Tempest is possible

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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by D3thAdd3r »

CunningFellow wrote:If I make a small hex file that can play all the instruments from Minds Eye (cymbals, drums, etc) one by one, can you guys listen to them and tell me if my new noise channel sounds like the 15 bit LFSR ?
yes of course :)
CunningFellow wrote:And then have
1 Wave
1 noise
Just for SFX then everything can be done no collision.
It seems like we have run full circle here. I am not in a position to analyze trade offs of this or that, since really only you know what can be done with all the optimizations, options, and tricks you found. But at a basic level this solution would go back to the need of a priority system. If only dumb PCM(can't use it for an extra wave), then we lose the depth of the 2 part effects. Now, so far we haven't heard them really well in game, but once that is sorted out, I really believe it is worth it. The sound effects test at least so far shows what they will sound like, and to me are better than any game I ever released. I'd be quite happy with 2 dedicated waves, and some ability to reproduce the explosion sounds. The explosions could get cut off sometimes and it would be fine. Tempest 2000 on Jaguar cuts off effects so much it is almost ridiculous, still good sound overall.

Now the original Tempest arcade game I did analyze the effects and they are using a lot of noise likes. I did briefly play around and theorize to mimic those but I was just spinning my wheels . I never found an efficient process for making noise effects and only have enough "feel" to produce the couple I ever needed to. To me they were, meh..ok. If I was more confident I would say just do 1 wave and make some new supporting noise secondary depth parts of it. But I'm honestly a bit scared to promise that and end up with something well below the quality/epicness of the rest of the game. I will think on it though. People like it and so do I, so I wont repeat my cold blooded cost/benefit analysis on "PLAY" :lol: I am assuming there is really no flash to PCM explosions?
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uze6666
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by uze6666 »

CunningFellow wrote:Uze, Awesome

So if I can have

3 Wave
1 Noise
1 PCM

Just for Minds Eye

And then have

1 Wave
1 noise

Just for SFX then everything can be done no collision.

Uze, D3thAdd3r, If I make a small hex file that can play all the instruments from Minds Eye (cymbals, drums, etc) one by one, can you guys listen to them and tell me if my new noise channel sounds like the 15 bit LFSR ?
Sure send it, we'll check it out.

Btw, I lost track of the cycles savings, but is it enough to add an extra wave channel to the current 5 channels (noise+full pcm)? I'd really like to add another one in the current mixer engine (i.e channel 6) in a retro compatible way.
CunningFellow
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by CunningFellow »

18 clocks saved far without the possible new noise channel so not enough for an extra wave yet.

If the new noise idea does sound the same as a real 15 bit LFSR then we have 29 extra clocks - so you can have an extra wave channel.

I may have to go back to the 4 phase idea that kills 32 bytes of RAM then I can have

5 Wave
2 Noise
1 Dumb PCM

in T2K
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Any progress on the sound expansion Cunning? Does it seem at this point it could cleanly integrate with the existing sound options so that we could actually specify it in the makefile? I was trying to make a couple songs lately and gave up, ones that I tried before and gave up, and thought to myself "man I wish I just had 1 more channel"
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by CunningFellow »

I've tried adding SDHC support to T2K.

This hacked version can only support SDHC as I am not yet taking into account byte/sector addressing differences.

I just want to see that other people can run it on their SDHC cards on real hardware.

If I get majority thumbs up I will fix it up so it does SD/SDHC automatically.
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CunningFellow
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by CunningFellow »

Got a few positive responses. So I went ahead and fixed up the code so it could support SD and SDHC at the same time.

Give it a try and tell me if its all good.

I'm going to go try finish super hexagon now.

Edit: Added a fix for cards that where too slow to load the title screen in V-Blank
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Artcfox
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by Artcfox »

After the latest fix for delaying the title screen movie by 1 frame, the game works great, however the latest 5.0.11 bootloader hangs with the SDHC cards that have T2K.UZE and UTEMPEST.LVL on them. I don't have any more blank cards to test if it hangs without those files on there, but it won't list anything, and it is completely frozen. I can't even change booting to the game or the menu. If I flash T2K.UZE from a non-HC card, and tell it to boot to the game, I can switch the cards to an SDHC that has the UTEMPEST.LVL on it, and the game plays fine, but if I go back into the bootloader, the bootloader hangs.
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Artcfox
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by Artcfox »

I ran into a bug, that is preventing me from advancing. I played one game, and got to a high level and died. Then when the game restarted it was really fast, the way some of the higher levels act. That was fine, and I was doing better than I've ever done before, but now I'm stuck on a level (I killed all the enemies), and it won't advance me to the next level. Is there a way out?

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Jubatian
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by Jubatian »

Wow, nice progress here, I could finally play Tempest on real HW!

Unfortunately I had absolutely zero luck reproducing the bootloader issue. No matter what card I used, what filesystem I formatted it with (FAt-16 or FAT32), it just worked. Including things like putting Tempest and its level file on a 8MB card from a digital camera, which was already some 85% full, and formatted the way the digital camera needed it.

I could manage to screw up the partition table though once, but data analysis showed that the MBR was set to use CHS addressing (nowadays pretty much obsolete), which the bootloader can't decode.

Artcfox sent me a PM describing that he was having problems with cards coming with empty space at the beginning. Never seen that sort of thing myself, but I don't have Windows at home, if it tends to do that for some obscure reason. This, if the bootloader was meant to sweep through it until finding some data which looks like a partition table would be quite a problem, too complex algorithm to fit in the nonexistent remaining space (4 bytes as of V.5.0.11, or 2 AVR instructions, but even if it was 20 or even 50, it might be too few).

EDIT: Never mind, looking at the code it might be an assumption that the first partition would come sooner than the 4 MBytes mentioned, will have to look into the reasons why. Added comment describing actual limits in the Bootloader thread.
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Artcfox
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Re: Tempest is possible

Post by Artcfox »

With the latest patch to the bootloader (5.0.12), I can now run Tornado 2000 on every SDHC card that I've tried on real hardware!
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