Awesome! More fun things for the CE in the making! Great work! Smile
MateoConLechuga wrote:

Code:
or a,a
sbc hl,hl
ld l,a
Is shorter Smile Anywho, fantastic work! This is looking pretty sweet indeed; can't wait for another awesome cross compatible game. Good luck, and keep it up!
Ah yes excellent, thanks Mateo!
The TI-84+CE build now functions essentially the same as it's TI-83+/84+ counterpart (sans text). You can now play through a level collecting items, killing aliens, etc.

Next up I'll be splitting the level data out into appvars for the 84+CE build, as the program is currently sitting just shy of the 64KB limit.

Thanks to MateoConLechuga (and everyone who has assisted him) for CEmu, which I used to capture the below video Smile

Awesome work! Can't wait to give it a try Smile CEmu is a little slower than actual speed at the moment due to block instructions such as ldir and others which aren't handled properly yet, so that should be fixed soon. Keep it up! Smile
MateoConLechuga wrote:
Awesome work! Can't wait to give it a try Smile CEmu is a little slower than actual speed at the moment due to block instructions such as ldir and others which aren't handled properly yet, so that should be fixed soon. Keep it up! Smile
I did notice it seemed a little slower - I've been running it at 120-130% which seems close to the actual calculator speed.

Regardless, it was great to finally try out CEmu properly, it's going to be a great tool!
A little bit more progress over the last week - I've started working on colour menu screens & text.

After stumbling back on this video of Mateo experimenting with a Mario CE engine, I decided to do some experimenting myself.

This is only very quickly put together, no sprite clipping or vram flipping, and not optimised at all, but it's enough to show that maybe a full colour version of Alien Breed is possible on the CE...



The sprites are still 8x8, but are now 8bpp (256 colours), and again scaled up x3. Like Mateo's Mario CE, all tiles are fully redrawn each frame instead of "scrolling". If I implement vram flipping and optimise the routines, it will look much better (in fact, it looks much better on the actual calculator than the above gif).

If I went ahead with this method, I can maintain the same code base between the monochrome 83+/84+ calculators and the colour 84+CE Smile
I decided to try using 16x16 tile sprites (as opposed to 8x8 scaled up x3 in the previous screenshot), which resulted in the below (don't mind the yellow artifacts, they don't actually happen during execution). It certainly looks better quality, but in my opinion it's now a bit too small on screen.



For the sake of maintaining gameplay compatibility between the 83+/84+ monochrome version and the 84+CE version, the play screen needs to show 12x8 tiles, and the tile width/height needs to be a multiple of 8. I'm contemplating next trying 12x12 tile sprites scaled up x2 to make them 24x24, which is a multiple of 8.
That looks quite nice, but I agree it's a little bit too small.
Yeah, it might be more comfortable with a x2 scaling. Gotta love those speedy pixels though! Very Happy
Here's another test using 12x12 tile sprites, scaled up x2. I think this is my favourite so far. It scrolls 3 pixels per frame, so 1 tile every 8 frames, making it the same as the non-colour version (which is what I want, to maintain gameplay compatibility).



Don't mind the messy screen edges, as I still haven't implemented any clipping.
This is very exciting to see, James! Are you doing this in C or ASM? Do you plan on adding in any extra gameplay mechanics?
merthsoft wrote:
This is very exciting to see, James! Are you doing this in C or ASM? Do you plan on adding in any extra gameplay mechanics?

Thanks Merth! It's in eZ80 ASM. v3.0.0 will add some additional enemies again, as well as another campaign that will have multiple routes through it, I've added in a trigger/scripting system to the levels to give more power and flexibility as to what can happen during levels, and I'll add in more achievements too.
Ok so for the time being, I'm going to stick with 8x8 scaled x3, because I want to use 256 colours & also it will likely be easier to work with.

I've updated the 8x8 sprite version by adding in some more colour texture and implementing clipping and VRAM flipping.

Looking very sharp mate!

I really like the speed Smile.
I haven't done any further work on this over the last 5 days, but you can download a copy of the latest scrolling test shown above if you want to see what it looks like on a calculator Smile

Ab5Test Download
Here's a quick progress screenshot of integrating the colour engine into the game Smile

The title screen is a lot scarier in color! Nice work Smile
elfprince13 wrote:
The title screen is a lot scarier in color! Nice work Smile
Yeah it's amazing what a big difference a little colour can make (and of course, better resolution).
Very good work
  
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