Extra audio channels so music and SFX can play at same time (new 8 channel audio system)
This caught my attention! 8 channels would be pretty impressive. What would this entail? Would this involve an upgrade to the UB OS/ROM? Would each channel be able to play samples?
local changes to "soundmixerinline.s"
The PCM sample channels get dumbed down from what the currently are. They will only be able to play at a fixed rate and no loop.
Not good for music that needs the channel for instruments. Fine for T2K that just needs the word "play" spoken in the song.
However I am going to redo how the resources are loaded from SD card. Each resource takes 9 bytes. The screens like the one shown above are 2 resources. The TEXT and then an OBJECT list for the spinning enemies. SO that screen takes 18 bytes of precious flash.
I think I can rework it to make the code a few words longer and make the resource list only take 2 bytes.
Maybe Artcfox will sell me one of his. He must have at least 5!
After 2 incomplete attempts at making my own, it is the soldering of the AD... chip that I'm trying to avoid mainly by buying one ready made. That seems to be the trickiest bit.
Cool to see you continually tweaking T2000. Its looking very polished now and with more to come it seems! Be great to get see the cleaned up and tweaked source release happen. I failed to get it to build last time I tried.
I am not going to put this on the wiki yet because it is a state of flux.
However the UZE file, the source code and the matching LVL file all in one zip.
Code is still a bit of a mess and comments need a lot of work to make sense in places.
Keen to see if people think the code is too ugly/difficult for the general public. I was planing on doing a youtube video going through some of the hairy details of how Tornado 2000 works.
The good news is I was successfully able to build this updated release under Debian (testing) Linux! The bad news is I failed to run it under cuzebox or uzem as it just says "NO BOOTLOADER".
CunningFellow wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 10:53 pm
It will only run under cuzebox and needs the bootloader ROM present.
That will be a file called CODEROM.BIN in the same directory as the executable.
If you don't have the coderom.bin file then run the bootloader5.hex file from Jubatian and cuzebox will create the bootloader ROM.
This isn't working for me. I've tried using both bootloader5.hex and bootloader5.uze copied to coderom.bin (and I've tried CODEROM.BIN) in the same dir as the T2k binary but I'm still getting the no bootloader found error under both emus.
For the next release I'd just include it or at least include a README with these instructions please.
If you have a file called coderom.bin in the same directory as cuzebox.exe then delete it.
Get the file called bootloader5.hex and put it in the directory with cuzebox.exe
Copy t2k.uze and utempest.lvl to that same directory.
Run bootloader5.hex. The gameloader menu should appear in the emulator.
Select T2K from that menu (or any other game present). When you do this cuzebox will create a new coderom.bin
From now on whenever you run any (dot)uze file OR select a game from the menu - the bootloader will be present.
Neither T2K or the RLE(spinning Elite Cobra) demo will work with the old uzem emulator. Only Jubatians new cuzebox.
Each for a different reason. T2K because it needs the bootloader which uzem does not support. RLE Demo because it needs USART Interrupt support.
Originally T2K would not run in the emulator because T2K used a novel new method to end a scanline using a timer interrupt. I did a patch for uzem to work with this. Other video modes also now use this method to end the scanline and both emulators support it.
RLE demo added the need for a new interrupt to make the video mode work. Only cuzebox has been patched for it.