SpritesMind.Net

Is there anything different about Genesis and 32x carts? Something akin to the difference between 2600 and 7800 carts?

In other words, when the OP gets done with this can he walk up to Watermelon and have them use the same ROMs and cart packaging?

Official 32X carts have a slightly bigger case to prevent people from plugging them into a Genesis. Otherwise there's no difference at all.

Since my last update I've worked on drawing more background tiles under the characters feet. I added a "conveyor belt" effect to demonstrate scrolling of those tiles against the static background image and to make it a little more interesting.

Thanks to everyone's help tweaking the drawing algorithm to improve the performance substantially.

http://youtu.be/VeM5PqBVr8g

Made some improvements over the summer:
Added Side-Scrolling ability that lets you walk either forward or backward in the level. The Enemy will follow you within "sight distance". Added other objects in the foreground and another layer in the background just to highlight the movement effect.

Video is here:
http://youtu.be/ChiOXwBn_kk

Performance seems to be slightly degraded as more stuff happens on the screen, but I've been looking at the same demo screen for so long it's hard to tell. I guess that is expected.

Thanks to everyone who answered my questions in this thread about handling controller input.

I've got some questions in the main Genesis/MD forum about how to define a coordinate system for the game. Still looking for any input. What I have is what you see in the video, but my code seems clunky and not yet at the point I could define a "level" that my engine would process, its a lot of chewing gum and shoestrings holding that thing together

Ok, so this is nothing spectacular, but I've been slowly making this thing better over time.

http://youtu.be/_zkp2T92mTg

What's new
- Walking animations for Ninja (framework for all characters to have walk animations)

- A parallax effect and an expanded background. So What I did is take a much larger panoramic photo and resize it into two 320 x 160 bmps. I compress them and load them both to RAM at runtime. I then draw them side by side so it's seamlessly scrolling in the background. The parallax scrolling ratio from the foreground to background is about 7:1.

- The entire background (the square tiles on the floor and railing) are defined through a simple array in my code so I could easily change the level by updating that array. The array is See 14 x 100 ints where each
value refers to the index of a array of 16x16 images.

the "HELLO" spelled in the background is done with this. Rudimentary level editor!

- Mostly behind the scenes refactoring of the "game engine" to make it more robust and extensible, things like the palmtrees are now game objects I can put anywhere I want. Infrastructure there for multiple bad guys if I want. Cleaned up the main game loop.

This is all being done using a single 32X CPU. Genesis 68000 and the second 32 SH2 CPU are in idle loops.

To do:
- I would like to have some parallel processing to make use of the other CPUs using either MD for background or ob1's SuperVDP method to use both 32X CPUs for drawing the images to FB.
- Sound FX + Music - I haven't even tried this.
- Add multiple enemies. Enemies should have a fixed number of lives so you can eventually kill them.

Also because I think stats are cool:

39 text files.
38 unique files.
10 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.53 T=1.0 s (29.0 files/s, 7302.0 lines/s)
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Language files blank comment code
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Assembly 6 478 9 2605
C/C++ Header 13 104 181 1623
C 9 295 536 1398
make 1 19 5 49
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SUM: 29 896 731 5675
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It's working pretty decent here. You've made a lot of progress since you started.