Dodgy builders

[arnoldemu]

Rant:

Damn dodgy builders. They used the wrong bricks, they used too hard a mix, and then they seem to have used little of the mortar. (in the extension on our house that is as old as I am)

The result is I had to almost rebuild a top-corner of our house. Whenever I tried to re-point the whole bricks were moving and comming free.

We had two old gas boilders taken out and a new combi put in it's place. Yes I knew it was going to be interesting, but to force me to rebuild part of the house? Thanks NOT!

Note to builders, if you need to fill in a hole, do not put 3 red bricks end on and "fix" them together with air. Ok it lasted 10 years, but to hold a gas water heater on the wall??? Crazy!

I've now rebuild it correctly using a good mortar mix.


So who is up for making a game of "me vs the builders" ?

[AMSDOS]

Sometimes I wish I was a builder. You know just go out into the Country, claim some free land, and get all the lumber I need to build one of those cute little Charles Ingalls places from Little House on the Prairie. I used to work in an estate (maintenance worker - keeping the parks and gardens neat and tidy) and if you ask me there's no such thing as a tidy builder there, true there probably are decent builders and I think some of them are alright, though there are dodgy ones there too, some of those places were starting to crack the minute it was completed. Don't know if you can blame "Bob The Builder" for that one though there are concerns from folks (who probably work in the industry) regarding his safety and quality standards. But yeah it's a concern all rounded and bounded by Red Tape - even Charles Ingalls wouldn't even be able to go up onto his roof and fix it! 

[arnoldemu]

Sometimes I wish I was a builder. You know just go out into the Country, claim some free land, and get all the lumber I need to build one of those cute little Charles Ingalls places from Little House on the Prairie. I used to work in an estate (maintenance worker - keeping the parks and gardens neat and tidy) and if you ask me there's no such thing as a tidy builder there, true there probably are decent builders and I think some of them are alright, though there are dodgy ones there too, some of those places were starting to crack the minute it was completed. Don't know if you can blame "Bob The Builder" for that one though there are concerns from folks (who probably work in the industry) regarding his safety and quality standards. But yeah it's a concern all rounded and bounded by Red Tape - even Charles Ingalls wouldn't even be able to go up onto his roof and fix it! 

This house is old, the extension is not so old, but as old as me.

Thankfully I gained the knowledge how to fix these problems and the courage and I don't think there are laws here to stop you repairing your house here.

I wouldn't go up on the roof, because I am scared of heights. But if I wasn't I'd fix more up there too

Also by doing the work myself I was sure that it was done how I wanted it. I am not so sure that a builder would do as thorough a job as me, or even that they would have repaired it the same (unless I had paid them lots of money).
Now I can stand back and appreciate my work.

I know the work is good, because it's easily holding the new boiler in place (I had to brick up flue from old boiler and plaster it too).
And building work is not my job

[AMSDOS]

I think a true test of a Builder, is the kind of builder who will build to their standard, someone who builds a place as if they were going to live in it! I think they try and emphasise that here by placing Builders reputation next to their name. Unfortunately I've heard stories about builders who might build a really good house and their next one is completely dodgy because payments weren't made or the company were sacking builders once the place is completed, or something went bad.

I saw Big Ben getting it's face cleaned on the TV and gee you reckon those guys would have fun. Over here it's all Scaffolding for a tiny little house. Personally I prefer the old 2 Ladder system with a bit of lumber thrown inbetween, Scaffolds are extremely dodgy if they aren't set up right and leave a huge mess if there's people around! 

[Axelay]

So who is up for making a game of "me vs the builders" ?

What sort of genre did you have in mind?  A shoot'em'up perhaps? 

[AMSDOS]

Would make for an interesting Text Adventure game, could go something like this:

You're standing at a Building Site, you look on in disagreement at how well the work has been done. Ahead are some builders, some of them are playing ball, others are making the job look worse by not doing anything right. In front of you are some tools, a paint can, a nail gun, a recharable drill, a saw, and 100 packets of nails for the nail gun:

What happens next is upto you:

[Axelay]

Would make for an interesting Text Adventure game, could go something like this:
 

Well, a text adventure might work, but if you don't get that parser right, it will probably just add to the frustration!

[arnoldemu]

What sort of genre did you have in mind?  A shoot'em'up perhaps? 

on the PCW? 

Serious: I looked into hardware scrolling on the pcw.
I am still thinking of making a game for pcw (probably a conversion of a new game I have planned - not blue angel 69).

Vertical scrolling is very easy. No extra ram needed

Horizontal is a big can of worms.

First because the addresses don't wrap, I think I would effectively need to have 2 screens side by side.
and then adjust the addresses in the roller ram to perform the scroll. This is good if you want a scroll 16 pixels at a time.
Now, on pcw, I am not really sure how the pixels equate to the cpc. It has 720 pixels in X. For cpc without a border it is 768 in mode 2.
So probably something nearly like on cpc.




But then comes more fun if you want to scroll in byte sized movement.

You can't actually set the address of any line to start on the 8th byte.
So my trick was to change the screen so that we see lines 0,1,2,3 and then lines 4,5,6,7 are 1 byte shifted.

This works out really nice and we can scroll the screen horizontally. But we need 2 times the screen data, because we lost half our lines.

You may say why have lines like this, well it actually works out quite easy to draw in ram.

But wait, 2 screens  side by side and now we need to have another copy shifted by one byte?

So how much ram for hardware scrolling a screen horizontally on pcw (and this is only by 8 pcw pixels - not sure how this equates to cpc scroll speed)? 4 Screens. Each screen is 23k, this makes a whopping 96k for scrolling.

Thank god the base pcw has 256k of ram and the video ram can access the lower 128k!!!!

There may be other ways to do this, maybe CharleyTronic can find some

Maybe playing around with other registers may trick the hardware to shift the screen.. no idea until I try on a real machine.

In terms of drawing sprites, it will be a bit slower than cpc sometimes because of more data to shift around.
Yes I am crazy.

[AMSDOS]

arnoldemu wrote:

on the PCW? 

Serious: I looked into hardware scrolling on the pcw.
I am still thinking of making a game for pcw (probably a conversion of a new game I have planned - not blue angel 69).

Vertical scrolling is very easy. No extra ram needed

Horizontal is a big can of worms.

First because the addresses don't wrap, I think I would effectively need to have 2 screens side by side.
and then adjust the addresses in the roller ram to perform the scroll. This is good if you want a scroll 16 pixels at a time.
Now, on pcw, I am not really sure how the pixels equate to the cpc. It has 720 pixels in X. For cpc without a border it is 768 in mode 2.
So probably something nearly like on cpc.

But then comes more fun if you want to scroll in byte sized movement.

You can't actually set the address of any line to start on the 8th byte.
So my trick was to change the screen so that we see lines 0,1,2,3 and then lines 4,5,6,7 are 1 byte shifted.

This works out really nice and we can scroll the screen horizontally. But we need 2 times the screen data, because we lost half our lines.

You may say why have lines like this, well it actually works out quite easy to draw in ram.

But wait, 2 screens  side by side and now we need to have another copy shifted by one byte?

So how much ram for hardware scrolling a screen horizontally on pcw (and this is only by 8 pcw pixels - not sure how this equates to cpc scroll speed) ? 4 Screens. Each screen is 23k, this makes a whopping 96k for scrolling.

Thank god the base pcw has 256k of ram and the video ram can access the lower 128k!!!!

There may be other ways to do this, maybe CharleyTronic can find some

Maybe playing around with other registers may trick the hardware to shift the screen.. no idea until I try on a real machine.

In terms of drawing sprites, it will be a bit slower than cpc sometimes because of more data to shift around.
Yes I am crazy.

You should checkout Bounder out on the PCW if you can, it's a very nice game - I think the secret is like you said it's a Vertical Scroller so whoever wrote it for the PCW, must have known this would have been an advantage, Horizontal Scrolling I always thought was a Harder thing to do on any machine isn't it? Would have been interesting had the PCW picked up the attention of game coders and demo makers perhaps, unfortunately it was only really marketed as a Business Machine.

[arnoldemu]

You should checkout Bounder out on the PCW if you can, it's a very nice game - I think the secret is like you said it's a Vertical Scroller so whoever wrote it for the PCW, must have known this would have been an advantage, Horizontal Scrolling I always thought was a Harder thing to do on any machine isn't it? Would have been interesting had the PCW picked up the attention of game coders and demo makers perhaps, unfortunately it was only really marketed as a Business Machine.

Ok will do.

Well the pcw hardware has more flexibility than the cpc's in some respects, but definitely vertical scrolling is much easier.
But then even with cpc, smooth vertical scrolling is much easier too.

Horizontal scrolling is always a problem, unless there is hardware to help scroll pixel by pixel (e.g. in cpc+).

Like I said, I am planning a game on the cpc (this one doesn't scroll ), and I am thinking of doing both a cpc and pcw version.
Not going to be easy to do all the gfx in 2 colours for pcw version

[AMSDOS]

arnoldemu wrote:

Ok will do.

Well the pcw hardware has more flexibility than the cpc's in some respects, but definitely vertical scrolling is much easier.
But then even with cpc, smooth vertical scrolling is much easier too.

Horizontal scrolling is always a problem, unless there is hardware to help scroll pixel by pixel (e.g. in cpc+).

Yes I suppose there are exceptions!

Like I said, I am planning a game on the cpc (this one doesn't scroll ), and I am thinking of doing both a cpc and pcw version.
Not going to be easy to do all the gfx in 2 colours for pcw version

More reasons to play Bounder on the PCW - since the CPC version is lovely & Colourful, one can only wonder how a Green Screen version would ever work! Not that I'm suggesting to rip the GFX out of it!   

[Axelay]

 

  What sort of genre did you have in mind?  A shoot'em'up perhaps? 
 

on the PCW? 

Well, if you must!     

 
In terms of drawing sprites, it will be a bit slower than cpc sometimes because of more data to shift around.
Yes I am crazy.

Crazy is good.  It means it should be interesting! 

So is there an emulator for the PCW range?

[arnoldemu]

So is there an emulator for the PCW range?

Joyce and MESS both emulate the PCW, but I doubt either will emulate the video hardware exactly, so changing data mid-line is unlikely to work.
To be honest, I've no idea what would happen if the data was changed mid-line.

Vertical scrolling is much easier

EDIT: I am making some pcw example code. Hopefully this will help others to get up to speed with it if they want to.