Really cool, it's super hard and does slow down quite a bit when there are lots of bullets on screen, but it's still completely playable and actually a little helpful since you can control your ship a little better. With some animations (and more than one life ) it'd be great! You can probably use your bullet-handling routine to make a simple explosion when you get hit The tutorial at the beginning is pretty cool, too. Really, it's a super cool project, though way too hard for me right now!
EDIT: You might consider letting the ship accelerate a little bit when you hold down an arrow, maybe jump 2 pixels at a time, to move around the screen a bit more quickly.
I guess it'll help out with your battery life. I never knew about the _GetKeyRetOff B_CALL before. I don't think i'll ever actually use it, but it's nice to know
And if you only want 16 values, you can just "and $F" (and %00001111) and your "random" number will be limited to 0-15
If you did 5x5, you could also just use 8x8 sprites and add some other things around the border. Also, i'm not sure how you store the current status of a square, but if you used 2 bytes where each bit represented one square, you could easily check to see if the player has beaten the game or not just be checking if both bytes = 0.
And another idea: leave the cursor as it is, but also add in thepenguin's idea where you use a 4x4 (or 5x5) grid on the calculator keypad. Then, when you press that button the cursor will jump there and change the lights accordingly.
I just loaded it up to my calc and it's really nice! I would recommend not using _GetKey, though. Try pressing [2nd]+[On] while running your program and see what happens Generally you would use direct input, but here _GetCSC would also be quick enough. If you use direct input, you'll need to add a delay, otherwise the cursor will move too quickly!
Also, if you notice, you really don't even need sprites here. You're only drawing two different bytes to the screen: %10101010 and %01010101. You could just load %10101010 into a, draw that twice, move down a row, cpl (a faster and smaller way of doing xor $FF, so it will turn %10101010 into %01010101) and repeat 15 times. The main loop of your sprite routine will probably be smaller than the size of your 16x16 sprites!
Another tip is that often times if you're going to be editing a byte in RAM it'll be faster and smaller to load it into hl first. If more than one area will use it, you can load hl before jumping to that routine, for example your key checking routine:
DoKeyAction: LD HL,Cursor CP kLeft JR NZ,RightKeyAction
LeftKeyAction: LD A,(HL);load cursor column DEC A;smaller than cp 1, and also serves to decrease a :) RET Z;if Column=1 dont got left, it'll go off the grid LD (HL),A;1 byte, 7 T-States. Loading into an address is 3 bytes (1 byte for the opcode and 2 bytes for the address) RET;KeyAction is done: return to main loop
RightKeyAction: CP kRight JR NZ,UpKeyAction LD A,(HL);load cursor column (we loaded Cursor into HL above) CP 4 RET Z;if Column=4 dont got right, it'll go off the grid INC A LD (HL),A RET;KeyAction is done: return to main loop And in your main loop, you push HL which is a nice idea to save a little space, but why not do it like this:
LD HL,Cursor;xorDraw active Sprite LD B, (HL) INC HL LD C, (HL) LD HL,ActiveSprite PUSH HL;save HL (sprite pointer) and BC (sprite coordinates) PUSH BC CALL XorDrawSprite;aguments in BC and HL, as supposed to
B_CALL _GrBufCpy;draw the current status and active square B_CALL _getKey CP kClear JR Z,GameEnd CALL DoKeyAction POP BC POP HL;xorDraw active Sprite (on old location, so its ereased) CALL XorDrawSprite? All in all your code is nice and well organized, though i might switch ix and hl around in your sprite routine just 'cuz ix is so slow and takes up more space. Either way, it's a nice first project and i look forward to seeing what else you've got planned!
It would be nice to give thegame a bit of a touch-up instead of reusing the graphics, besides this engine is a bit more robust and allows for things like animated tiles, masked tiles, etc. I started making a copy of the overworld map but as you can see it's not finished yet. If someone else wants to work on things like maps and tiles/sprites, i can work on the coding side of it. Otherwise, it's just going to be another side project for now until i clear up a couple more projects. It'd be a nice test to see what my RPG engine is capable of, though, especially since all the hard stuff is already done (maps, sprites, story) and all it is is plugging in data. The overworld map is only 8 sprites, and 4 of those are towns/caves
EDIT: i also don't know why, but i haven't been able to access Omnimaga the past few days, i've had to use a proxy to get here. Oh, and Joltima has the source to the 1.31 version: http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/76/7671.html but none of the others were released with source. I'm not really sure how much of a difference there is between that version and the final 1.9 version. The readme says "larger enemies and smaller size". I don't imagine the text changed between versions.
I have an RPG engine that could probably handle Dying Eyes pretty well. It's not grayscale, but it's smooth scrolling and has better support for things like menus. If someone wants to help with sprites (in .bmp format would be best), we could probably get a fun playable version out relatively quickly.
Also, i thought Joltima already was in English? I don't remember having any trouble reading it, at least. Personally, i like Joltima better than Dying Eyes, though i think both are amazing.
This is just based on my experience, not technical knowledge 1) I really don't think you have to worry about this, i've never had any trouble with this. If you open multiple groups at once keys with the same value will be processed the same, so if you want to use two keys from different groups that have the same key value, you'll have to read the groups separately. But i don't think you need to bother resetting the key port (i never do). 2) Again, i don't put any delay in between reading and writing and haven't ever noticed any problems on actual hardware (83+, 83+SE, and 84+SE). I've heard people say this before, but i've never actually bothered with it and haven't noticed any side effects. 3) I dunno this one, sorry. I just know of the onInterrupt flag " OnInterrupt,(IY+onFlags)"
So a reasonably recent version of TiLP should soon be in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories? Cool! Do you know if there'll be support for any other distros?
Ah, i just found this thread: http://ourl.ca/18034 It seems TilEm2 should also soon be available from the repositories
Documents and Manuals: For the documentation of the newest versions, consult the following sections of the site: Characteristics and Functions PseudoCode Examples Screen Captures More details can be found in the in-program help.
Other related links: GPL licence under which the software's distributed. Changelog to see what's new in each version. List of known bugs: errors known to be present in the latest available version. Timeline: a summary of the major milestones in the life of this project. Cucarachas Racing is a blog where I publish information about my projects (among which is PSeInt) in a somewhat disorganized manner, sharing both technical information (about programming) as well as information directed towards the end user (about functions and decisions on design).
About... PSeInt - copyleft 2003-2013 (by Pablo Novara - zaskar_84<arroba>yahoo.com.ar)
Special thanks to those who helped in the revival of this project in its early stages (Román Gelbort, Adrián Staffolani, Patricia Chechele, Horacio Loyarte, Joaquín Duo, et al), and many other professors and students who sent in daily error reports and suggestions online or by e-mail.
Spoiler For Characteristics and Functions:
What purpose does PSeInt serve? PSeInt was designed to help students who are just getting started in creating computer programs and/or algorithms. Pseudocode is generally used as one's first contact to introduce basic concepts such as the use of control structures, expressions, variables, etc., without having to deal with the particularities in the syntax of a real language. This software attempts to facilitate the task of writing algorithms in this pseudolanguage by offering a wide array of help and assistance and providing aditional tools to help locate errors and understand the logic behind the algorithms.
Characteristics and Functions of PSeInt:
Editing tools to write algorithms in pseudocode (in Spanish) Autocompletion Pop-up Help Dialogs Command Templates Syntax Highlighting Smart/Autoindent Generation and editing of the algorithm's flow charts Simultaneous editing of multiple algorithms Pseudocode language is configurable Offers predefined configuration profiles for many institutions Can interpret (ie. execute) the algorithms you write Step-by-step execution of an algorithm, controlling speed and monitoring variables and expressions Can automatically prepare a table listing the state of variables throughout the execution of your program Determines and clearly marks syntax errors as you type and during execution Allows the conversion of the algorithm to C++ Offers an integrated help system about the psuedocode and how to use the program Includes a set of examples with differing difficulty levels Multiplatform (tested on Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X) 100% free (GPL license)
To translate some of the other parts, it might be worthwhile to translate some of the instructions first, for example AZAR could become RAND or RANDOM, SENO (a funny name ) could become SINE, etc.
EDIT: And @DJ_O: i still don't think it's really necessary to study another language first before starting ASM (i never did and still haven't ), though i don't see how this would help you learn z80 assembly... I'd be interested to hear about that though
I would say, at least in the writing, a mix of Greek/Latin style lettering and Japanese characters. I've always liked how compact japanese/chinese symbols seem to be, yet latin/greek alphabets are better able to handle different syllables with fewer symbols. As for the actual spoken part, none. I invented it based on the idea that this is an aggressive culture.
I don't think Chinese characters are really that efficient, especially traditional characters. They may take up less space overall since the strokes are so compact, but i think the average Chinese character takes more strokes than it would to write out in, say pinyin. Chinese words tend to be much shorter, though. Though Chinese cursive might be more efficient than the Latin/Greek alphabets.
I think it's a really cool idea and a fun project, i hope to see more! Where did you get the idea of real/unreal/hypothetical? I think that's an interesting distinction
Also, your numbers require a lot of strokes (Chinese often use the 0-9 forms we use, especially for 0 -- compare that to the Chinese character for 0: 零 ), if you want to keep that format you could try something like:
Here's the little intro text: PSeInt is a tool to learn logic programming, geared towards students without any prior experience in logic programming. Through the use of a limited, simple, and intuitive pseudo-language (in Spanish), one can begin to learn and understand the basic fundamental concepts of a computer algorithm. Originally conceived as the final project for the Programming I course of the Computer Engineering degree in the Faculty of Engineering and Water Sciences at the National University of the Littoral, it is actually a pseudocode interpreter based on the contents of the Fundamentals of Programming class of the same degree.
Sólo una cosa, no entiendo muy bien qué significa aquí cátedra, supongo que no es tan importante pero yo siempre pensé que una "cátedra" era como el trabajo de un "catedrático", pero me parece que aquí no tiene mucho sentido...
I can start translating the documentation, if you want
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) it'd be great! You can probably use your bullet-handling routine to make a simple explosion when you get hit 
The tutorial at the beginning is pretty cool, too. Really, it's a super cool project, though way too hard for me right now!
Generally you would use direct input, but here _GetCSC would also be quick enough. If you use direct input, you'll need to add a delay, otherwise the cursor will move too quickly!
