Parasol Star Remake ? (PS4CPC)

[cngsoft]

Guess what is almost ready to become a playable demo?



Just one thing is missing: I'm going to need the assistance of tastefulmrship, who adapted the Amiga songs of "Parasol Stars" to a CPC friendly format, because I need the scores of the main song so this playable demo does more than "beep", "boing" and "crash"...

[sigh]

Sweeeeeeet!

[Puresox]

Oh cool !!!!!!!!!!!!

[TomEtJerry]

Really nice graphics ! 128kb release with no flickering ?

[Nich]

Guess what is almost ready to become a playable demo?

Nice! Is the demo going to be ready in time for RetroMadrid 2013?

[cngsoft]

TomEtJerry: Flickerless double hardware buffer... in 64kb! :-D Multiload, however: each world and big boss will be loaded separately.

Nich: If nothing goes wrong, yes, it is, albeit fairly limited (just the first six stages), after all it's both a demo and a proof of concept.

[arnoldemu]

Can we have a thumbs up smiley? I want to fill a whole post with them.

I can't like a post more than once

[TFM]

 

[tastefulmrship]

Just one thing is missing: I'm going to need the assistance of tastefulmrship, who adapted the Amiga songs of "Parasol Stars" to a CPC friendly format, because I need the scores of the main song so this playable demo does more than "beep", "boing" and "crash"...

Oops, sorry! I've been busy and haven't been reading any threads (MaV pointed me to this request)... do you need the original .SKS or the .BIN file?

EDIT1: Here's the original .SKS file... use |GS to assign an address... or I can do it for you! Actually, sod it, here are ALL 6 .SKS files. Just load into Arkos & export as .YM

EDIT2:

Can we have a thumbs up smiley? I want to fill a whole post with them.

[Gryzor]

This looks soooo nice!


(Lynwen, where are you?)

[Puresox]

How do you get these to work? What files are SKS ?

[tastefulmrship]

How do you get these to work? What files are SKS ?

Either load into STarkos on CPC or Arkos on PC.

[cngsoft]

Oops, sorry! I've been busy and haven't been reading any threads [...] here are ALL 6 .SKS files. Just load into Arkos & export as .YM

Thank you very much!!! However, I'm afraid it's a bit too late, because I'm riding the bus to Madrid tomorrow morning :-( As soon as I'm back from the event I'll try integrating the music into the game and make a video of the playable demo.

[cngsoft]

Bad news: the PS4CPC playable demo won't be ready for tomorrow's RetroMadrid 2013. Good news: http://cngsoft.no-ip.org/cng_zip_lz3.htm already features "Invasion of the Zombie Monsters" :-)

[MacDeath]

Hail César !!!!



I still hope for hidden MLP:FiM bosses...

Ok, I made a slight palette edit, please don't use orange for the cheeks, orange on pink if really not ... good...


I turned the Yellow into pastel yellow, so it mix betterly with pink and is less saturated too (lots of saturated colours already...)


Player sprites' Cheeks are now Magenta (the red-purple crossbreed, not sure about the name)


Another thing is to try the different sort of bright green so it gives the whole set a slightly different ambiance/feeling/mood.


the seaGreen is quite good IMO, but here i put the lime green (yellowish) so it goes better won the fruits tiles (orange and yellow are used on them).


More yellow in the green and less in the yellow (it is pastel now) is somewhat a way to unsaturate a bit anyway.


Also, getting this setting enables you to go with an additionnal "green" gradiant...


Black-DarkGreen-Lime-pastelYellow-white.
Gives a sunny feeling too.






Same thing may be done with Cyan actually... As Sea green is a mix aof green+Cyan indeed. good to give an Icy feeling.

[TFM]

Hey! These two big sprites, located over the two umbrellas, at the right side of the picture, they look like.... MacDeath's avatar! 


Looking forward to play a first demo of the game! 

[cngsoft]

After the disappointment of bringing a terribly incomplete double-buffer non-playable demo of PS4CPC to RetroMadrid 2013 I pretty much dug the project down and chose to focus instead on my own attempt at resuming the computer science degree I failed to complete twelve years ago. But now that exams are over (and I already know one score: 10/10! yay!) it's about time I resume developing this game, and talking about it too.

I finally settled on the pre-processed sprite engine we discussed a while ago. Empty bytes aren't stored; instead, a couple of nibbles tell the engine how many bytes to skip, and how many to draw. A couple of extra bits help the engine know whether it has to mask (rather than just copy) the first and last bytes of the block. The performance has improved over BB4CPC, but sprites are now 20% heavier on average, for most of them didn't really have many empty areas to begin with. Sure, the goal was speed rather than compression, but still...

I also ran into something that applies to BB4CPC as well and could justify yet another version. Do you notice something new in this sequence?

[TFM]

A lot of letter bubbles on screen?

[cngsoft]

A lot of letter bubbles on screen?

No, no, although it's true I could have popped the green E bubble and scored an EXTEND. Look at the water stream: it's now as long as in the arcade game (10 rather than 8 tiles) and it's dragging the drowned enemies instead of catapulting them away. How could I forget to do this back in the day?

[sigh]

Glad to hear your keeping this project alive and I really do hope you pass all those exams.

Regarding the project - are you attempting to squeeze this into 64kb or will it be 128kb with multiload?

[6128]

Hi, Cesar.

If you release a new version of BB4CPC please read carefully the keyboard problem I've outlined in this thread of Amstrad miarroba forum.

Amstrad CPC - Cintas Bubble Bobble 4 CPC - Amstrad CPC

[cngsoft]

Hi, Cesar.
If you release a new version of BB4CPC please read carefully the keyboard problem I've outlined in this thread of Amstrad miarroba forum.
Amstrad CPC - Cintas Bubble Bobble 4 CPC - Amstrad CPC

...If you redefine the keys as Q-I-O-SPACE (jump,left,right,shoot) [...and...] you press at once I+O+Q [...] the game jumps back to the main menu [...] Truth be said, I didn't test other key combinations...

Ah, the good old CPC keyboard matrix clash. The solution is simple: choose other keys. When I want to play BB4CPC I always redefine the eight keys as ZXCVNM+comma+point and I never get any unexpected keypresses even in the few times I got a friend to come here and play the game together with me.

EDIT: for those who don't know yet about the keyboard matrix hardware glitch, here's a brief explanation. The scan codes of the keys I, O, Q and Escape are 35, 34, 67 and 66 respectively, and whenever we examine the keyboard hardware we get 10 bytes, each one stating whether eight keys are up or down. If we thus plot a 8x10 table and check the locations of the aforementioned keys we get this:

   0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
00 - - - - - - - -
08 - - - - - - - -
16 - - - - - - - -
24 - - - - - - - -
32 - - O I - - - -
40 - - - - - - - -
48 - - - - - - - -
56 - - - - - - - -
64 - - ? Q - - - -
72 - - - - - - - -

They define a perfect rectangle. That's indeed what happens: whenever three keys are pressed at once and the first one shares the horizontal coordinate with the second one and the vertical coordinate with the third one, a "ghost" fourth keypress is generated to complete the rectangle. Hence I+O+Q being the perfect recipe for a "ghost" Escape keypress.

[Xifos]

  Ah, the good old CPC keyboard matrix clash.

I remember having it when playing two players games with my brother...
When we were kids a looooong time ago !

[TFM]

Yes, it is a hardware problem. The only solution is to use another keyboard. One of my CPCs has a Siemens keyboard, which does not has the problem.

[arnoldemu]

Yes, it is a hardware problem. The only solution is to use another keyboard. One of my CPCs has a Siemens keyboard, which does not has the problem.

Is this an original CPC keyboard or a modification?
If it's original how can you determine the difference?
I have a 664 which doesn't seem to suffer from keyboard clash.