Nice to see the old classic games invading the prime (you see what i did there? )
Anyways, looking nice

Thanks for the feedback

Yes the random level was a bug, now corrected
I also get the flickering when I pick up a green dot, I need to look into that.

  Space is the aliens locations on the GROB.
Aliens are layed out in 30x30 grid og G4, so it is easy to calculate wich alien a bullet is entering.
I dont use any pixel check, but that would also work.

Boss aliens would be easy to implement; make them harder to kill, and also make them fire more bullits.

By the way, don't you hate the low framerate in the emulator?

Well, that was news to me that it was problematic... will put that on the list of things to adjust.

How many fps do you want it to update at?

Quote from: Handmixer on January 04, 2014, 01:53:21 pm

Aliens are layed out in 30x30 grid og G4

There can be 900 aliens at once on the screen? (unless you meant that each alien is 30x30 pixels?) if you had kept the old alien drawing method (through a loop rather than a giant GROB, you would probably have needed to do like Atari 2600 games and only draw a bunch per frame, which would have resulted in extreme flicker, but kept speed up)

Yes, my  mistake, the aliens takes up 30x30 pixels. But since the actual size of the alien is 26x21 pixels, then a litte math has to be done to check if the bullit is in the void.


Regarding the emualtor discussion.  I understand that in the terms of making a video of what goes on on the emulator screen better accuracy is needed, but when I write code in the connectivity kit, transfer it and then run it. If coding-transfer-run was a smooth flow I wouldnt't care so much about the Emulator since I would use the calculator to run. But today production is not smooth. I use the editor in the connectivity kit, but I have to lookup help in the emulator or in the PDF - context sencitive help should be Integrated in the editor. When I transfer the program the calc goes to Home, and it puts my new program in the bottom of the list, that is counter produtive, at least it should give focus to the program that was uploaded the last. Some basic syntax check could also be done before transfering the program to the calc.

Wow the boss almost went Touhou on me for a few seconds

I think the boss is way too hard, though, for a level 3 boss. Since we can't move vertically and only have 1 life, he is next to impossible to beat since he almost dodges all your bullets and often traps you between waves of his own bullets, making escape impossible. It might be good to maybe add 3 lives or make the boss so he cannot shoot more than one bunch of bullets in 2 seconds (like in Galaxia and Phoenix).

A bigger sprite would be a good idea. It could also have different eyes to show he is angry or something.

As for level transition you could just make new waves of enemies scroll in like in Galaxian.

Btw, I think this is on HP's fault, but if we play Trailblazer for a while then Space Invader, the ship sprites flicker like mad. I think the HP Prime has a memory leak or something requring a reboot for normal behavior to return, but I was wondering if there's a workaround for now?