KR155E is going to test the SRAM access the way I did it in Blox 2. Let’s see what happens there.

My initial recode of the save functions in Blox 2 did not work, so I have to debug it. This is not much fun, so I have no idea when I’ll be in the mood. So… better don’t wait for me. 😉

I have fixed the title here and in the game section.

[KR155E]

Great job, guys! I noticed that the “m” has a single pixel to the top right, which should not be there.

EDIT: As Ben pointed out to me via email, this malformed “m” is actually in the original English alphabet that was created for the game by Coconuts Japan, but since almost only uppercase English characters are used in the game, this error can’t be spotted by simply playing. A funny little fact I think. 🙂

• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by KR155E.
• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by KR155E.

One more thing I noticed: In the Classic Phish level, the far background and the player/enemies scroll at the same speed, while the ground scrolls much faster. It would probably look much better if the ground and player/enemies scrolled at the same speed, and the background at a much slower speed.

Just tried the demo on hardware, and it runs perfectly. Good work!

The stage select screen has a little bug, which causes the music to play as soon and as long as I press the left or right button, but the stage items won’t move until I release the button.

I would change three things to make the menu look and feel even more awesome:

– Speed it up a lot
– Make all the menu items start moving at the same time
– Scale the items down in size once they are moved to the background

The latter would not be trivial, though, as it would require Affine transformations, which I personally never got to work properly. 😀

thunderstruck schrieb:
It is possible to swim between both of them. The top of the lamp fish won’t hurt you.

Alright, finished the level! It’s a bit hard to see that you can fit through them.

I found a little typo: “Revange of the fish” should be “Revenge of the fish”.

Nice, thunder, this is really well done! I love the attention to detail, the nice looking sprites, all the little animations here and there – it all looks very polished. Lots of potential in the thunder engine, can’t wait to see it grow further. 🙂

By the way, is there a way to get past the two “lamp fishes” in the classic fish level?

That’s a lot of goodness for a single video! 🙂

thunderstruck schrieb:
Just out of curoisity. Was it because you did not reference the mem.c file in your Makefile?

No. I don’t know why it did not work, but I simply had to declare the array as a global constant to make it work.

[KR155E]

I am able get rid of the errors and get Blox 2 to compile if I comment out a few small portions of the code. I can’t explain to myself what’s causing the memcpy error, but I am now much closer to finding the problem. 🙂

EDIT: Here’s the line that causes the memcpy problem. It’s used to define a button code sequence. I don’t see anything wrong with it:

u16 classic[] = {2050, 2050, 1026, 1026, 34, 18, 34, 18, 6, 10, 8194}; /* LU, LU, LD, LD, LT, RT, LT, RT, A, B, Sel */

EDIT2: Got that solved, thanks to dasi! 🙂

• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by KR155E.
• This reply was modified 13 years, 8 months ago by KR155E.

So, Ben Stevens and VBmills will receive 50 box and label prints each and will take over distribution in the USA and Europe respectively. 🙂

I have some more left, so I think I will take care about the german market while the prints last.

@thunderstruck sound good! that would be a neat feature to add to the engine some day. 🙂

@VBen that artwork looks very nice, good work!

thunderstruck schrieb:
50 sprites only for the player is certainly too much. However, the demo shows a pretty early version. We will polish the game before it goes live. My engine provides a pretty simple way to extend/change existing animations. It shouldn’t be to complicated to a blink or a fin or something as long as there is some space left on some map.

From your post I assume you’re loading all animation frames into a BGMap and cycle through them? The problem with this method is that you’re dependant on the size limit of the BGMaps, plus at any moment, you’re holding many sprites in memory, which you don’t need in that particular moment, because they’re not displayed. Basically, you only need to have the sprites in memory, which you’re showing on screen in that moment.

So the better way to do this would be to point the map to only one location in character memory and reload the animation frames directly into character memory. VB Wario Land or the vbJAEngine are doint it that way for example. 50 animation frames should be no problem with this method, the only limitation would be the ROM size. 🙂

A good suggestions, thanks! I have reduced the number of articles to 5 now. 🙂

There’s an elegant solution for embedded flash videos: showing a screenshot of the video on the site, and embedding the video via javascript only after the user clicked on the screenshot. If the video starts instantly this would feel almost the same, except it would be much faster. Maybe I can build something for me that generates the needed img tag with js code and somehow gets a screenshots in the size of the video.

Now the question is: how would you split the boxes? If people want a low number and they know that either Luke or I have all the low numbers, that could create a dilemma. Perhaps send Luke all the odd numbers and send me all the evens or vice versa?

Splitting the boxes, so that both receive equally low and high numbers is the way to go. Splitting even and odd would be one way to go, but there are people who like even numbers more – like me. 😉 Maybe I’ll split randomly.

I have pre-numbered all box prints, so there will be no doubles.

Indeed, since FlashBoys are no longer shipped with boxes, the numbers are no longer in sync with actual produced cartridges. Now those numbers count only boxed FlashBoys, i.e. collectibles, I think that’s OK. The number fields are there on the prints anyway, and just leaving them blank would not be the best way. 😉

Thanks Luke and Ben! I’d be more than happy with any of you taking over. I’d like to split up the boxes and send one part to each of you, so we’d have one person for the American, and one for the European market. Does that sound good?

This video is rad… ke! 😀 Heh, I love that part.

It’s really great to see coverage of the Virtual Boy homebrew scene. Things like this don’t happen too often. Thanks for doing this!

This gives a very good impression of gameplay, thanks!

We should not forget that grabbing images directly from the display would be fantastic in terms of recording gameplay. I certainly would love a way to create pixel perfect (stereo) videos for the site!