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Genesis8 - Remake of Slap Fight (Alcon) by Abalore W.I.P.

Started by NewsBot, 16:00, 20 October 16

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abalore


robcfg

Jokes aside, I'm 45 and my hands start aching, so I've noticed that I cannot play such fast paced games...

VincentGR

No problem here at 44.
The key is to play fps and rocket league, keeps you alive  ;D

norecess464

Great overall progress !! The intro is fantastic. The game sounds lots of fun too, maybe sometimes a bit repetitive in its approach but the since it's a close port of the original gameplay, I can't complain much!! :) Probably one of the best vertical shoot'em'up available for the Amstrad. I would recommend to not rush for release, 2021 is cool too even for a game called "Alcon 2020"  ;)
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!

Otto

Quote from: GUNHED on 21:42, 12 December 20Sorry, I got 50 this year and I'm not as quick as I've been 45.
Youngster. :-)
But seriously the game is very had. And very nice.

How about a cheat for all those of us who crossed the 30-year-line "a little while" ago? Remember that in retro gaming many players aren't youngsters anymore.

abalore

Quote from: norecess on 05:20, 13 December 20
Great overall progress !! The intro is fantastic. The game sounds lots of fun too, maybe sometimes a bit repetitive in its approach but the since it's a close port of the original gameplay, I can't complain much!! :) Probably one of the best vertical shoot'em'up available for the Amstrad. I would recommend to not rush for release, 2021 is cool too even for a game called "Alcon 2020"  ;)
Thank you!

I start my holidays on 16th and there is not much to do. I hope to be able to release the free downloadable version before the end of the year. The physical edition will come later, because we want to make a nice cartridge, packaging, manual and all the stuff.

WiltshireWizard

#206
Fss.

abalore

Quote from: WiltshireWizard on 22:49, 22 December 20
Finally got around to playing this. Used Winape 2.0 B2 and an Xbox controller.


Well, it's certainly a faithful conversion in terms of how tough it is! Respect to the programmer(s) who took on this challenge. For me, bizarre as this may sound, it's too close a conversion and the colour scheme made it difficult to watch in my eyes. Because you see, the reason I like, for example, Space harrier on the Amstrad, and even Dragon's Lair or R-Type, is because all those conversions contain the particular idiosyncratic qualities that for me, make it an Amstrad game. Maybe I am not explaining this that well. Whereas this conversion, when playing it, makes me think "Well, I may as well just play the emulated Mame version."


But I take my hat off to you for putting in the time and energy into programming this and I hope it is a success.
Hi, I totally understand. The stippling in graphics is meant for CRT screens, so it doesn't perform well in emulators. For us, it's important than the game performs well in the real machine.

D_Skywalk

Hello @abalore we met at the exhibition in Malaga and that day the game already looked very good, my congratulations again.

I've been seeing that the game doesn't start in libretro because the header seems to be malformed or different from other games of the same capacity. The sum of the first 4 bytes should be 524548 (the pages + 260 header bytes). Are you doing something special and that's why you need those 8 additional bytes that appear in your header?

Thank you very much, David.


I'm a homebrew developer, Linux geek and a tireless game designer!

abalore

Quote from: D_Skywalk on 10:58, 23 December 22Hello @abalore we met at the exhibition in Malaga and that day the game already looked very good, my congratulations again.

I've been seeing that the game doesn't start in libretro because the header seems to be malformed or different from other games of the same capacity. The sum of the first 4 bytes should be 524548 (the pages + 260 header bytes). Are you doing something special and that's why you need those 8 additional bytes that appear in your header?


Hello David, the 8 byte difference is because there is a chunk "fmt \0\0\0\0" after the form-type "AMS!".

The reason of adding this empty chunk is because I found out that some utilities or emulators don't work without it (you can find it in some other CPR files too)

But anyway, a well implemented RIFF parser should read "fmt \0\0\0\0" as a chunk with "fmt " ID and 0 bytes, and just skip it because of being from an unknown type. So I must understand the RIFF parser from libretro is not very robust. The crude reality is that most parsers are poorly done, and that's the reason you are forced to make 512K files for smaller cartridges (they don't parse the CBnn correctly to store the data in the correct ROM block, but they presuppose the data will be in a static, predefined format).

As a solution, you are free to remove the 8 bytes corresponding to "fmt \0\0\0\0" using any hex editor and replace the 0C by 04 in the size field in order to make it work in libretro, or even better, modify the parser to allow skip unknown chunk IDs.

D_Skywalk

Np! The game loads perfectly and reads that chunk correctly, but I had a small test to check that there were no unexpected chunks. I understand that some tools use it, can you specify with the ones you've been using, to see what they use it for.



Still, I think it's a bit hackish to put that chunk in there xD

Thanks again @abalore :)
I'm a homebrew developer, Linux geek and a tireless game designer!

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