Uzebox Forums

I just found this quite amazing, actually a colleague showed it to me in a break of a training, well, it is quite new, no wonder I missed in all that relocation mess!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWQ0591PAxM

People are still doing stuff for the NES. All sort of awesome hacks there to cram a lot of content into a no bank switching cartridge!

I just saw this video 2 days ago. I actually considered posting the 40kb game video as a sort of tilemap tutorial video since it really clearly showed how tile de-duplication worked.

I'm very tempted to pick up a copy of this... Especially because it didn't use extra hardware in the cartridge and as they said "could have been a launch title."

That certainly is incredibly impressive. I'm always amazed by people willing to implement complex games in pure assembler. You must have hair on your teeth, plenty of patience and a good sense of humor. The various compression techniques are interesting. It's also good to see that actually a lot of them are already used over here. One thing that struck me was the use of meta tiles of meta tiles. Never considered that myself, but does actually make complete sense. Think I'll have a play around with that. Perhaps something I can implement as an extension to the meta tile feature in gconvert.

I think I remember in the thread about Joyrider that JHoward said he used something like meta-meta tiles to make the map larger.

As of yet I have not made a game totally in ASM for the Uzebox. The AVR is just so well suited to C that for non speed critical things C is better in most respects.

T2K used ASM for all the line drawing and trig stuff, but all the game logic was done in C with a stack of function pointers.

The 6510 can be difficult if you want to do something really intensive, I played around with it on the C64, doing VIC synced graphics. Things get tight when you have only 63-65 cycles in a scanline depending on video standard (contrary to 1820 on the Uzebox), and the chip can do loads / stores in 3-6 cycles depending on the addressing mode. However those video chips are really neat, and it shows how much even simple hardware can do when comparing to Uzebox (I can almost get VIC II like graphics with Mode 72, but only almost, and it needs a mess of code tiles to get there).

I liked it in comparison to my Flight of a Dragon, since actually my game uses most of the techniques as well to cram all what it has in 60K. Maps actually have meta-meta-meta tiles in this game, so not 2 levels, but 3 levels, it was really tricky to design the individual levels so diverse maps could be assembled.

And sure, the AVR is just designed for C (it was one of the key design goals), the compiler can do excellent job with this architecture.