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avatar_XeNoMoRPH

Bomb Jack remake

Started by XeNoMoRPH, 07:36, 10 January 23

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XeNoMoRPH

spectacular and very promising remake by Antony Flack:




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Gryzor

Oh wow. Is he turning it into a complete game? 

eto

Is that a very clever dithering of 4 colours or are there more than 4 colours (per line)?

TotO

Quote from: eto on 12:51, 10 January 23Is that a very clever dithering of 4 colours or are there more than 4 colours (per line)?
I think both. I love the UI design, it is part of the game.
"You make one mistake in your life and the internet will never let you live it down" (Keith Goodyer)

Prodatron

Quote from: eto on 12:51, 10 January 23Is that a very clever dithering of 4 colours or are there more than 4 colours (per line)?
I was wondering about this as well. It seems, that there is black, white, light blue, red, but also yellow (the castle level).
But I think that's the monitor, and inside the game area there is no yellow, just white. Otherwise it would waste a terrible amount of rastertime.

GRAPHICAL Z80 MULTITASKING OPERATING SYSTEM

fgbrain

looks lovely... great animations with many nice colors (in mode 1) & gfx.

I believe its 128kb only and for a good reason!

hm, another unknown guy comes up with a gem??
_____

6128 (UK keyboard, Crtc type 0/2), 6128+ (UK keyboard), 3.5" and 5.25" drives, Reset switch and Digiblaster (selfmade), Inicron Romram box, Bryce Megaflash, SVideo & PS/2 mouse, , Magnum Lightgun, X-MEM, X4 Board, C4CPC, Multiface2 X4, RTC X4 and Gotek USB Floppy emulator.

abalore

very good color usage, and fast sprites. I think the developer could think of making a cartridge version too to be able to play on 64kb CPCs too, and to optimize the sprite drawing even more.

VincentGR

Saw this yesterday.
Ok BJ was great on the CPC, but I wish we had superb games like this one back then.

eto

Regarding the colours/mode 1:

It's really impressive how the CTM helps to accomplish the effect of having more than 4 colours, but I wonder how that looks in emulators, on an LCD or even on a GT65. 

TotO

Don't care how it looks on emulator or a CPC w/o using a CTM/CRT. It will be great when they will emulate the display too. :)
"You make one mistake in your life and the internet will never let you live it down" (Keith Goodyer)

norecess464

Hey! It's a totally impressive preview here

- the vertical-shaped resolution is obvious, perfectly fits the game design
- MODE 1 ? really ? you got me. Thanks to the dithering, I initially thought more inks were involved
- splendid pixel-based movement for the sprites (at 50hz?)

Now the flaws of the original game appears immediately obvious.

Please take your time to turn this into a great finalized game, it totally worth it :) 
My personal website: https://norecess.cpcscene.net
My current project is Sonic GX, a remake of Sonic the Hedgehog for the awesome Amstrad GX-4000 game console!

OneVision

This is one of the most awesome remake I've seen on this machine. And on OLD !
The 50hz sensation is thrilling, very arcade-ish.

Can't wait to play it !

GUNHED

Yes, there are more inks used. Listen to his videos.  :) :) :) Great to see that more coders use the power of MODE 1!  ;D ;D ;D
http://futureos.de --> Get the revolutionary FutureOS (Update: 2023.11.30)
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Carnivius

Never even liked playing Bombjack but I'm finding the development of this version pretty interesting from a technical viewpoint.
Favorite CPC games: Count Duckula 3, Oh Mummy Returns, RoboCop Resurrection, Tankbusters Afterlife

TotO

Quote from: GUNHED on 13:26, 12 January 23Yes, there are more inks used. Listen to his videos.
Sure, you can see ink change for the score and round.
"You make one mistake in your life and the internet will never let you live it down" (Keith Goodyer)

Cwiiis

This is fantastic, really nice work - especially impressive to see this on the stock CPC... I was kind of considering Bomb Jack for a Plus remake at some point in the future, but here's someone proving that the Plus is totally unnecessary to do a good job :)

GUNHED

Quote from: Cwiiis on 15:21, 12 January 23This is fantastic, really nice work - especially impressive to see this on the stock CPC... I was kind of considering Bomb Jack for a Plus remake at some point in the future, but here's someone proving that the Plus is totally unnecessary to do a good job :)
Right, the Plus is necessary to do a fantastic job.  :) So wait for the Plus version of the game.  ;)
http://futureos.de --> Get the revolutionary FutureOS (Update: 2023.11.30)
http://futureos.cpc-live.com/files/LambdaSpeak_RSX_by_TFM.zip --> Get the RSX-ROM for LambdaSpeak :-) (Updated: 2021.12.26)

Gryzor

#17
Quote from: andycadley on 18:06, 13 January 23Although all this Plus chatter probably ought to be moved off this thread, the work here deserves the praise more than this discussion attached. @Gryzor ?
Yup will do

[EDIT] Just did, and cleaned offensive posts from all parties.

Anthony Flack

Hello, I am the author of the Bomb Jack port/idiot in the video.

To answer the question about colours, in the main play area I am using 0 (black), 25 (light yellow), and depending on the level, either 11 or 14 (sky blue/violet), and 6 or 15 (red/orange).

Light yellow looks like light grey, almost white when it is put next to a sky blue pixel. 14 and 15 together make a nice medium grey. On a real CPC monitor, the pixels smear into the CRT dots and you can create many combinations of colours that don't even look like dithers. The classic Amstrad colours, the secondary colours like purple and orange, pink and lime create the best effects because they have a little bit of R, G and B so they light up all the phosphors. Also they are the colours that will dither beyond the CPC palette, whereas primary colours only dither into secondary colours. I really like some of the softer colours you can find in dithers; it takes the edge off the CPC's acid trip palette a little. 

Here, I am limited by trying to recreate Bomb Jack, but that's the challenge. The overall effect still works on LCD I think, although you can obviously see more clearly how it is done. My main priority is looking good on the original CPC monitor.

Actually, my main priority is to try to get the gameplay accurate, but doing some nice Mode 1 graphics is a bonus. In general I have tried to use mostly dithered colour in the background (avoiding using pixels of the same colour next to each other), which helps the sprites to stand out. Also using 4-colour masked sprites rather than three colours plus transparent makes a big difference in Mode 1 I think.

I have also long thought that the Plus machine would be an excellent candidate for a faithful port of Bomb Jack. The sprite specs seem almost made for it, and of course the colours. But I don't have a Plus machine, so I did this instead. And it turns out the regular CPC ought to be, just about, fast enough to do a faithful port, hopefully. All the collisions are in now, and that wasn't much of a speed hit.

It makes a big difference IMO to hit 50hz and see the sprites appear to glide over the background like proper hardware sprites.

Anthony Flack

And actually perhaps somebody here can help me.

I originally intended the whole game to fit into 128k, but as I continue to pack everything in I'm concerned I might not quite fit it all and don't want to sacrifice a nice animated title screen or cut back on any other fun effects like that for lack of memory, so I think I may have to acquaint myself with the disk drive. I could free up 20k of RAM right now if I loaded the background images off the disk instead of having them squatting in memory all the time. And if I did that, I could add extra pictures as well. And then there's high score saving. There's definitely perks to getting the disk drive involved.

I'm a total noob at this though, and I've never tried to load a file from asm before. I'm going to need the firmware back no doubt but I nuked the firmware and dumped a screen buffer all over its jump block and the AMSDOS ram block and all its worky bits. 

That's fine, I don't need the screen buffer when I'm loading from disk, and I can restore all the firmware memory I pasted over if I stash it first. Surely somebody must have done this before though and can save me ploughing through loads of documentation. Can anybody tell me exactly what minimal memory locations I need to save/restore and what I need to call to get data on and off the disk? 

Nich

Quote from: Anthony Flack on 11:16, 16 January 23Surely somebody must have done this before though and can save me ploughing through loads of documentation. Can anybody tell me exactly what minimal memory locations I need to save/restore and what I need to call to get data on and off the disk?

This thread contains Z80 assembler code to load files from disc when the firmware has been overwritten.

The areas of memory that you may, or will, need to preserve are:

  • &0000-&003F - used by the firmware. If your code doesn't use this area, then you will only need to preserve the interrupt jump code from &0038-&003A.
  • &ABFC-&B0FF - used by AMSDOS. The location of this area can change depending on what you specify for the highest usable byte of RAM (e.g. in BASIC, it's located from &A6FC-&ABFF). Also, if the user has installed any additional ROMs, these may reserve some RAM for themselves, so the value of &ABFC may need to be lowered.
  • &B100-&BFFF - used by the firmware, AMSDOS and the stack.

You may also need to save the address of the stack pointer (SP) when you're using the firmware, and restore it once you're finished.

Anthony Flack

Brilliant. When you say the value of &ABFC may need to be lowered, is this something I need to check for in order for the game to work if you have things hanging out of the back of your CPC that I don't?

I haven't read the thread yet. I should go read the thread, maybe this is all covered. First CPC project, so learning as I go.

Gryzor

Hey, @Anthony Flack , welcome here, thanks for the awesome-looking remake and also thanks for the clarifications!

Nich

Quote from: Anthony Flack on 11:36, 16 January 23Brilliant. When you say the value of &ABFC may need to be lowered, is this something I need to check for in order for the game to work if you have things hanging out of the back of your CPC that I don't?
Actually, my code in the thread I linked to only initialises ROM 7, which is where AMSDOS or ParaDOS is installed. However it is possible to install other DOSes such as ROMDOS in other ROM slots, so I usually like to initialise all ROMs (using CALL &BCCB rather than CALL &BCCE).

Unfortunately I don't know of any way to check what value should be used instead of &ABFC. I tested a configuration in WinAPE that installs lots of ROMs (Protext, Prospell, Maxam, Utopia, ROMDOS) and it reserved memory from &A5FE-&B0FF, so that is an indication of how much memory you may need to copy temporarily.

Cwiiis

I've found that if you're using the firmware functions, you also need to restore shadow registers (excluding `af) - in my game, I just avoid the firmware memory area and backup the shadow registers to allow use of firmware disk functions. (obviously only if you're using shadow registers - but I'm guessing you are :))

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