At the moment, the audio is simply four square wave channels. I have a way to put in a noise channel, but nothing that I know of is tracked to play that type of sound. That's what the tracker I'm planning will include the ability to put in.

(Cross-posted from Cemetech)

Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a four channel interrupt-based music player for use in assembly games. This program is for 15MHz+ calculators, so no, it won't work on normal TI-83+. Today, I'm proud to report that I've gotten more than just a frequency sweep test written. Today, I've got actual music to play.


For this test, I embedded the source (almost verbatim) of the track "Same One (Bellon)" found with QuadPlayer, and wrote a small routine that feeds that information almost verbatim into the sound driver. After tweaking the frequency delays of the audio interrupt and messing with the tracker timing, I ended up with this: https://soundcloud.com/iambian-zenith/audiotest2/s-q7HJz

(Note: The music is much cleaner on hardware. And when the computer trying to record this isn't struggling)

More work needs to be done with the actual timing or file interpretation (or perhaps the source is at fault? I dunno.) and there does seem to be distortion in the sound at higher frequencies. For the sound linked above, the crystal timer for the sound driver is set at CPU (15MHz) / 8 with a delay count of 30 (which resolves to about 62.5KHz), while the timer for the music tracker was ... well.... guessed and tested until I found that it played it at a rate "close enough" to how QuadPlayer played it.

At the mentioned rate above, I ran further tests to see how much of the CPU is actually taken by the audio interrupt. Using Wabbitemu, I got ~76.5% used, while on my TI-84+SE, I got ~74.8%. During tonight's HCWP, I'd like to distribute this test program to see what numbers other people are getting. I'm especially curious to see if the timings vary a bit more on TI-83+SE hardware.

Another note: Since this an audio-only program, there isn't much in the way of screenshots, unless you like watching a blank screen for the current test, or a bunch of rapidly-changing numbers for the prior test.

Minor progress being made with the project. Reworked the player bullet routines to be easier to work with, so geekboy can work more on Nanami's shot type. I'm finally working on the resource handler routines. Might tweak the idea around to support internal garbage collection or something fancy like that. The thing is already getting pretty fancy.

Doing yet another rebuild of this project. This will most (probably) definitely be the last time I do that. The changes include moving the game to a much more sane interrupt scheme, since it was insane to use a danmaku shooter engine to drive the grayscale to begin with.

As such, I'm retooling most of the other routines and putting together a text-script system that's about as feature-filled as it gets. Taking a page from Earthbound, I'll be putting much of the game in this system, which includes stat calculation and the battle engine. Because let me tell ya. It was hell to try to code stat calculation in assembly. At least this way, I'll be able to get through that part of the game with minimal fuss. Oh, and events! I ought to be able to code events in it too! It better be, cuz I'm not going to do it any other way.

So, in short, sorry you guys had to wait forever, and I'm sorry that you guys have to wait longer. Although I lost my contact with guy who wrote the story for this game, I should still have enough to finish the game.

Next up: Rewriting the tilemapper to be more... sane.

Necropost.

After just over two years, I've decided to revisit this little project. The major change is the packager interface, which is now much more user-friendly. This time around, instead of having to mess around with file folders and batch files, all you have to do is drag and drop into the window and click the packager button to make your files.

This has already been done and the application can now generate data files that can be read by the original Athena installer. I haven't released this version yet because I'm still working on overhauling the installer so it has a far smaller memory footprint during installation (ideally, zero. Yes, it's possible). Along with this, I want to implement the ability to make Athena packages self-extracting.

That's going to take some doing.

EDIT: Added screenshots of the packager window. Win7 makes them look prettier than they should be. Illusiat 13 is being used here.

(1) Ask the person which one of the others would lie to me. The liar would point out someone else, and you can then use the person not picked to ask the second question to. The truthful person will pick the liar, but since there's only one, you will be guaranteed someone who tells the truth if you pick the unchosen one.

(2) Since the person you are asking this question to is guaranteed to tell the truth, you ask this person which gate will lead you out safely.

*omnomnomnom* Refill please!

Well, bad things happened in Realm of the Mad God (lost my fully maxed wizard, geared with the best of the best), so I might just allocate more time to the calc community. No guarantees since that game is worse than WoW and crack addictions.

But first thing I'm gonna do is look over the vast amount of code that's been left unattended. I know I was working on stat calculations, so I should probably get a debug menu up and running that shows these stats and their calculations. While the menu system usage was well documented, the code that's behind it is a rather big mess. You wouldn't want to see it. So making a menu shouldn't be that big of a problem. The problem is going to happen when I try to do custom routines based off of ... well... not sure anymore, but I'm sure I'll figure it out soon enough. Hopefully, my Z80 skills hasn't slid too far backwards from months on end of mindless gaming.

Just to be clear, the pucrunch Axiom does not do any compression. All it does is decompress stuff. It is up to the user to use pucrunch to compress their data from the PC side of things.

The Athena Packager/Installer project does all compression PC-side, and includes a utility on-calc that does the decompression.

However, the idea that games should be able to do their own package management is a good idea, and should be included in the next version of Athena. I'll have to think about it.