Has anyone ever thought of retro fitting an Amstrad with Hardware scrolling?

[ralferoo]

I think the moniker "bullet hell" is quite appropriate for these kinds of games. I just don't enjoy them at all... even though I find a lot of "instant death" games too hard, I prefer to die and learn to avoid that thing in the future than just have a health bar deplete slightly and not know if that's the correct place to be or not.

That said, they're usually pretty to look at, even if it's hard to figure out what's actually going on!

[McKlain]

The thing about those games is that usually you only die if a bullet hits your ship's cockpit. The impact zone is pretty small, regardless the size of your ship. That is what allows you to avoid the bullet courtains. That and your memory and reflexes.


I like Cave's Donpachi games a lot 

[sigh]

I adore the Cave games too with my top 3 being :

Ketsui (Brilliant score mechanics. My favourite cave game)),
Esp.Rade(great design, but not so great score mechanics) and
Dangun Feveron(addictive score mechanics, but not quite so good ship speeds)

I wonder if something less bullet intensive like Raiden Fighter would be doable? It would also be really good to see more 2 player options.

[TotO]

Yes, the collide mask of the ship and of the bullets are both smalls. (so you think that you are good, but... no)
On CPC, it will be more easy to compute and display area w/o bullet than the invert.   

[McKlain]

Maybe something with less detailed graphics is possible, like one of those abstrac shooters with vector graphics for the pc.

[TotO]

The problem is not the detailed graphics, but the quantity of sprites to handle.

[Puresox]

No fan of Bullet hell games here also. Not my idea of fun learning your hit box and remembering patterns just doesn't do it for me , I prefer an R-Type shooter or 1943 style

[TotO]

Me too !
A nice vertical classic shooter is Flying Shark... On arcade, sure. 

[Axelay]

@Axelay, I would love to see what game you would make if you used CPC smooth vertical scrolling.

Do you have some code that can do it? I can provide some if you need some

Yes, I have some code that does that, thanks.   

I once asked Axelay to do a vertical shooter, but he said no !

But not 'never', right? 

[Xifos]

I was just telling stories in order to convince you to do it.

(did it work ?)

[Gryzor]

Thank god bullet hell shooters are not possible on the CPC. I don't feel *that* masochistic!

[sigh]

Interesting.

I adora bullet hells (am crap at them)but I understand the sentiments. I just find that bullet hell shooters usually have some of the most entertaining score mechanics.

[fano]

Manics are a visual fascination for me (DonPachi series are eye sugar) but i don't like playing them because there are very disturbing with so small hit box, i am not able to asbtract the whole ship so i suck at this   
Problem on CPC is to process so much bullets, not only drawing but computing coords, checking bounds and testing against player box, you may manage 32 of them but no more i think (with managing the other objects like enemies,player and player weapon)

[sigh]

you may manage 32 of them but no more i think (with managing the other objects like enemies,player and player weapon)

How big would the sprites have to be in order to acommodate 32?

[fano]

Difficult to reply as that depends of used method (compiled sprites,dual playfield) and screen refresh rate (50hz or 25hz)
If your game runs at 50Hz , you can alternate player shots and bullets each frame , they will blink fast so that would not be a big problem.For sure , the most adapted machine to do a vertical shooter with a maximum of bullet would be the 6128 Plus as you have 'just' to concentrate your efforts on bullets/player shots rendering.

[sigh]

Okay. How about this scenario:



This is an unfinished mock up and the score mechanics were never really worked out, but it was to be something like a watered down mechanic of Ketsui and Dangun Feveron, with both players sharing the score.
I actually had started on a mode 1 mock up in order to have more elaborate special effects.

Playfield is 160x200 using mode 0 graphics and a 2 player mode. Game would be 64KB Disk or 128KB disk (with extras of course and bosses loaded in seperately). This mock up shows 7 sprites:

Player ships = 2
Bullet = 4
Power Up = 1

The laser would have to be made up of many other sprites (maybe 6).
Explosions could be around 9 sprites - 3 frames small, 3 frames medium, 3 frames large; mixing and matching to create exploding effect. Expect slowdown when things get busy, but that is standard in all "Cave" type games.
Then the enemies and 1 round enemy bullet.

All this running at 25hz.

I know that the picture doesn't really show much, but I'm wondering if a bullet fest "could" be possible and playable to a decent speed.

[TotO]

Where are the enemies, and their bullets ? 
Probably not a so easy task for the CPC... But, if you done a vertical scrolling shumps, use a 128x256 screen area instead.

[sigh]

Where are the enemies, and their bullets ? 
Probably not a so easy task for the CPC... But, if you done a vertical scrolling shumps, use a 128x256 screen area instead.

True indeed! I didn't get to do the enemies and bullets, so I guess it was pretty pointless for me to post that picture!

But why the 128x256 format? It seems rather thin on the width, not giving enough room manouverability.

[TotO]

For a vertical shooter, a 128x256 screen (MODE 0) look overscan and allow display optimizations.

[Axelay]

I was just telling stories in order to convince you to do it.

(did it work ?)

Hard to say.  I've always wanted to make a vertical shooter, or three, anyway! 

[Xifos]

Well, hum...

I put a dsk with a little try.
overkill.dsk (run "overkill")
But i think i'm not good enough to do things properly.
Dealing with interrupts and crtc is too much for me.
I am not even sure if it works on real hardware...

It works good in winape, and strangely in wincpc...

[Gryzor]

Hey, this is actually a really good start! The sprite is the perfect size, and I love the colours in the background


Is it possible to fix the charater-based tile appearance at the top?

[Xifos]

That's the problem.
I have trouble with my two screen setup and reg5.
Maybe i could draw lines instead of putting tiles...

[Gryzor]

What if you masked it behind something else?

[Axelay]

Well, hum...

I put a dsk with a little try.
overkill.dsk (run "overkill")
But i think i'm not good enough to do things properly.
Dealing with interrupts and crtc is too much for me.
I am not even sure if it works on real hardware...

It works good in winape, and strangely in wincpc...

Looks like a promising start to me.     Unfortunately I dont have access to a real CPC to test it on right now...

That's the problem.
I have trouble with my two screen setup and reg5.
Maybe i could draw lines instead of putting tiles...

Another option might be to put a pause in the very first interupt and have it blank all the colours at the start, wait until the lowest position of the top of the screen, then set the colours to what they're supposed to be.  Or even set to mode 2 at the beginning of the screen, then back to the game mode at the point you want the top of the screen to appear, and you'll only need blank colour 1, if colour 0 and the border are the same.  This would tie up a good chunk of cpu time, so you'd want to find some fixed length processes to put in there, like key scanning or score display update or maybe background tile writing.

Writing the tile background one line at a time every frame might have another benefit though, because writing a large chunk of the background every so often may cause a spike in the CPU load big enough to interfere with the frame rate.