There is no Thanksgiving over here but I just passed the defense of my PhD thesis… so I will just celebrate that.

morintari wrote:
… would you consider making the perspective 3rd person like the Guitar Hero games instead of side view or birds eye like the previous Game Hero game?

Maybe, maybe not. We will see what happens when I actually start.

Protoman85 wrote:
Hey, it is!

Maybe, maybe not. Right now I don’t feel like it, but in time maybe my temporary completion-fetish might kick in.

I really like the hombrew showcase. It made me want to polish my game. Would be great to have a new review when there are new hombrews.

wazzal wrote:
It sounds AMAZING!

Thanks.

I will try to do use the Midi-Player in Fishbone first. the current quality should be more then ok for that game. There is still some stuff I have to fix/change, so it is not as easy as it might sound.

After that I probably going to do “GameHero 2”. I could just replace the music in GameHero but not polishing the graphics at the same time would be a shame. Therefore I would use my current engine anyway… so there is no difference to just do a completely new game.

However, here is what I changed since the last iteration:
– Notes do now fade at the end (This can still be improved)
– Dynamic timing for all channels
– Dynamic volume for every note
– Different instruments per channel
– Timing using interrupts
– Replay for every channel
– Fixed Midi-Converter to support new player
– Converter adds pause at end of each channel to enable synchronous replay

I only tested this for one song but it should work for the others as well.

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Wow… this music sounds amazing!

That’s the reaction I was hoping for. It actually wasn’t that much work. I still feel like I could do better though. Seems like I have to do a “GameHero 2” when I’m done with Fishbone.

In my ongoing attempt to make the world a better place for all of us I have been working on this project again.

Attached to this post you will find a new demo of the Midi Player. You might notice that the quality of the music improved.

I’m not done yet though.

Tell me if you like the results.

Attachments:

1. example_pad.zip

Dreammary recently told me that he had problems booting the game after he flashed it on his flashboy. Did anyone else experience this?

e5frog wrote:
Seems a bit odd to me.

Isn’t the SRAM hooked to the same bus as the rom but only half of the data lines hooked up?

Is it the data lines that are used every second one and not just the upper or lower half?

So is the SRAM using D1, D3, D5, D7, D9, D11, D13, D15 instead of just D0-D7 or D8-D15?

Guess I could open a cart and have a look…

It would actually be great if someone else would look into this. I just hacked something together that worked for me. However, it would be great if someone could end the ongoing speculations and post some code that shows how it should be done.

So… how near is the first batch to actually being shipped?

I guess I will have to wait until someone donates it to me 🙂

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Well, I tried my best to get a score glitch by turning my Virtual Boy off and on as fast as possible on several occasions,

Well… thanks for testing, good to know it’s not glitchy anymore. However… dude… don’t break your Virtual Boy!!!!

🙂 I’m happy I could help. I can go through your code in depth if I find some time. I really like how your game develops. I won’t do it this year though. But if you provide my with the full source some-when next year I will see what I can do.

HorvatM wrote:
Well, I looked at the SRAM file of your test program produced by Reality Boy with a hex editor and only every other byte was nonzero. But eg. Galactic Pinball can use every byte. Since the FlashBoy Plus is compatible with all commercial games, how does it do that?

That’s interesting… I have no freaking clue. I guess this needs further investigations. If I try to write into the uneven bytes it always fails. Writing 8k isn’t a problem when I only accessed the even bytes. That’s also how I understood DogP and Dasi.

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

The SRAM is a 8-bit wide chip on a 16-bit wide bus, so you have to access it through even addresses only.

Yup, always right after midnight. This delayed the Fishbone Demo release by several hours!

Ok, here is the update. The program now test 8k. It still works on both systems. Also Kr155e pointed out a bug in the clearRam function so here is the fixed one:

static u16* const	SAVERAMX =	(u16*)0x06000000;

void mem_setToSRAM(u16 pos, u8 value)
{
	SAVERAMX[(pos*2)] = value;
}

u8 mem_getFromSRAM(u16 pos)
{
	u8 value = SAVERAMX[(pos*2)];
	
	return (u8)value;
}

void mem_clearSRAM(u16 offset, u16 range)
{
	u16 i = 0;
	
	for(i=offset; i<(offset+range); i++)
	{
		mem_setToSRAM(i, 0);
	}
}

Attachments:

1. memtest-1.zip

Ahhh, there are 8k of RAM…. I will keep on testing!

Ok, as there are still some people having problems writing to the SRAM I programmed a little test program. It simply writes a changing value to the SRAM and reads it again. If the value that has been read isn’t the one that has been written the test fails. The program tests this for the complete 4k. I tested this using RealityBoy and on Hardware using my FlashBoy Plus. It worked perfectly on both systems.

This is how I write/read the SRAM:

static u16* const	SAVERAMX =	(u16*)0x06000000;

void mem_setToSRAM(u16 pos, u8 value)
{
	SAVERAMX[(pos*2)] = value;
}

u8 mem_getFromSRAM(u16 pos)
{
	u8 value = SAVERAMX[(pos*2)];
	
	return (u8)value;
}

void mem_clearSRAM(u16 offset, u16 range)
{
	u8 i = 0;
	
	for(i=offset; i<(offset+range); i++)
	{
		mem_setToSRAM(i, 0);
	}
}

I know it is not proper c formated code with fancy shifting and all of that stuff but it works for me. I hacked the test program together pretty fast... so there might be something wrong there.

I hope this helps!

Attachments:

1. memtest.zip

bigmak wrote:
I want one!

foil_lone_wolf wrote:

Benjamin Stevens wrote:
Oh man… I hope you’re planning to sell copies of carts and boxes of your game. If so, let me be one of the first orders! 🙂

I would be so down too.

If there are another 22 to 47 people interested this might actually happen. In that case I would even make a manual.

UncleTusker wrote:
Looks amazing. AVGN would love that!!!

You think I should donate it to him?