[New Game Uploaded] Robin

[Gryzor]

File Name: Robin
File Submitted: April 21, 2013, 7:52:10 PM

A long-lost game by Indescomp, 1986. Read more here and here.



Robin Amstrad cpc HD Comentado - YouTube

Click here to download this file

[MacDeath]

Here come the brave Sir Robin...


Bravely bold Sir Robin rode forth from Camelot.
He was not afraid to die, O brave Sir Robin!
He was not at all afraid to be killed in nasty ways,
Brave, brave, brave, brave Sir Robin!
He was not in the least bit scared to be mashed into a pulp,
Or to have his eyes gouged out, and his elbows broken;
To have his kneecaps split, and his body burned away;
And his limbs all hacked and mangled, brave Sir Robin!
His head smashed in and his heart cut out
And his liver removed and his bowels unplugged
And his nostrils raped and his bottom burned off
And his penis-- humhum...
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
Bravely ran away, away!
When danger reared its ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about
And gallantly he chickened out.
Bravely taking to his feet
He beat a very brave retreat,
Bravest of the brave, Sir Robin!





Brave Sir Robin - A Silly Ballad (Monty Python)

[Gryzor]

No, not that one.

[MacDeath]

Haha, I liked this one anyway...

[cngsoft]

I temporarily break my hiatus (university projects and exams, argh) to say that this little game is actually extremely interesting from a historical point of view. It helps casting a new light on the early years of the Spanish game making company Opera Soft, back when it was just the in-house programming team of Spanish computer distributor (and Amstrad's national representative) Indescomp.

If we compare this game against the first games released under Opera Soft's name ("Cosa Nostra" and "Livingstone Supongo", both dated late 1986) we can spot many things in "Robin" that would appear in the later games, ranging from the "dirty tilemap" engine to graphics such as the eagle ("Livingstone Supongo") or the water splash ("Livingstone", also the later "Goody"), the looks of the hero and the human baddies ("Cosa Nostra"), and even concepts like going to jail if defeated by certain enemies ("Livingstone", "Goody"), the non-perpendicular map design ("Cosa Nostra")... All these things make this game one of the missing links between Opera's names released under their own brand, and those they had made earlier, an evolution that had been in the dark for quite a while due to the scarce memories of their oldest games.

[redbox]

Sounds interesting. What's a "dirty tilemap" engine?

[cngsoft]

Sounds interesting. What's a "dirty tilemap" engine?

In a computer without hardware tiles and sprites, the task of drawing the screen can become very burdensome: for example, assuming a perfectly orderly string of LDIs, the CPC would spend 16384*5=81920 microseconds just to copy data onto the video memory. As a result the convenience of reducing the amount of things to redraw on each frame becomes apparent.

Enter the "dirty" flags in tiles, sprites, whatever our graphics engine is using to divide the visuals in logical components. At the start of a new frame, all elements are tagged "clean", but when an item must be redrawn because it's animated or in motion it's flagged as "dirty". This lets the graphics engine know which elements must be redrawn, and thus the burden of updating the screen is reduced to updating the areas where the dirty elements are located.

The games of the pre-Opera Soft folks from late 1985 onwards (i.e. we're excluding things like "Campeones" or "Supertripper" that used XOR-masked sprites instead) reveal this little feature if we wipe the video memory while in the middle of gameplay (something we can do with debuggers): as sprites move the original background reappears behind them, but on a character cluster basis: the redrawn backgrounds are perfectly aligned to the typical 8x8 character boundaries, exactly in the same fashion the tilemap is internally defined.

The only catch is that you can't make software scrolling games with this method; when Opera started making these ("Sol Negro", "Mutan Zone", "Gonzzalezz"...) they used a hardware double buffer method instead. This made Opera Soft's games visibly faster on the CPC than similar competitors from Dinamic and Topo Soft: in comparison, these companies kept using pure software methods until the end of their days, with the notorious exceptions of "Rescate Atlántida" and "AMC", made with hardware double buffers by outsiders hired by Dinamic, and "Silent Shadow" published by Topo.

[redbox]

Thanks for the explanation.

This is similar to the "way of the donkey" that was discussed in another thread recently.

I think the real power comes if you combine the dirty tilemap with a double buffer as you can redraw a lot more tiles (without flicker) that way.

I'm looking forward to having a go at this when I've finished my current project

[ralferoo]

Here come the brave Sir Robin...

If you're going to put a youtube link for this, it has to be the original...


Brave Sir Robin