DJ: I'm trying to keep the feel of the original but there's a reduced number of objects on screen. I've been watching the arcade version of Frogger and trying to adapt it while keeping the speed fast. The game looks simple enough, but on the road the frog is drawn as an aligned sprite. Fast and easy enough to accomplish, but when it gets on the logs, it can scroll horizontally pixel by pixel. That's where I need to cheat a little bit....

Here's a new preview of Tunnel:


Download the demo: http://briandm82.com/?ddownload=587

I'm pausing it again to finish Frogger, here's an updated version, nothing major, WriteText and an Optimized mode has been added and all previously disabled functions have been enabled. Today I got a jump on an Animated Gif Converter which will allow 'movies' to be played on the calc. I'm also optimizing it so that for simple animations high resolution videos might actually be an option

No but I like it! Ha Ha! Which brings me to another question, whats a clanger???

Greatest ever. DJ is going to hate it! 

Here's a demo video on Frogger. Right now its at 10,737 bytes.

The sprite count is definitely the biggest problem and will slow it down significantly, I try not to think about it I can make a small number of sprites go faster or large number go slower. I was also thinking about not letting the logs come on screen until the road was passed, then stop the vehicles. Maybe even have the road on one screen, then scroll up to water part. There is also the possibility of having the screen horizontal to take advantage of the hardware scrolling for that. But for now, I use the edges of the screen for borders so I don't have to draw any partial sprites (the sprites scroll completely off the screens sides out of view). Tunnel does use the hardware scrolling and with Hayleia's suggestion for scrolling multiple frames it helps out a lot. I scroll it at 16 pixels now (the width of the ship) which is essentially drawing the ship as an aligned sprite. Before, when the ship got to the edge of the screen, I had to draw part of it on one side and the rest on the other. That really killed its speed. For certain games that might be necessary, but Tunnel doesn't need the extra resolution. Now it scrolls so fast that the hardware scrolling itself is the bottleneck. I have to purposely slow it down so that when it scrolls, the ship sprite is drawn at the right place instead of ghosting it in front of its position.

tr1p1ea: Thanks! I make mockups to figure out where to place stuff and get a jump on creating the graphics. Then I use IViewer converter to convert the sprites to asm files.

DJ Omnimaga: Thanks! I chose Frogger because it has a static background and that helps a lot with the speed.

I take advantage of the static background and it uses 160 mode. Also the road and water are one color so no background copying and pasting necessary for the vehicles and logs. Because the frog has to jump on logs and stuff it requires transparency and background copying to erase it. The slow part comes when he has to jump on a log, that means I have to redraw the frog constantly or copy the background where hes at and redraw it constantly as it scrolls around. I may make the road three lanes and the water 2 'lanes' to speed it up. Hopefully I'll have a demo video up by tonight.