Carnivac's CPC pixels

[beaker]

@Carnivac - a man after my own heart - Transformers and Amstrads! Although I tend to lag a bit behind on the latest IDW G1 stuff having just read All Hail Megatron and Last Stand of the Wreckers (still not a patch on the original Simon Furman comic stories IMO). Sounds like you've been through the ringers over the years; hopefully the lottery win will mark a change in fortune. Buses sound as good as the ones in Basingstoke. Half the time they didn't turn up and other times you got 2 at once. Good luck with the job hunt!
This is what's left of my collection. Still kicking myself for selling the like of Jetfire years ago...

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So Bryce, think I have a shot at making some money with my gold C64? I just got to find a better sticker and a glass board  Please note the lower ROM board and Megaflash sticking out of the back of the CPC 6128 for extra brownie points....

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[Carnivius]

@Carnivac - a man after my own heart - Transformers and Amstrads!

Nice collection.  I sold off my most of my G1 stuff some years ago when I was broke.  I only have Powermaster Optimus Prime left cos of sentimental attachment (I remember the great birthday I had where I got him as my main present).  I mostly just have figures from the movies as I far prefer the complex designs and incredible engineering some of the figures have such as the Revenge of the Fallen Leader Class Optimus Prime (I have the imported Buster version by Takara that chromed all the gray parts and turned his lower smokestack bits into his movie-accurate gun) and I tend to paint them up a bit to look more worn and metally.  I also painted up a Cybertron Snarl figure to be my movie/classics version of Carnivac as...well...the original G1 toy is crap.  Charming crap but still badly proportioned, hardly articulated crap.  Furman had a knack for turning poor toys into great characters in the old Marvel comics which explains the insane prices for original Carnivac, Bludgeon and Thunderwing.  I do own Generations Thunderwing but disappointed at how small he is.  And I own the Revenge of the Fallen Bludgeon with the third party Headsrobot upgrade kit for a more skull like face (with cybernetic skull on reverse side), better helmet, and chromed non-floppy swords.  My fave Decepticon figure ever.  So yeah I've no need for the overpriced G1 versions (though I did have G1 Carnivac complete a few years ago).  And yes I've managed to stab myself with his new swords twice... I kinda wished I hadn't wiped them clean.  Authentic human blood looked pretty cool on them.  Oh well, I've got plenty more blood if I want to do it again.

The old Jetfire toy was awesome.  Still holds up well today in terms of detail and articulation.  Never liked his cartoon appearance (but then I never liked the cartoon much itself, why does Grimlock become Barney the Dinosaur in season 3?).  Much preferred the Macross toy design.  Dinobots still look great after all these years.  I'm not a big G1 fan anymore (other than the Marvel comics, I can't be bothered with IDW's version after all that godawful headmaster crud and the travesty that was All Hail Megatron.  I have greatly enjoyed their movie comics though) but I would quite like the Masterpiece Grimlock as it's just a bigger improved version of the original figure which was great to begin with (and one of the few G1 figures I kinda regret selling).   I don't care for the other Masterpiece figures at all since they're overpriced, poorly designed pieces of flimsy crud and Grim's the only one I'll break the 'never buy a supposed masterpiece figure again' rule I have.

I'm babbling.  Just got back from a very hot and exhausting rehearsal.. was already tired from all the dancing about I did earlier after finding out I won that money.

[Gryzor]

As do I!!!

[Carnivius]

As do I!!!

As do you what?  I don't follow.   

[Bryce]

So Bryce, think I have a shot at making some money with my gold C64? I just got to find a better sticker and a glass board  Please note the lower ROM board and Megaflash sticking out of the back of the CPC 6128 for extra brownie points....

Yes extra points for the Bryce hardware in the picture, but the points are instantly deducted again for for putting a CPC behind a C64! 

Bryce.

[Carnivius]

This is what's left of my collection. Still kicking myself for selling the like of Jetfire years ago...

I've only just noticed you got duplicates.  So Prime in robot mode and also in truck mode at same time.  And Snarl & Sludge of the Dinobots are there twice too (I thought the dino group looked bigger than usual, hehe).  I've done that a few times when I've had duplicates too.

[Gryzor]

 Hahaha! My "as do I" quip was in response to TFM's "Looking forward to that" (your next creation), but apparently some new posts were on a new page...

[Carnivius]

Almost done the new RoboCop mock up.  It's... VERY different to the early sample I showed before.

[Carnivius]

Ok I'm pretty much done.  Tried to go for a dark, atmospheric, gritty look of a street during a riot and the brown/grey look worked better than I thought considering the CPC doesn't have much in the way of browns and greys (more the C64's field but then it doesn't have much else and it certainly couldn't do this).   I used various stills from the movies as reference (even the sky gradient comes from one particular scene).  Also, inspired by my own Cosmic Prison Commando I put in a little text line where RoboCop could say certain things (mostly quotes from the film) in abscence of sound samples.  Hope you guys like it.  It's my favourite CPC piece I've ever done.   

Here it is doubled up with scanlines (as that's how I play CPC games when using an emulator).  There's a link below it to a regular version.  Also see if you can spot the 'easter egg'. 



Link to regular size version without scanlines

[Trebmint]

Hey loving the artwork. Can I just ask based on the last image. You're using 16 colours. So how are you doing the transparency on the sprites? Is there a colour that the sprites arent using.
Oh by the way that count duckula stuff is fab.

[fano]

Hey loving the artwork. Can I just ask based on the last image. You're using 16 colours. So how are you doing the transparency on the sprites? Is there a colour that the sprites arent using.

There is no need to save a color for sprites transparency on screen , that's only for their storage.Btw , nice gfxs that would be lovely to see all this stuff animated 

[sigh]

Brilliant piece of work! Definitely has a Cosmic Prison Commando feel to it.

[ivarf]

Link to regular size version without scanlines

Lovely! To the coders, would you need 128 kB or even 512 kB to get a full Robocop game with this kind of look throughout? Or would it be impossible?

[Carnivius]

Lovely! To the coders, would you need 128 kB or even 512 kB to get a full Robocop game with this kind of look throughout? Or would it be impossible?

I don't think it would be too much trouble.  It's not doing anything fancy or overly memory consuming.  Even if it needed 128k rather than 64k I'm sure I could have unnecessary stuff cut out for a '64k version' such as Robo arriving in his car, or more varied shop signs.  This mock up is actually very simple when you break it down.

[ervin]

Blimey! That is absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful!
It does indeed remind me of cosmic prison commando.
Just magnificent.

I haven't got a clue what the easter egg might be though.

[EDIT] aaaaand right after I posted, I spotted it.
Clue: 464

[TFM]

Well, if s/o wants to use 64 KB only, then the floppy disc will relad constantly...
Seriously, you will need 128 KB here, GFX need a lot of space.

[TotO]

Sure, if all the game have to look like that, you may have (not sure) not enough memory for storing all tiles, sprites and fonts on a 64K system. (don't forget SFx and why not music too)
And it will be a shame to remove cars, or something else to free memory. 

By the way... Great mock-up to make peoples dream.

[Carnivius]

I'll post the tile sheet for that screen when I get time (busy day, busy week, I'm performing rehearsing and performing a play all evenings this week), there's not actually that much compared to some CPC games I've played and a lot of it would get reused throughout a level anyways (is amazing how even one or two extra tiles in places can give a fresh look to a mostly 'recycled' area) and even in later levels (though I think multiload would be an option).  Only the small green font would have a full set, the orange font for ammo and time only need numbers as does the large green one.  Most enemies would reuse the same leg animation to save space and of course RoboCop himself would be split into two (top half that can aim different directions, while his bottom half does leg animation).  And would the status panel really use up more memory than the huge blocky one on the original game?  The gun's gray box is the same as the one used for the lives and the little tubes are made from 4x8 tile pieces.

[TotO]

With 64K, you only get 4 banks of memory for managing at less :
- One display screen (16K)
- Engine, menu, game code (16K)
- Tiles, map, fonts, attribute array (16K)
- Sprites, sound, audio player, logic code (16K)

If most 64K games look very "simplest", with very few patterns, a poor game IA and lacking music.
It's not because programers are lazy. (hum...)

Just about your ingame fonts, you spend around 2KB.
- Green little font : 512B
- Green big digit font and % : 768B (reusing tiles parts for some digits)
- Orange "amo" digit font : 512B (2 chars to refrest with a part of the gun)
- Orange "time" digit font : 256B

For a simple 256 tiles set for background, it's 4KB.
A game map of "16x256" tiles take at less 4KB too.

Sure, it may be possible to do it with 64K, but it will be not so easy as you though.

[fano]

I'd add some few things about video memory as it is one of the bottleneck of the CPC, correct playfield surface (160*153 mode 0 40*25 R9=5) for correct sprites size with double buffer (avoid flickering and allow hard scrolling): 24K , add the panel like you made : something like 6K.You can already count for something like half of the memory used for video.

[Gryzor]

Wow, this is beautiful! The scanlines make it rather dark, but it's so alive it's like a screenshot from a living, breathing game. Indeed I'd love to see it animated!


And, heh, great job on the easter egg

[arnoldemu]

Ok we can stop saying bad things about 64k machines now!

Some people will never like them, others will still continue to like them.

The truth is that it is hard to fit a game into 64k, but it's not impossible and you're not guaranteed a poor game. Really it depends on lots of factors.

The values you give there are not the same for every game in my experience.

There are many good 64k games.

The blanket statement of "if we had 128k all games would be better" is not true.

Even 128k games would need to multi load to get more content, same as 64k would.

[Sykobee (Briggsy)]

Excellent mock-up! Can't wait to see the tileset.


As for font memory usage, I see it as not having such a high overhead.
4-colour fonts: 64 characters (including the scoreboard pipes) at 4x8 = 512 bytes, or 32 characters [A-Z.,!$?/] in 256 bytes, and a separate digit font in 80 bytes.
Code routine selects which 4-colours to render the font in. A little slower than storing 16-colour fonts, but saves memory and allows some rendering-time flexibility.


16KB for tiles and fonts? With 512 bytes used for the standard character set, and 704-bytes (44 characters) for the big digits (or drop one of the colours and it's 352 bytes using the above method) we still have a lot of tile memory.
Each tile is 64 bytes, so we can fit 16 into 1KB, 240 into 15KB. I wouldn't be surprised if many games made do with a lot fewer tiles!

[TotO]

16KB for tiles and fonts? With 512 bytes used for the standard character set, and 704-bytes (44 characters) for the big digits (or drop one of the colours and it's 352 bytes using the above method) we still have a lot of tile memory.
Each tile is 64 bytes, so we can fit 16 into 1KB, 240 into 15KB. I wouldn't be surprised if many games made do with a lot fewer tiles!

The playfield of this picture (removing sprites) use close to 200 different tiles...

On that, you have to add the game map (4K at less) and the attribute table (probably 4K too).
So, you are game over before coding the game.

[Carnivius]

The playfield of this picture (removing sprites) use close to 200 different tiles...

On that, you have to add the game map (4K at less) and the attribute table (probably 4K too).
So, you are game over before coding the game.

200 different tiles?

And thanks for the nice comments.  I also really like seeing the posts that theorise how things could work rather than just saying "nope it can't be done".