Was that a glitch? The tile-out thing stopped and looked kind of choppy there for a sec.

A little bit more progress over the last week - I've started working on colour menu screens & text.

The title screen looks nice James!

Bought the CE! Just waiting for the game...

After stumbling back on this video of Mateo experimenting with a Mario CE engine, I decided to do some experimenting myself.


This is only very quickly put together, no sprite clipping or vram flipping, and not optimised at all, but it's enough to show that maybe a full colour version of Alien Breed is possible on the CE...





The sprites are still 8x8, but are now 8bpp (256 colours), and again scaled up x3. Like Mateo's Mario CE, all tiles are fully redrawn each frame instead of "scrolling". If I implement vram flipping and optimise the routines, it will look much better (in fact, it looks much better on the actual calculator than the above gif).


If I went ahead with this method, I can maintain the same code base between the monochrome 83+/84+ calculators and the colour 84+CE

Cool so far! Would it be hard to put the heath/ammo bar in red/blue on the playing screen?
I can help with sprite drawing with Piskel App if I have time in school.

The weird artifacts at the border i assume are from the lack of sprite clipping? It seems you're missing a column when the map isn't aligned, though i guess for the CE being byte aligned isn't such a huge deal since every pixel is byte-aligned The speed is looking nice, though i imagine drawing all those color sprites is gonna be a pain in the neck, hehe.

Correct - because there's no sprite clipping it glitches out a little, and it currently only draws 7 rows / 11 columns when it's not aligned. Only because I threw this together in a rush to see how it looked. Once I get more up to speed with the LCD controller and vram flipping, as well as clean up the sprite rendering, it will look much neater

Cool so far! Would it be hard to put the heath/ammo bar in red/blue on the playing screen?
I can help with sprite drawing with Piskel App if I have time in school.

Yeah eventually there will be a stats bar for both players at the top and bottom of screen, same as the original Amiga version. The sprite drawing shouldn't take me too long, I'll be using the original Amiga sprites, but probably simplified to 8x8 instead of 16x16.

That does look a bit small, i think 12x12 would look nice, but honestly the original scaled 8x8 sprites looked fine to me.