I am going to be cutting it fine on flash. I think I will only have 4 or 6 K free
That's good news. It's looking fine, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to fit mind's eye in under 2K. I'm assuming you haven't removed the default waves via the makefile. They are taking about 2.3k and I would replace a few with percussions, etc.
This weekend I will try get a firm number on how much space I have left.
I have not written all the PC based software to help me with the webs, but I'll make up data structures and fill them with dummy data just so I know how much space I have left.
I might have a look at the audio ASM to see if we can't squeeze and extra channel or something as well.
Here is what I am up to now.
It's not very different from previous from the outside.
It should have fixed the garbage on the left side of the screen on some SD cards.
Most interestingly though is that I have done a split screen mode. The first 16 pixel-rows are 2 line of what will be a ROM-tile mode. In the background of these 16 rows of pixels I accomplish the SD cards
Stop_Transmission
Read_Multi_Sector
and
Get_Token
That saves about 5000 clock cycles from the user-code time. At the moment I am just cycling colours. I do have 24 spare clocks per 8 pixels so it's an easy ask to do a 1BPP ROM-Tile in that.
So in those top 2 text rows on the screen I will have Lives/Score/Level and save a lot of RAM-Tiles for the action.
I still need to squeeze "clear screen" into the 200ish free clock cycles per scan line. Thats another few thousand clock cycles saved from user-space.
Same for me here, latest HEX doesn't work in the emulator. It works for the hardware with a microSD but seems you may off a couple cycles in you top section. Severe distortions with a regular SD card, the image in the bottom section in a total mess.
Sorry. All the work I am doing to date is one the video mode to be able to even begin a playable game.
I should by the end of this week have all the background work done and next weekend have something you can at least move the claw left/right in.
Probably no aliens or shooting things yet, but a step in that direction.
I saw Jeff Minter review many different version of Tempest including Tempest Xtreem. It is what made me change my mind about having music in the game and trying to do particle effects.
I am fairy confident I can come up with something that goes at least as well as that version. In fact there will be a little surprise treat when I eventually get a release you can move the claw in.
I'm not sure if you have followed by rambling thread or not. If not you probably don't realise why I am excited by these non-playable demos.
The backround webs it cycles through are not just tile maps made with the tile map converter tool. They are actually 1Bpp BMPs being played of the SD card straight to the screen. Over the top of these I am able to draw a 2Bpp vector mode (like mode 6 but 1/2 as many tiles)
Getting this far has been a lot of hours of effort, and most of the time I only had the emulator to work with.
Then the week before last I built some physical hardware to test on so am now certain that I can finish the work and get a playable game.
The actual game of Tempest will be quite trivial to do once the back ground work is done. Maybe a few days (excluding music/SFx)
Any ways - I thought I would post the ASM code I have done so far so people can have a look at it.
I suspect Uze, D3thadd3r and jhhoward would all be interested in seeing it at least.
It still has the rainbow pixels in section one as the real version is in a state of flux and has terrible/misleading comments.
Ask any questions you like if it don't make sense. I am going to do a full write up of how it works with diagrams and stuff to make it easier to understand also.