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Started by Vince, 16:19, 20 June 20

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Vince

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SkulleateR

Nice story  8)


Welcome and have fun here ....  ;D

mr_lou


trocoloco


Axelay


Welcome, and good luck with the conversions.  :)


On the subject of that racing game video on lemon, I had read that discussion, and I guess you are probably the same Vince there that had mentioned never having seen a CPC racing game not in a small window apart from Burnin' Rubber?  Not that I regard that as a CPC game anyway.  I didn't really want to wade in to a possible format war type argument there, but if that was you, you might be interested to take a look at a couple of earlier CPC racing games:


3D Grand Prix
Super Cycle


They're obviously early and simple, but do what they set out to way better than Outrun with a 'full' standard screen size.

Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 07:39, 23 June 20

Hi Axelay, as you can see from my sig, that is me, yes.

Ah, sorry I didn't see it.   ::)   I often check the forum on my phone and just checking it now I realise for some reason it shows the sig font invisibly small.

Quote from: Vince on 07:39, 23 June 20That video is possibly of a the game running on the plus range? I may be wrong ?
I can't be sure because I've only watched the video once, it's so far off and I don't care much for 'long term hype'.  But from the colours it was looking like CPC palette, and it referred to CPC in the trailer so I'd assume it's not Plus.

Quote from: Vince on 07:39, 23 June 20
Either way, the Amstrad series of computers were very much short changed and I fully acknowledge that!

I absolutely adore the c64 (and it is my favourite possibly even more than the Amiga), but I think I would enjoy, very much, learning all about the machines in the process of converting (not porting) my own games from the ground up.
I had fun learning the C64 for my Relentless conversion just last year, about the only thing I found annoying was I could never get straight in my head that carry flag implementation.  :laugh: 


Quote from: Vince on 07:39, 23 June 20
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I would also like to think that, one of my personal personality plus points is that I can and openly do admit when I am wrong. A friend of mine, a very knowledgeable, technically outstanding guy has confirmed to me that the footage of that game is genuine and I take my hat off to someone who has such skills!

As I also said over on the L64 discussion.

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I'll take a good look at those games, though, I don't think you can compare them to things like Turbocharge Outrun Europa and things as the style is somewhat different.
True enough.  I know they aren't particularly comparable, I just didn't like the idea someone might think that CPC racing was wall to wall Cisco Heat's is all.  :D

Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 18:16, 24 June 20
Hmmm. Someone mentioned it might be a cart, so... I didn't think a standard machine had a cart slot, am I wrong ?
No 'cart' slot, but it has an expansion port to which you can add RAM & ROM expansions.  Back in the day this included a 'rombox' which had sockets for inserting software bought on ROM chips, only productivity type software because of the cost as far as I'm aware.  In recent years there has been a game release or two on ROM expansions that are effectively 'like carts', and there's been discussion of an expansion with an actual cart slot in it so there's no swapping expansions around to change games, but I'm not sure if that's an actual thing yet.



Quote from: Vince on 18:16, 24 June 20
Great!  ha. The only thing that really gets me . drives me crazy is, I can't work with the colour restrictions else I'd be knocking up my own graphics (well coder-y ones).
Ha, yeah, the colour restrictions in multicolour character mode were more restrictive than I had understood before starting to work on the game, but fortunately I had rexbeng doing the graphics so for the most part it wasn't 'my problem' to deal with.  :)


Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 15:07, 25 June 20
Nice one ! I've not played it, I'll have to check it out!

As a scrolling shooter it was always entering a pretty crowded genre on the C64, but it was the most straight forward game of my previous CPC projects to try and convert because both versions were meant to fit in a 16kb cart/ROM.  I like to think it turned out pretty well for a 'my first C64 learning project' type of game, if nothing else.


[/size]
Quote from: Vince on 15:07, 25 June 20
Does the CPC range have a Tapuino? Tape emulator? They are brilliant, but as a dyslexic I really hate the name I am always spelling it wrong.
I'm not aware of anything Tapuino like on the CPC, but I can't claim to be up to date on all the hardware projects these days, there seems to be so many getting made or discussed.  I have just used a cassette tape adaptor with an old notebook playing tape files converted to waves on my 464 in the past.  I think more recently I've seen people talk about using their phones to play Mp3 files of tape images in a similar way.


reidrac

The "DES" (the cart system for the CPC) seems quite advanced:

https://auamstrad.es/des/

(I couldn't find a web in English, you may want to try with Google Translator)

I like the idea, probably better than the plain Dandanator (cart that goes into the expansion). IIRC with the DES they want preserve the idea of a physical medium that allows for nice physical releases, and also provide some extras.

The downside: you need the expansion (DES), and then the games (that I think are cheaper than the Dandanator itself). This requires an investment by the users, and when a game is released for this system, you know what you'll have as many players as DES units are out there.

IMHO I see the future more digital (e.g. SD card) + M4. Because you can play anything with the M4 (get the DSK and you're set), and you can get a box with a manual and "feelies" with an SD that you can use in both emulators and a real CPC. I guess it would be like a game for the Nintendo Switch.

3" disks are rare, and I guess cassettes will have a similar fate eventually.
Released The Return of Traxtor, Golden Tail, Magica, The Dawn of Kernel, Kitsune`s Curse, Brick Rick and Hyperdrive for the CPC.

If you like my games and want to show some appreciation, you can always buy me a coffee.

Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 18:20, 29 June 20
I like it, it looks nice. Looks like the controls are smooth.
Some original movement patterns for baddies. Stage 2's graphics have a nice style.
But... You might want a second go at the scrolling. The 64 can do super smooth scrolling.


Thanks.  What was the issue you were seeing with the scrolling though?  I wasn't able to test it on real hardware, but someone who tested it for me didn't report any issues.  Only way I could try it on my TV was with the C64 mini and that looked fine too.  I saw 'jitters' in the scroll under emulation on my PC and in youtube videos, but that was I think just 50fps on 60hz refresh rates.  Was that what you meant or something else?

Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 18:37, 30 June 20

Ok, on youtube video it looks *very jittery. Like your not using the native hardware scroll of the 64. Do you have a link to a download, and I'll try it myself?


Sure, it is available on itch.io here.

mr_lou

Quote from: Axelay on 13:16, 30 June 20I saw 'jitters' in the scroll under emulation on my PC and in youtube videos, but that was I think just 50fps on 60hz refresh rates.  Was that what you meant or something else?

This is something I mention more than most here, as far as I've seen.
All these YouTube vids described as "50 fps" - just doesn't help when the PC monitor is a 60hz one, which it is 99% of the time. So YouTube vids generally give a rather poor representation of the european retro computers' abilities. Same goes for local playback of a 50 fps mp4 file. Your monitor is still 60 hz.

Only the real hardware can be trusted. And alternatively blu-ray, because blu-ray players literally changes the refresh rate of the display to match the videos. But only if played on a real blu-ray player. Playing the ISO with VLC for example, again gives the 50 fps vs 60 hz problem.

Just another reason for choosing blu-ray as a diskmag platform.  ;)

pelrun

Things can be a lot better if you have a variable refresh rate display (i.e. the GSync/FreeSync stuff). It's for LCD monitors what Multisync was for CRT's, but with much finer granularity. So you can run 50Hz content and it'll play at 50Hz, even if your monitor is normally at some non-integer multiple of that rate.

mr_lou

Quote from: pelrun on 06:48, 04 July 20
Things can be a lot better if you have a variable refresh rate display (i.e. the GSync/FreeSync stuff). It's for LCD monitors what Multisync was for CRT's, but with much finer granularity. So you can run 50Hz content and it'll play at 50Hz, even if your monitor is normally at some non-integer multiple of that rate.

It goes without saying that things of course will look better, if the refresh rate could be changed.

It should probably be noted that most monitors can display 50hz just fine, in my experience. I can see that when I connect a blu-ray player to them. It works fine. So the problem isn't really with the monitors, but more with the OS software. There's no such option for neither me nor my better half, using Ubuntu and Win10.
I suppose it should be possible to find software to do it. Like maybe even from the manufacturer themselves.
But even if the average consumer would have the option of changing the refresh rate - they just wouldn't touch that setting anyway. Unless of course they were a genuine european retro geek, then they'd probably have it at 50hz or 100hz all the time. But otherwise they wouldn't touch it.

Previous times when this topic has been discussed, it usually ends with:
We need a dedicated YouTube app and/or local videoplayer that handles the refreshrate change when in fullscreen mode.
And I think someone already mentioned a videoplayer that did this, but I can't remember what it was.
It makes sense though that the refreshrate change is handled by the videoplayer rather than the OS.

pelrun

Quote from: mr_lou on 07:47, 04 July 20
So the problem isn't really with the monitors, but more with the OS software.


The situation is a bit more complicated than it seems. The monitor announces what modes it supports via it's EDID data. But it actually reports two *separate* sets of them. One, called DMT, are the standard computer monitor modes with 60Hz/75Hz/100Hz/120Hz and up refresh rates. The other is CEA. CEA includes all the rates like 24/25/29.97/50/59.94 that are important for film, PAL and NTSC video, but aren't really interesting to a computer.


Your PC is reading the DMT modes and ignoring the CEA ones, and your Bluray player is reading the CEA modes. Hence why it has no difficulty playing back PAL content on your monitor.


There's certainly software available to create custom modes and add them to your OS independently of the EDID ones, with the obvious caveat that they aren't guaranteed to work. :D

mr_lou

Quote from: pelrun on 09:51, 04 July 20CEA includes all the rates like 24/25/29.97/50/59.94 that are important for film, PAL and NTSC video, but aren't really interesting to a computer.

Well they're interesting to us dammit!  :)   Well, one of them anyway.
And should therefor also be interesting for the computer.

Axelay

Quote from: Vince on 11:13, 04 July 20
So I played it on Emu, Vice. Then later, in the evening, I made a physical tape and its the same on real hardware.


Sorry.


The screen has a slight stutter. After a screens worth of scrolling, it seems to copy the whole screen and it seems to be a couple of pixels out, then it begins the slight stutter again.

I see that same stutter in the original so maybe it is the technique you used?


Sorry to be negative. I just know that if you had a second run at the c64 version I am sure you could get that lovely and smooth.


This is only my opinion, Axe, so take it with a pinch mate.



No worries, thanks for taking the time to check it out.


I'm not really sure at this point what I might do about it though because I'm not seeing the issue you describe.  Of course on my PC I get a bit of jitter at full speed because of the 50/60 hz difference which I expect, but when I slow the emulation down I'm not seeing anything other than a regular 2 pixel step scroll with no jumps or delays.  And on the mini on my TV it was looking smooth as an arcade.


At some point I will probably try and have a look around for what is available for getting software on to real hardware to see if that is able to reproduce what you describe.

villain

What a useless thread now... Why???


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