Uzebox Forums

It was only yesterday I saw a video and learned of a very cool looking 1979 vectorbeam game called Warrior:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUp0lzFiscs

This game predates me, I never saw it in an arcade but its got a great look and looks fun to play. I was reminded of CF's Tornado 2000 and Chickens in Choppers as well as the recently discussed Barbarian. You could say it's a vector precursor of Barbarian.

I thought I'd post it here as it looks like something that could potentially be remade on the UB.

Do you reckon this could be achieved on the Uzebox CF? How many vectors can the UB draw on screen at once with your T2000 vector video mode?

The blue background and the white vectors no problem.

The red/green parts of the screen would probably have to be simplified to use repeating patterns.

Blue background is "free" and takes no RAM.

Any thing that is not blue/black uses up RAM.

There is enough RAM to make 14% of the tiles on the screen non blue/black.

The background does not need to be lines/vectors. It can be any arbitrary bitmap. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0N7p5DayI

In terms of how many vectors you can draw see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Uaz5XjnVo. That is close to the limit.

CunningFellow wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 10:31 pm The background does not need to be lines/vectors. It can be any arbitrary bitmap. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0N7p5DayI

OMG! I don't think I had seen that demo before! Wowza! That looks amazing.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something like Limbo with a fancy background that changes as you move? It might end up being really huge because of the background, but no worries, I have a 32GB SD card

CunningFellow wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 10:31 pm In terms of how many vectors you can draw see this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7Uaz5XjnVo. That is close to the limit.

That there is a LOT of vectors!

Artcfox wrote: ↑Sun Jan 29, 2023 12:12 am I wonder if it would be possible to do something like Limbo with a fancy background that changes as you move? It might end up being really huge because of the background, but no worries, I have a 32GB SD card

the 400 megabyte data file of T2K would be a half hour long movie of webs rotating and zooming if you played it end to end at 30FPS

So, doable?

Yes - Have for a while thought something where the blue background was a world you could walk through would be cool. It just would not ever get done if left up to me

Back on topic. Count the squares that are non blue/black in this picture. You can get to a max of 128 before you run out of RAM.
Each warrior takes about 16. So that is 1/4 your non blank tiles (32) for the two players. That leaves 96 tiles to do the red/green bits.

Simplify them so there is a repeating pattern or reduce the amount of coloured areas - could be done no problem.

danboid wrote: ↑Sat Jan 28, 2023 1:05 pm Do you reckon this could be achieved on the Uzebox CF? How many vectors can the UB draw on screen at once with your T2000 vector video mode?

If I make a tool to draw the backgrounds and static RAM tiles do you want to give it a try Danboid?

Thanks for offering to help CF!

I don't feel ready to attempt this yet.

My Uzebox project list looks like this:

Add (UART) patch loading to Uzesynth (if Alec doesn't do it, I'm sure he'd do a better job than me). I think the community stands to gain the most the more we can do to improve the music production workflow. Its been put off for the longest time.
Finish IKD - kinda depends on the previous
Defender remake

I've never actually played Warrior. I should give a go under MAME. Defender seems like a more glaring omission but Warrior might be easier to tackle because it doesn't depend on scrolling?

Reading the comments on the youtube video the mention this site

https://mrdo.mameworld.info/mame_artwork_ingame.php

That has a ZIP file (warrior.zip) to download the overlay artwork. Would be a good starting point.

Also Defender would be good