garden Centre of the Universe and now XOR... :-) What next??? :-D Those making them, should see about getting them mentioned in Retro Gamer magazine. They've got a section in the magazine about new games for all the old machines, with mini-reviews etc. Definitely worth a bit of free promotion and seeing your game in print on the shop shelves. :-) I agree with the discussion that we all concentrated on emulating the 16bit machines too much instead of working within the limitations to create other stuff, but such is the way of things. We all wanted to do what the big-boys could. Then again, that pushed a lot of the games further than a lot of people expected anyway. I suppose that's another area where the SAM was like the Spectrum. It wasn't technically as advanced as say the c64 in many ways, but competed by sheer versatility and creativity. Such was the SAM to the Amigas and STs. I think over the years the SAM has certainly proved it could do great stuff, when pushed to its limits. Who originally thought Lemmings would work? It's a shame we didn't see more games that weren't as limited by speed, like Dizzy/Flashback types. I'd love to see a basic test of a wolfenstein game running! :-) It'd really be a nice show-piece. Having said that, if someone managed to get it working, once the pseudo 3D engine of that was running, why not create the SAM's own first FPS? (Like Colin was planning with Chrome) No need to use the existing Wolfenstein graphics and such, when we can create our own for the SAM, and our own level designs, story, creatures, etc? Warren Quoting James R Curry <8...@itdoesntsuck.com>: I remember ordering the original from one of those ZX Spectrum mail order places. They were never able to deliver it, for some reason, and offered me the choice of another game, instead. No idea what I wound up buying. Now I can finally play it. Looks good! Is it in Mode 4? On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Thomas Harte wrote: I played it for five minutes and it all looked very impressive. That being said, I don't actually know the original game so I was quite lost. Looking at the incredibly sparse World of Spectrum inlay scan though, I think I'm meant to work things out for myself? On 24 April 2012 18:00, Balor Price wrote: > Hello everybody > > I'm proud to present my conversion of the 1987 Spectrum game XOR. I finally > kept my promise to my teenage self to finish a SAM game! > > You can download it for free from the revived > http://cookingcircle.co.uk > > I hope you enjoy it (and yell in frustration). It's 25 years old and still > as rock-hard as I remember. > > Any feedback/initial bugs found would be greatly appreciated. :D > > Cheers > Howard -- James R Curry 8...@itdoesntsuck.com
Re: XOR now completed!
Being one of my favourite topics... the Wolfenstein algorithm is actually incredibly inefficient. It's a linear search for every column and then a couple of multiplies, an add and a divide to get scale. If you instead used a combination forward/backward renderer with portals and convex sectors, you could do significantly better for any sort of geometry you'd expect on that level of device. Assuming I've thought this through, costs Wolfenstein doesn't incur would be: per visible sector you'd end up at a quadrant test, a divide and a small table lookup per vertex, a divide, two multiplies and three adds per visible wall. But you'd then be looking at (much the same) two multiplies and an add every 8 or 16 columns and just two adds per column. So you're spending a little on setup to save a lot per column. You'd draw front to back, zero overdraw for the world. Sprites would be sorted per sector and I guess you'd want to walk back to the front in sector order to paint them in, making it a stack-type thing rather than merely a queue. Walls could be any angle, and costs would increase as geometry complexity increased, whereas in Wolfenstein they increase as your rooms get larger. But freely angle walls would probably allow you to keep the geometry simple. Disadvantages would be indeterminate, and usually larger, level data sizes, and the need to create a proper editor rather than just editing in TextEdit or Notepad or whatever. So, yes, I'm good at bluster. On 24 April 2012 23:18, wrote: > Just been having a quick play!! Love that it works so fast. :-) very cool to > see another new SAM game. How many is that now, in the last few months? Dave > Invaders, Garden Centre of the Universe and now XOR... :-) What next??? :-D > Those making them, should see about getting them mentioned in Retro Gamer > magazine. They've got a section in the magazine about new games for all the > old machines, with mini-reviews etc. Definitely worth a bit of free > promotion and seeing your game in print on the shop shelves. :-) > > I agree with the discussion that we all concentrated on emulating the 16bit > machines too much instead of working within the limitations to create other > stuff, but such is the way of things. We all wanted to do what the big-boys > could. Then again, that pushed a lot of the games further than a lot of > people expected anyway. I suppose that's another area where the SAM was like > the Spectrum. It wasn't technically as advanced as say the c64 in many ways, > but competed by sheer versatility and creativity. Such was the SAM to the > Amigas and STs. I think over the years the SAM has certainly proved it could > do great stuff, when pushed to its limits. Who originally thought Lemmings > would work? It's a shame we didn't see more games that weren't as limited by > speed, like Dizzy/Flashback types. > > > I'd love to see a basic test of a wolfenstein game running! :-) It'd really > be a nice show-piece. Having said that, if someone managed to get it > working, once the pseudo 3D engine of that was running, why not create the > SAM's own first FPS? (Like Colin was planning with Chrome) No need to use > the existing Wolfenstein graphics and such, when we can create our own for > the SAM, and our own level designs, story, creatures, etc? > > Warren > > > > > Quoting James R Curry <8...@itdoesntsuck.com>: > >> I remember ordering the original from one of those ZX Spectrum mail order >> places. They were never able to deliver it, for some reason, and offered >> me the choice of another game, instead. >> >> No idea what I wound up buying. >> >> Now I can finally play it. Looks good! Is it in Mode 4? >> >> On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 8:21 PM, Thomas Harte >> wrote: >> >>> I played it for five minutes and it all looked very impressive. That >>> being said, I don't actually know the original game so I was quite >>> lost. Looking at the incredibly sparse World of Spectrum inlay scan >>> though, I think I'm meant to work things out for myself? >>> >>> On 24 April 2012 18:00, Balor Price >>> wrote: >>> > Hello everybody >>> > >>> > I'm proud to present my conversion of the 1987 Spectrum game XOR. I >>> finally >>> > kept my promise to my teenage self to finish a SAM game! >>> > >>> > You can download it for free from the revived >>> > http://cookingcircle.co.uk >>> > >>> > I hope you enjoy it (and yell in frustration). It's 25 years old and >>> still >>> > as rock-hard as I remember. >>> > >>> > Any feedback/initial bugs found would be greatly appreciated. :D >>> > >>> > Cheers >>> > Howard >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> James R Curry >> 8...@itdoesntsuck.com >> > > >
