Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

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SpacebarArcade
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Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by SpacebarArcade »

Hi. This is a little project I did for our Arcade - using the Uzebox Jamma. The game is kind of a cross between a top down racing game and an endless runner. It is vertically oriented which presented some challenges.

Code here: https://github.com/spacebararcade/SmokeyAndTheBandit
Details here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 811&type=1
More details here: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set ... 811&type=1
On the testbench: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MB2kLF4LBSU
In the cabinet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iShyuUyFLrM

It was quite simple to get something playable up and running. I do wish I could get more than 8 sprites functional :-) I'm also having some trouble getting it to build with the latest version of Uzebox - currently only works with 3.3.

satb-cab1.png
satb-cab1.png (426.42 KiB) Viewed 1409 times
satb-cab2.jpg
satb-cab2.jpg (26.12 KiB) Viewed 1409 times
Attachments
smokeyAndTheBandit.uze
(57.83 KiB) Downloaded 41 times
smokeyAndTheBandit.hex
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Last edited by D3thAdd3r on Tue Nov 14, 2023 5:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Very cool, look kind of like Spy Hunter. I love seeing a quarter deposit register in the game, I wish I had a cabinet :(

For your game you can only have 8 sprites? Most of the time 8 sprites arranged as 2x2 mega sprites will take 18 or less ram tiles. Free floating single sprites can take more though. I see you have a RAM_TILES_COUNT of 26 which I think is fairly low. Perhaps there is ways to save ram in your game that would allow more. If you decided you wanted to go with Mode 13, you would then have 52 ram tiles available without any other game changes of course ;)

So, how on earth are you supposed to get past that stream of water you crashed into at the end of the video?
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Jubatian
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by Jubatian »

Wild :)

An other video popped up for me on this nice game, apparently you can jump with the car! Quite fast-paced, seems like something which absolutely needs 60FPS to be playable. Hmm... I just realized I can turn this monitor in portrait mode... Guess will give a try later in emulator (I am visiting family, though, so if time permits, wild keyboard bashing won't go on anyone's nerves etc., its Christmas after all :) )

Mode 13: Well, not exactly 52 since you need a 256b palette buffer there. Subtracting that it is rather 44, still a lot more than 26, though! But I don't think it has a sufficiently fast sprite blitter for this game.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Oh, of course you are right there.

Still with a shorter screen you could blit that many. For vertical scrolling things of course VRAM_TILES_V is precious. Could always have the camera put the car lower in the screen to make up for the lost of vram rows as far as look ahead visibility is concerned.
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uze6666
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by uze6666 »

We don't see UzeboxJAMMA game very often so that's awesome. So now that's there's a game, we really need to implemented vertical mode in uzem! Btw, in mode 3 you can have up to ~38 usable ramtiles. So you can double that in mode13 since it's a 4bpp mode and remove 256 for the palette. So about 68 Ramtiles. Just have to complete that blitter though...
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kivan117
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by kivan117 »

Awesome work! Looks like it runs pretty smoothly... Unfortunately I don't have the Uzebox Jamma... now it looks like I'll finally have to get one ;)
SpacebarArcade
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by SpacebarArcade »

I hacked uzem to run in vertical mode - I got annoyed pley testing with my head sideways :-)

It does go very fast but on the CRT it looks very smooth indeed. I was shooting for a twitch game that feels like "Kaboom" on the 2600 if you are familiar with that. So as the level increases the placement of beer cans and the turns in the road becomes more erratic.

The code is pretty messy. I'm trying to go back and clean things up so I can add a couple of additional game elements.

It is on location at our Arcade and gets played almost as much as Galaga and Ms. Pac Man! Maybe when the novelty wears off that'll change :-)
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Gosma
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by Gosma »

Cool i would like to try it in my uzem :D
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Artcfox
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by Artcfox »

Very awesome game!

Also, thank you so much for including the convert-midi-for-uzebox.txt file in your git repository. That was invaluable to me for learning how to create MIDIs from scratch on Linux using Rosegarden and getting them to work on the Uzebox. I'm not sure how many people went poking around in your git repo, so I'll include the contents of that file here just to help anyone else out who only browses the forums:
How to create a music patch file

* Find a midi song
* Open it with rosegarden (import)
* Reduce the tracks to 4 or less
** Remember that the uzebox doesn't support polyphany within a channel, so try to pick channels that only play one note at time.
** Remove existing markers.
** Create markers S (start) and E (end) at the start and end of the song.
** Save the resulting midi file (export)
* Convert the file from midi type 1 to type 0 (wine /home/trent/Downloads/gn1to0.exe)
* Convert the midi file to an uzebox patch file (java -cp /home/trent/Downloads/uzetools.jar com.belogic.uzebox.tools.converters.midi.MidiConvert -f 6 input.mid output.h)
I got sick of having to use Wine to run the Windows program to convert the MIDI from a type 1 to a type 0, so I updated the uzetools.jar file to support both type 0 and type 1 midi formats, so that step should no longer be necessary, and I updated the converter to support the type of NOTE_OFF commands that Rosegarden uses, so if you pass the -no1, -no2, -no3, -no4, or -no5 flags it will now work as expected.

Also, if your source MIDI has a polyphonic track, I just added a tool (p2m) to the main repository that can split a polyphonic track up into multiple monophonic tracks, so (within the Uzebox's limitations) you can actually play those files correctly on the Uzebox if you're willing to sacrifice channels.

Thanks again for an awesome game, and thank you so much for providing instructions for Rosegarden!
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nicksen782
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Re: Smokey and the Bandit - Uzebox Jamma Homebrew Arcade Machine

Post by nicksen782 »

No binary? Running 'make' in the 'default' directory gives error about missing file: '/data/sprites.inc'

I would like to see this.
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