Maybe he can use this engine with his SMB project? Can anyone contact and talk to him about this?
I don't know at what stage his project is, but if @GinBlog82 use this engine and other person(s) do the graphics (we have very good graphic designers around here) the SMB project can be finished!
What can we do to encourage people to help in this project to be finished??
Hi, sorry for the delay. I was so full with my actual job (I work for AWS as SDE2, so pretty busy) that I didn't touch my project at all (sorry). Searching on youtube, I recently discovered this demo and I was wondering how much the cpcwiki community was blaming me for my poor attempt in cloning SMB so far :-) However I'm still satisfied with my old result, because I believe that they are two different kind of projects, with two different kind of results.
From my point of view, I wanted to reproduce the old SMB graphics without modifying the original tileset (same pixel resolution). In the Rhino's demo, instead, I see that the graphics has been readapted for mode 0 and overscan, that is more useful as skin to show his engine's features but not exactly what I was trying to do in the past. Using mode 0 instead of mode 1 is better if you want to get smoother scrolling with less resolution and more colors, it's something that I already evaluated in the past but I don't think that I'll go in that direction now. About the demo, the useful part of the screen is about 384x160, so I'd say 24x10 tiles on mode 0, mine was 16x12 on mode 1 (more compatibile with the famous World 1-1 map). Playing with Mario all around, the physics looks pretty different than the original title (I guess because it's an early demo). If you move forward or backward it goes immediately without any kind of acceleration or friction, which is a simplification too. I'm not saying that adding the old mario physics is something complicated, but it adds complexity to the code and it may introduce concerns, in particular if you are dealing with CRTC registers and you may end up with sync issues, so you must be careful.
Anyway, the Rhino's demo is amazing and it has some interesting ideas from what I can learn to improve my demo and achieve a smoother scrolling by myself. I'm not going to throw away my work to use other people engines (or disasm them), even if I don't have time to develop, so don't ask me to do it because the answer will be always a big "NO" :-) I think that the scrolling is something that you can always improve since you are alive, throwing the old technique away and try new solutions, so I'm not concerned because there is no limit on something that you may learn and implement. Maybe a good idea is to use a larger screen to cover borders and play more with the CRTC registers. Thank you very much for the suggestions and for the inspiration that you gave to me so far.