Despite a lack of updates, I am actively working on this.



I have decided to use less "classical" approach to the rooms. Maps will be divided into rooms, but rooms will expanse areas larger than a single screen. (without the need to transition from screen to screen)

That's neat.  This will make a great project!

I was thinking about downcoding it to monochrome, as perhaps it could be done in BASIC + xLib, Axe, or whatever else.



Just considering my options, assuming anyone might volunteer to do the coding part. I don't know if anyone would be interested if it's 4-level grayscale, and thus likely not doable in anything but ASM.

Awesome job so far!

I'm not too sure. The issue is that even in ASM, when scrolling, the grayscale looks horrible, due to the crappy quality of the 83+/84+ LCD. Because of this you need to make sure the framerate of anything that runs in grayscale is not too high (maybe between 8 and 15 FPS). Usually in Axe or ASM, you do this by refreshing the grayscale very often between each frame. However, if a game is complex, that doesn't give you as much time to refresh. You would probably need to make the game so it only works on the SE/84+ calcs, not 83+. The issue, though, is that grayscale in Axe needs to run in 6 MHz mode.

With only one gray, I think it wouldn't look as bad, though, when scrolling.

I'd like to do the (ASM grayscale) coding for you, Zera, but I very probably won't have much time to spare this summer.

(+ my required 'knowledge update' on 4-level grayscale. I know how it works, but I've never implemented it, so speed-wise I'd run into trouble after a while)

Yeah. I would probably want to stick to grayscale. Even one gray would probably be fine.