I'm really looking forward to this. The co-op feature looked really cool but i can see how that could cause a lot of headaches. I don't know of any link-play game with a smooth scrolling tilemap (though maybe Hayleia's Super Smash Bros Open comes close). I feel like the Alien Breed series has always been pushing the limits, i remember being really impressed by the 8-way scrolling way back when, and now all this!

Does that have any other side effects other than not reopening the $C000 protection? It seems to work ok for the 15mhz calcs, so for the meantime i'll just add a check  for those. I'll read up on the ports over at WikiTI and see if i can figure out what exactly the code's doing.

Thanks, i just tested it out on my 83+ and it works, but exiting the program crashes the calc. It exits just fine on the 83+SE, though.

Btw, is there a copy of this routine available for assembly programmers? I'm not exactly sure what to do with the source in the first post, for example what are all the REP_NEXT macros? I've been able to get around the C000 limit on the 84+/SE, but haven't figured out how to get around it on the 83+BE.

Bump. I did an extra bit of work on this the past couple days after seeing DigiTan come back over at Cemetech. I'm not sure if there are any things that still need to be ported over or not, i fixed a bug when building robots and think i've finally sorted out the display glitch in the battle routine (i think ionFastCopy was getting interrupted by the interrupt). I'd appreciate it if anyone could play through it and find bugs or spots that just don't seem quite right. I can give you a save file with a more powerful robot if that'll make testing easier (though the game might not be as much fun ). I'm hesitating to say that it's finished though until i finish playing through the whole game.

I also haven't touched the linkplay code, once i make sure that this is basically bug-free i can work on adding that in. But that reminds me, you'll have to have a lot of RAM free on your calc to run this (the latest version takes up 24026 bytes + 183 bytes for the save file).

EDIT: Also, don't forget to read the Readme. I highly recommend that you read it, it explains a lot of things that aren't really self-evident, in particular the part on the battle system.

EDIT: I also just remembered that since it uses Crabcake it won't work on the 83+, just the 84+ and SE editions.

EDIT: Alright, i just beat the game on my SE. There might be a few small bugs, but hopefully nothing too serious. I also fixed a couple things from the original, like spelling mistakes and i added a call to prevent you from jumping back into the enter town dialog if you say no. I've updated the attached files. There were a few other things i wanted to do, too, like let you buy/sell more than one item at a time, but it's already a tight fit as it is. You'll have to delete pretty much everything (minus apps) from your calc to play it.

I'd appreciate it if someone else could play through it and see if there are any bugs. There are a couple small things that i think were in the original, for example i picked up three sets of FINS and when you enter a map you always start at the same place (so when exiting a house, you won't reappear outside the house's door), but it doesn't really affect gameplay any.

You can still redraw the full map every frame, i just think the method for drawing is a bit slow. Rather than draw each sprite individually and having to recalculate the address in the gbuf you can look into inlining the sprite routine into your tilemap so you don't have to recalculate the gbuf position for each sprite. Actually, i think giving the character a bit of acceleration (being able to move 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 4, etc. pixels per frame) would help quite a bit. I really like the smoothness of it all, though

I agree, the tilemap looks really nice and i like the scrolling. It is a bit slow, though, i think it could be optimized a bit but otherwise moving two pixels at a time might be an ok solution. I think it'd be better to get some help optimizing it now though so that you won't have to worry about speed when adding new stuff in.

Nice work so far