Richard's C64 blog!

2011 - A year of C64 productivity

2012-01-05T18:00:00.017Z

5th January 2012

Well as 2011 has passed by, 2012 is here. I want to reveal some of the highs and lows of the C64 and TND in 2011.

1000 Kung Fu Maniacs

Before 2011, I was working on Kung Fu Maniacs. A sideways scrolling SEUCK game, which Alf Yngve created. The game was bloody awesome. Who would have thought about making a beat 'em up with the Shoot 'Em Up Construction Kit?. I worked on a new front end and also additional enhancements to the game. Jon Wells did the music and helped me out with SEUCK questions. This game turned out to be commercial, although one drawback is the score/panel looks too much like SEUCK, but I didn't know (and still don't) how to make a new look scoring panel. When it come to the tape mastering, I made a loader that looked a bit like the Wild Loader, using the usual TND tape loader source. 1000 KFM turned out to be a loved SEUCK game. :)

Sheepoid

First off the start of 2011 was remarkably busy on the TND production front, although there were hardly any game releases at all made by me. That was mainly because I have been working on a game for the Retrovision 2011 all format beer and gaming party. I wanted to make a game for the Llamasoft Jolly. That game was of course Sheepoid. Kenz took interest in doing a Psytronik Software release of this production as well, which I was pleased to hear about. Sheepoid took a few months to create and my fingers took quite a battering working on this production. Well, 2-3 months to be exact. This was because I had to enhance the game a lot and changes were imminent. I also had problems, which involved the explosion routines. The char explosions were assisted by Achim Volkers (Thank you for your help). The game worked pretty well. Extra features were added as well. Frank Gasking and C64Endings.co.uk took the reign of play testing Sheepoid. I was informed that I should make a *special* competition version of the game for Retrovision 2011, in which players will only play the game with one life only. More about this later.

Sheepoid loader and Disk Menu

Making the Psytronik version of Sheepoid took quite a lot of battering keys. We wanted a loading picture for the game, and Ste'86 jumped in to draw the loading picture for the Sheepoid loader (Thunderload). The tape loader used a the colour cycling method while loading str

ipes were shown. The cycle represented the no. of blocks loaded, and the flashing sheep represented

the loading progress. I also programmed the disk menu, and was very pleased with the result.

Retrovision 2011

I already wrote a blog in May about Retrovision 2011. This event was great fun. It took about an hour and a half to get to the pub where the event was held. I drunk plenty of pop, but only had one pint of lager. I didn't feel like drinking, but felt like gaming. At the event I met Retromarkie, Kenz (They were the first two people at the event), Frank Gasking and C64Endings.Co.Uk. I also got interviewed by Paul at Retro Gamer, and was shown some WIP games. Those of which were OutSpace, a C64 game which I played on Colin's laptop. Also an unfinished game of Aquarius, which I am looking forward to seeing finished.

Hyper Viper

As I was busy with Sheepoid, I also was very keen to do some tape mastering for Psytronik Software. Hyper Viper by Jamie Howard was an excellent port of the classic MSX maze game, in which you pursued around the maze, guzz

ling the snakes from behind. Scoff in between a snake and it will multiply. :) Interesting concept. I was involved with the tape mastering for this production. Yet again, Ste'86 did another nice job with the loading picture. I composed a tune specially as an exclusive for the game's loader and disk menu. I quite enjoyed this.

Sideways Scrolling S.E.U.C.K Competition 2011

After the success of the SSSC 2010, I decided to launch another one back in 2011. Unfortunately although people posted on forums, etc that they're quite interested to participate in the compo, only a few entrants made it to the compo. Only 3 or 4 different entrants had participated in the compo. The first two games by Anthony Burns and Alf Yngve, opened the competition, except for one person entered the competition. Most entries were quite good. One entry was

of course a fake entry. It may have caught your attention that DeffEnder by Pav Loda / Deff Soft was in fact the fake, which I wrote to see if anybody caught out the fake from the genuine entries. Well not many people thought DeffEnder was fake. The funny thing was, when the voting had taken place, DeffEnder made it 3rd place :). WHAT? I just couldn't believe that DeffEnder actually made it to 3rd place before I disqualified it as a one-off joke. Some people actually thought the fake entry was Escape from the Annoying Chavs. :) The competition wasn't all that successful but we had a clear winner, which was Alf Yngve's excellent Forgotten Forest. I didn't release the enhanced version of the game on to the TND web site because it was part of a SEUCK compilation (as an extra) for Psytronik Software (As suggested by Alf and myself).

Shoot 'Em Up Destruction Set 2

What a busy year it has been for me on the productivity slot. SEUDS 2 was actually the project that had me, Kenz and Ste'86 really busy. I had 5 unreleased SEUCK games to add in game enhancements and new front ends to. The games turned out really well. Super Tau Zeta was a pure epic of last year's Sideways SEUCK competition. There was also Bloodwheels. Games that Weren't originally launched the unreleased version of the game, and I was getting the urge to get this one done. Well, it got mastered with a new front end, some in game enhancements, such as linked explosions, and also a high score table. The next game was one of my favourites. It just had to make me laugh. 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs - Way of the Exploding Fish. This game was quite a pain to update and enhance, but I managed to get the power ups working, the end screen animation, and also the main game's animation. It was purely great fun to have enhanced. The power ups made me laugh, especially the spirit of un-chen as one of the power ups. The storyline really amused me. Trojahn was a quick update. Looked impressive. Finally Forgotten Forest, the game that had won the 2011 Sideways SEUCK Compo. This game had music with SID screams and also linked explosions and power ups, special effects, etc. The tape mastering and disk menu were done and everything was ready for release. It was great fun working on this compilation. Alf Yngve's got some more SEUCK titles for me to enhance in 2012.

Sheepoid 2 - Woolly Jumper

This game took a while, but working in co-op with S.Pearson, made this game a real pleasure to work on. The game was built for the 16K game compo run by www.rgcd.co.uk. The idea of the competition was to create a full game, that would fit a 16KB cartridge. It was hard work to create and I made an 8 level version of the game specially for the compo. To be honest it was something completely different to what I have been making in the past. I attempted my first ever platform game, and it wasn't too hard, nor was it easy either. After the game was entered for the 16KB cartridge competition, it had quite a good result. It came 6th place out of 11 - due to so many stunning entries :) I did a special release of a non CRT version of WJ on 24th December. Now I am working on the full game.

Contributor's games

I was involved with the music for contributor's games, which came in 2011. We shall start with the non-SEUCK titles.

Space Trip

Achim Volkers did a nice platform game, inspired by some classic C64 titles. The player could also enter the console and select which level to board. This console part was inspired by Paradroid.

I had the privilege composing the music for this game. The title music was inspired by many of David Whittaker's classic C64 tunes. Using DMC V4.0 I had a go at doing a Whittaker style soundtrack, which worked out well for this game. Space trip also had it's own exclusive loader, which I made using the IRQ Tape Turbo source by Martin Piper.

On the Farm 2

Achim surprised me yet again with another fun game. This time it was an idea which Wayne/Art Ravers come up with. It was a sheep herding simulator, in which you played a border collie (Shep) who has to herd sheep into the pen within a time limit.

Shep had to be adjacent to the y-position of the sheep and he has to bark at the sheep too. The music and jingles were of course composed by me :)

Happy Blocks (Loader game)

Back in 2010 I did a tape loader game called MooTilation. I did promise people a new loader game for 2011. It turned out to happen in December 2011. :) Happy Blocks was the loader game. It was inspired by a PC flash game in which you dodged blocks, and after a certain number of blocks passed, the game got faster.

You also had to avoid crashing into the blocks. I originally wanted to add a scrolling message to the tape loader during the loader game. Sadly due to timing errors, I had to do away with it, and just use a static title screen. The loader game turned out as how I wanted it, and it was fun to play during loading. The HB loader was first used on the RGCD tape version of C64anabalt :)

As well as being involved with Psytronik Software and a couple of competitions. I also been enhancing a few SEUCK titles. There was Grayhawk by Alf Yngve, a great shoot 'em up inspired by Firebird Software's Warhawk. The game featured some really old-school title music. The title music was inspired by Mastertronic's Sidewinder 2, but of course the composition for Grayhawk was my own work.

Purge 101 by Anthony Burns. This was quite a challenge for me to enhance. I imported this game into the SEUCK Redux source code then created a brand new front end for the game. All worked out quite well, and Anthony has yet another surprise in store for 2012 :)

Strike Team Alpha by Carl Mason. This game took most attention. It was inspired by the Commando and Mercs games. I saw ST 1 and ST 2 back in the late 1990's, and it was a breath of fresh air to see some new tricks and tactics added into the SEUCK. I worked on a brand new front end specially for this game making it look sort of like a commercial production.

Some stuff that never made it to 2011

Up in the Air

I was literally fed up with this game project and felt as if I was getting nowhere with it. Mainly because of the graphics update and packing / depacking everything. I even wrote too much code, whereas there's not enough memory for adding more code for levels, due to the graphics data taking over the memory. At the time I decided to leave the project for the time being and work on finishing SEUDS 2, Woolly Jumper (Which the full version of the game is still not quite finished yet), and keep all of the source stored in a safe place for just in case I decide to go back to the project (Although I don't really want to, to be honest. It's just another Sub Hunter style game, which is nothing new). :)

Evil Wizard 2

It's a game which was originally planned by Pingo to be ready for Christmas. Unfortunately the game's not ready yet. The main levels are finished, and the title screen's set, but we are now awaiting some music from a well known C64 musician to fit the front end.

Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge

It's a horizontal scrolling Shoot 'Em Up which I left for several years now. To be honest, I forgot that I left this project behind. Whether or not I would come back to it is anyone's guess.

Tape Master Pro II

In 2010 I did a tape mastering utility, which used the autoboot IRQ turbo tape loader by martin Piper. Well, I originally planned to get this tool done during the production of Woolly Jumper, but I just didn't get around to it. It will be made some time in 2012, and I've got some extra ideas to add to the tape loader. Such as use of AND #xx or ORA #xx on the flashing border, and also to make the loader run programs that use KERNAL routines for keyboard input, etc. Which V1 didn't use. Sadly I never got round to fixing a BASIC run in the tape loader source, due to it always failing.

Woolly Jumper 16K - Finished :)

2011-11-20T14:29:00.009Z

19th-20th November 2011

19th November 2011

As predicted Woolly Jumper needed a bit of tidying up and fixing. It wasn't a major problem, but a minor issue. It was related to the front end / get ready, etc. flipping to the next screen, showed visible mess. The mess was mainly to do with sprite positions not being zeroed before all sprites were correctly positioned. So I added a routine in which cleaned this issue up (Like with Sheepoid). As soon as that was fixed, I had one more little thing to fixup, and that was just the screen flipping showing mess for less than a second before starting the game. Well, I found a perfect way to solve that problem. That was to switch off the screen, using $D011 and then allow the IRQ interrupts to switch it back on again, so that you could see no mess during the process. The good thing about it ... It worked.

20th November 2011

Last night, before I went to bed, Shaun replied back to say that my updated version of the game code worked perfectly, but there was just one more thing that he suggested that should be changed. The Vaccinator sprite didn't really suit the game, so he decided that I should replace the Vaccinator with the Cattle Prod, a sprite which he originally removed. As the Cattle Prod was originally used as a deadly object. Now the yellow Cattle prod will give the sheep better fire power (bigger bullets) and the light blue drencher will remove the power ups which the sheep has.

Finally, the 16K version of the game is finished (I hope) and if it is, then the .CRT build file is ready to be sent to HeavyStylus and I can work on enhancing the game even more for the 64K version. I came up with ideas in which is to remix the existing levels, making them slightly longer, so instead of 8 levels we have 16 levels and also extended according to the levels in the game.

There will be NO blog updates for the 64K version, as I am going to work on it as a big surprise. But there are some plans for the enhancements in the game, which are top secret. We will not tell you what they are, but one thing for certain, it will feature a neat loading picture by STE'86, which he specially drawn for the production. :)

Those darn bugs

2011-11-19T12:38:00.004Z

13th - 19th November 2011

Well, WJ didn't seem to be quite finished yet, as Shaun spotted a few bugs in the game, in which had to be resolved. After I moved the status panel at the bottom of the screen to somewhere else I ended with the player getting an extra life, instead of the level counter going up. This kept on happening during the level complete phase. So after updating this problem, another problem came, regarding the same status panel. The score didn't work properly. A simple mistake was made, and that was corrected.

The next bug was a major bug, Music. After the end of the level (The rocket) there was a droaning noise, which Shaun could hear, but I couldn't. So I found a way to resolve this problem, simply by creating a new instrument which silences the note and imported the music back into the compiled source. It worked a treat :)

The next bug was a minor one. On level 6, the sheep was walking on top of the snow on the barrel. This looked very odd indeed. I loaded up Arkitec and browsed through the utility to take a look at the value of the characters of the snow on top of the barrel. Then I removed those collision values, so

Shaun came across a major bug, in which the sheep died for no apparent reason, while it was jumping in thin air. The problem occured when the enemy sprites were all offset and still moving when not visible. So I had to program a little routine which compared to the position in which the player was. If the player's Y position was lower than the upper border, no sprite to sprite collision occurs. Otherwise, the poor sheep gets hit by the bad enemies. :)

The next issue was a graphic bug, in which level 2 kept looking quite odd. Well, the start screen. Some parts of the background was missing. Lawks. Not good :(. So I loaded up Arkitek to try and solve this silly problem, thus yesterday (Friday 18th November) I had an email back that the background still needed sorting out. So that I dealt with this small glitch today. I just hope that it is correct.

The final things were a couple of things which Shaun suggested to me to improve the game a bit. First of all, the falling power up / add. score objects could be seen leaving the screen below the status. This was originally intentional to me. Instead to make things better for the project I added a splash animation, for every time the collectable reaches the water. This makes a much better effect in the game. The other thing missing was the Game Over message, which has now been added. :)

I sent the new version on .D64 to Shaun to try out. If he's happy, then the 16KB build is finally finished :)

Could the 16K version be finished now?

2011-11-14T09:03:00.006Z

14th November 2011

Well, I got up early today about 8am (As I am working an 12pm-8pm). Checked my email and found that Woolly Jumper needed a small minor fix, which was mainly to do with the rocket animation. The flames on the rocket looked pretty odd, as both used the same frame. So I called the second sprite frame table (for the flames) so that the rocket flame looks more accurate. The good thing is that it worked out quite nicely :)

I have also been told by Shaun some good pointers about the game. The shooting reminded him of playing Space Invaders. Where the game gets difficult if you miss an enemy. The falling whistle reminded him of Ghosts and Goblins, and finally level 6 looked really arctic, especially with the penguin aliens on the loose.

Hopefully now the 16K version of the game is finished, and I can then work on the 64K version (Which will be the same game, but with extra features) which I hope to release in time for Christmas 2011. To be honest I won't really take all that long to add the extra features. Probably a few days to be precise. After that's finished, I can finally take a well earned rest from this game project. :)

Fixing phase! ARGH!

2011-11-13T20:37:00.005Z

13th November 2011

Okay then, most of today I have been working on trying to get the game to be finished. First of all some adjustments needed to be made to the game code. First of all, the front end logo needed to be updated as Shaun sent a much nicer looking version of the same logo, which I originally resized. That really made a huge difference. How on earth did I forget about Shaun's logo?

Most of today was a frustrating session. I kept getting more problems (or probably causing those in the game code). I adjusted the player's shield so that the player didn't flash, when it was wearing a workers helmet. I also updated the get ready text and positions of the rocket. The end of levels 2 and 3 looked very odd. I also had to fix the start screens for levels 2, 3 and 8. After fixing those, Shaun gave me an idea where scoring points (after shooting the enemies) should be based on the size of the bullets. So I added a routine that can work out how many points the player can score according to the following:

Weak bullet = 100 points

Medium bullet = 200 points

Mega Bullet = 500 points

Shaun didn't like the idea of having the cattle prod in the game, which caused the player to lose a life, so I removed it and replaced those with the other 3 collectables that are used in the game.

To finish things off, I added a routine in which drops a whistle to the central of the end platform. After the player picks up the whistle, a rocket will appear on screen, with yellow flames and pick the player up. I also had to find a way on how to get those enemy bugs moving in a different sinus wave to the other enemies. Well, the solution was finally found. I used Elwix/Style's WixBouncer tool, in which allows you to chose the sinus mode you want. Then you manually type in the start / end and length of the sinus. I then imported the sinus data into the source code. It made the pink bugs' move quite more different and interesting. Much better now.

Hopefully now I have sent a new .D64 to Shaun, we could say that this game is finished. If it is, then all will be revealed on this blog. The game will be sent to RGCD for submitting to the 16KB cart. Then I and work on expanding this game in time for a Christmas 2011 release.

Tried it on my C64C. It works great on a real C64 with joystick in port 2 :)

I've got the power

2011-11-12T17:57:00.002Z

12th November 2011

Today's been quite a long session (Drinking lager, oops, no. Wrong!) working on finishing off Woolly Jumper, 16K version. I have been working on making some tweaks and improvements and also added some power ups to the game, which will enhance game play for the player. Especially when he collects power ups. I also added a random table so that we have different power ups appearing on screen. The powerups are as follows:

- Vaccinator (Power up fire power)

- Sheep Shearer (Award 500 points to the player)

- Drencher (Restore fire power to the weakest bullet)

- Cattle Prod (Avoid at all times, it will cost a sheep's life)

The firepower is something as follows:

- Tiny ball of fluff (Small bullet, slow)

- Medium ball of fluff (Medium bullet, moderate speed)

- Mega ball of fluff (Huge bullet, ultra fast)

I have also been working on upgrading the collision to see whether or not the player can respond to the stopping chars. Sadly this feature didn't work properly for level 8 (The great white rock) and it ended up pushing the player all over the place. This caused an unknown bug, which I don't really know what has been causing it. The level design for just the final stage needs a rethink.

Well, we are nearly there. Hopefully the game will be ready a week before the deadline.

We are on whistle blower alert

2011-11-06T18:19:00.004Z

6th November 2011

It's just a short one today, because I have been working a very early 6am-2pm shift at my local distribution centre. And right now, I feel very tired, especially after going out last night. 5 and 3 quarters hour sleep (Although there was a party next door full of youngsters partying with fireworks). Anyway here's what has happened today.

I received an email from Shaun about an object which the player can collect, so it can move on to the next stage. Brilliant, that's helped me a lot. I imported Shaun's whistle (And painted it cyan) into the game source code. Then I programmed a simple box collision, where the player picks up the whistle. If the collision occurs, the rocket will appear on screen and pick the player up.

The second and final thing I did today, due to tiredness was added a little routine, to stop the player from holding the fire button, making the player constantly shoot, also to avoid the title screen skipping sensitivity.

Well, it looks as if the game is nearly finished for the 16KB cartridge compo. I just need to tidy a few things up, which I should hopefully get round to doing this week. One of which is to create random power ups through a timer, and also fix an additional sprite/background detection in which (during parts of the game) the sheep cannot walk through the rocks of level 3 and 8. If the game turns out to be larger than 16K then I'll have to compose some music for just the 16K version of this game, using the John Player. Toodloo, until Friday!

It's getting there ... :)

2011-11-05T15:09:00.003Z

5th November 2011

Things are getting on pretty well with Woolly Jumper and I feel that I could be nearly finished with the 16KB CRT version of this fun game project. Well, estimated time for finishing the 16KB cartridge is probably between next week and 20th November 2011. I am dedicating myself to at least one hour to this project during my spare time all this week, as we are coming closer and closer to the deadline.

So then what has been happening today? Well, basically I have been concentrating on some minor bug fixing and also getting the enemies to roam across the screen with their new attack patterns. So how did I go around to working on those? It started with some experiments with sprites. Before I could build the sinus patterns, I had to work out the starting and ending position for where to put the enemy sinuses. To be able to do this, I did a little poke that would display a square sprite. Did a little maths to work out the: start and stop position of the sprite sinues for the top, middle, and bottom portions of the screen. These mainly took effect on the penguin ships, green alien saucers and chickens. The meanest enemy of them all were the pink bugs. The bugs have a different kind of behaviour compared to the three aliens (penguin, green saucer and space chickens) . The bugs shall also be appearing less frequently, compared to the other aliens.

After programming and storing the new sinus movements for each enemy, I restored the sprite/sprite collision and discovered a silly bug. For every second enemy shot, you could see an explosion appear again after the death animation had finished. That was one heck of a daft mistake I discovered today. To to fix that problem, I added a routine that switched off the enemy dead mode, so that the enemy is offset. I also made it so that the enemies don't appear on the screen, or move in a Y-axis if they are supposed to be offset - and it worked.

The last thing I did today was added a little ending to the game, for after the final level was complete. It was something too basic, but because of size restrictions, I was unable to do a very good ending - but the full game will of course have a better ending than what I did for this version.

The hobby project continues through to December after the .CRT version's finished!

Sheep enters a high risk site

2011-11-04T20:03:00.003Z

4th November 2011

First of all, it was quite an embarrassing bug fixing session, due to the fact that I tried so much to try and fix a problem with the platform jumping issue, which Shaun pointed out. It turned out that I didn't need update the code by retyping the sprite/background collision detection. It turned out that I had forgotten to reset the timer which controlled the player's jump. How dumb was that huh?

Anyway, I imported the new graphics update of Shaun's into the game code. It looked much better. Shaun also did some very nice in game sprites as well. The sheep now wears a builders/warehouse high risk helmet when in Shield/Invinicibility mode, and the rocket now shows the sheep inside. Once the shield wears out, the loses helmet and is no longer invincible.

Hopefully either tomorrow or Sunday, I will concentrate on updating the enemy attack patterns, according to Shaun's diagram illustrations. Re-enable the sprite/sprite collision and then work on an ending for when the player completes the game. Just under 4 weeks until the deadline. ARGH! Hope I can make it :o(

Get ready for take off

2011-10-29T10:43:00.009+01:00

29th October 2011

Arrrrgh! 1 month to go. Woolly Jumper's deadline is coming near, otherwise it won't make it to the compo on time. I have to be quick, but spare time has been cut even more due to my full time job. Actually to be honest, I will not be under pressure to get this game finished, as there isn't really much to be done.

Shaun has got back to me about how the game should be improved. For a start off, he thought that it would be miles better if I removed the colour washing routine over the status bar. So the first thing done earlier on this week was to remove that score. I made it yellow, but after yesterday's email. A yellow status bar looked very odd. So I changed the status bar to white. The second niggly thing was the way the sheep was dying. The speed of the sheep bouncing off the platform falling straight into the water looked very odd. So I slowed down the speed slightly, so that it looked less daft. :)

Shaun also mentioned to me about the enemy formations. Although I worked quite hard on making a variety of enemy formations, it turns out that those formations do not suit the game at all. Therefore it would have been better if I just let the enemies fly across the screen, but I will need Shaun's help to do a quick enemy formation for each group of enemies during the game. Oh ... hang on .... I just got an email from him to illustrate how the enemies should move. I guess I didn't need to use SEUCK again then :)

While I was waiting for Shaun's reponse, I decided to work on the level complete sequence in which the player enters the rocket, and then the rocket takes off with the sheep inside. Unfortunately I found it to be impossible to have the player's face appear in the rocket, as the player sprite overlaps the rocket's sprite. However to solve this problem, I just removed the player sheep's sprite after the rocket picks the sheep up. Then the rocket takes off again. I also added the animation at the bottom of the rocket where the flames are burning from underneath the rocket. The animation was pretty smooth and looked great on the rocket. It would have been great to have the sheep peeping through the rocket window, but the only solution which I can think of to this little problem would be to have two more sprites that build the left/right part of the rocket with the sheep inside. This will be up to Shaun.

Tomorrow after my 6am-2pm shift at a Distribution Centre I might rework on the enemy movement patterns as illustrated by Shaun's rough examples. Now I think I shall have a spot of gaming :)

Here comes the bugs!

2011-10-23T18:21:00.006+01:00

22nd October 2011

I have been working pretty hard on improving Woolly Jumper. I captured the logo supplied by Shaun and loaded it up into Amica Paint. The logo's based on the loading picture logo by Ste'86. I then loaded up the Charwandler to convert the full sized logo which I received. BUMMER, loads of chars missing. Therefore it was impossible to have a proper logo. I did however come up with an alternative solution to the problem. I resized the logo in Amica Paint, so that it would fit all characters after conversion. Then I converted the characters with the Charwandler and succeeded with the conversion. I also imported Shaun's charset into the source as well. Looks really nice and chunky :)

The next thing I did was programmed the new front end. Looked quite nice, but it seems that the colours of the text looked a bit odd in grey (According to Shaun). Perhaps I should update this so that the colours are white. I also added a flashing "Press fire to start".

As soon as the little front end was done. I worked on building the start maps using Arkitek. I captured every single start map I created, then I used the Exomizer to compress each and every start map separately. Then I imported the source (and Exomizer decruncher) into the code. I feel that for the official release of this game, Magnus Lind deserves the credit for the Exomizer source.

The next thing I did was added some new enemies. The flying propeller bugs. They look kind of funny and suit the backwards. Then I worked on the get ready and level start phase. Now what did I do? Well, I made it so that at the end of each level, the scroll routine stops, and the player can exit the level by moving to the right of the screen. However, I still need to polish the end of each level by adding a rocket for the player to enter. Then the rocket will take off once entered. The player will then go on to the next screen. I also named the levels suggested by Shaun. Looks slightly much better, but for some reason. It's getting late now, so I shall pass another preview of this game over to Shaun and Heavy Stylus and do more on it some other time this week. Possibly Monday!.

Lucky Seven

2011-10-08T15:59:00.004+01:00

8th October 2011

Today I have been importing the new level data into the game. While I was playing through the game, I noticed a slight glitch in the background. The last part of the platform looked garbled up. I originally thought to myself that it must have been a corrupt file during exporting from the .D64 to the assembly source. It turned out to be the case where I actually forgotten to complete the map data table, in which uses 255 blocks. So after filling up the block data table, all turned out well.

I also set up the colour pointers for level 7 and imported Shaun's awesome new explosion sprites. Then I inserted a customizable character set which I did myself in 2009. Well, I ripped it from Bomb Chase 2009 to be honest, but that's just a temporary thing.

Finally I have been working on trying to fix an annoying enemy explosion bug. For some strange reason when the second enemy gets shot, it first explodes then it appears at the top of the screen visibly exploding until the next batch of enemies come on screen. Really annoying stuff, but I shall one day get this glitch fixed up :)

Anyway a snapshot of level 7 for you :)

Bah, bah, blast sheep!

2011-10-04T17:49:00.003+01:00

1st - 2nd October 2011

It's another Sheep episode. Well, I have been doing some more programming on this game project. Shaun sent me some new sprites for this game. I check those out and I was very impressed. So I imported the sprites which he made using SEUCK into SpritePad and then saved a raw set to import into the source code. I had to alter the sprite animation tables and also the colours. I also set certain sprites for certain animations, so that the sprites will work correctly in the assembled source. If I did not change those frames according to the data tables, things would have looked very odd :)

Secondly I received some new level data which used new character sets. Yet again, I had to update the collision pointers so that it makes an impact on the player's sheep. (Collision chars). This worked quite well, but some of the collision pointers make it look odd for the player's sheep. After correcting the pointers (so that the Sheep can walk in the snow for level 6), I worked on setting up the correct colours for the new sprites. Great. Looked much better new.

Sheepoid gets a good whacking

2011-09-28T19:46:00.004+01:00

28th September 2011

Man I am still recovering from a hard working day and also yesterday's pub session. Well, no pub today. Although it has been lovely and warm for it. Well, we cannot exactly go to the pub everyday can we huh?. Anyway, enough pub talk. Let's just get on with this blog shall we?

Well, I was a bit late to get back on to Woolly Jumper. This week. Although I was off from work over the weekend, I have been busy with Trojahn for the Shoot Em Up Destruction set. Only one more program to go for the SEUDS 2 compilation - Which I will be working on this coming Saturday. But that final program will be a surprise :)

Anyway, today I downloaded Shauns latest graphics update, which he drew using Arkitec. I took a look at the map and was concerned about one of the levels which was in the slaughter world. It turned out to be that one of the platforms needed to be extended a little. So I expanded the platform by 2 blocks, so that the sheep can land on the platform. Otherwise it would have been mighty impossible to land on to that particular platform without losing a life. I also noticed that Shaun added some shaded chars, which were used as pointers for the platforms. So I updated the charset by removing the stuff. I took a look at level 5's background. It's definitely much better now. The sheep should be able to jump over the girders no problem. I'm pretty much happy with this.

After being happy with the map, I saved all the data from the Arkitec and then exported the files into the source code and tested the game with it. Feels much more comfortable now. The next thing for me to deal with is the attack waves. The aliens seem to appear on the screen too frequently. So I programmed a little routine which allows them to appear on to the screen after a delay timer has been hit. I also re-enabled the collision detection. Also added scoring of 200 points per aliens hit.

The game's too hard for the player to be able to move around. Making the production still quite unplayable. Especially if after losing a life, the sheep hits a deadly background and dies straight away. Something had to be done with this problem. I came up with a big solution to this problem, which was to program a routine which checks for whether or not the player has a temporary shield enabled. If the shield is enabled, then the player will not get killed by any baddies or deadly, nor will the sheep drown when falling in the water. After the shield timer wears out. Poor the poor sheep could be in trouble if the player makes the wrong move :)

Enter the Trojahn

2011-09-25T20:07:00.006+01:00

17th - 25th September 2011

Well, well well. I have been busy yet again this week. Not only at work but also Woolly Jumper and the Shoot 'Em Up Destruction Set 2. This blog's mainly going to be about SEUDS 2. Well, it's game number 4, Trojahn. Alf has been updating this game a lot, and what I have seen seems to be a huge improvement compared to the old version which he wrote back in 1993. This game featured some more great tricks formed using S.E.U.C.K. Anyway, to make this a SEUDS 2 release. I decided to work on some major enhancements.

Before I actually started programming a new front end for this game production, I decided to work mainly on the in game enhancements. Simply by POKEing the SEUCK to run additional subroutines. One which will play in game music or sound effects, and one which will check for power ups, etc. Also one for the animated background as well. The power up routines only occur if the player breaks the magic urns. These power ups may vary and help enhance the player's skills. Those Urns could reward Trojahn more stamina (faster speed), faster powerful spear throwing, further distance for throwing the spears and also temporary invulnerability for 20 seconds or so. Trojahn loses all his power ups if he gets hit by an enemy of deadly obstacle.

As soon as I was (and Alf was) happy with the power ups, I kept on receiving updated versions of Alf's game. So I referred to using the latest one. I also worked on the in game, ending and title music using DMC V5.0+ and Goat Tracker. The music turned out pretty well, although I was sort of unsure about the title music. :)

Kenz sent me some 2x1 charsets in a bitmap form, but I had trouble converting the C64 bitmap picture into charset form, so I decided to try and convert Alf's original charset into a 2x1 font and then updated it to how Kenz originally drew the chars. The result turned out pretty good.

Now was the time for me to program the front end. I added some text, music, additional routines into the front end source code. I noticed a couple of flickering rasters inside each raster split, but managed to fix this without a problem. The title screen also consists of a music / sfx option, in which is activated by using left / right on the joystick. I also made it where after fire has been pressed, the get ready screen comes on, which reads: ELENA HAS BEEN CAPTURED BY THE SPARTAN KING. GO AND SEARCH FOR HER!. Then I linked the game code to this routine (after the fire button has been pressed) I also added a game over screen, which says TROJAHN'S QUEST HAS FAILED, ELINA HAS BEEN SACRIFICED TO THE MINOTAUR - GAME OVER. Both GET READY and GAME OVER screens have an eerie jingle, to fit the dark atmosphere in the game. Finally I programmed and linked the last part of the game. The ending. Tested the game, seems to be working okay, and I managed to reach the end of the game as well - in cheat mode :)

Clumsy sheepoid.

2011-09-18T20:30:00.006+01:00

17th September 2011

No screen shots or videos to show you this time, but I have still been working on Woolly Jumper. It is still sort of shaping up quite nicely, apart from that I came across some design faults in the game. (Go on, blame the coder). It turned out that the sinus mode which I originally used for the game wasn't all that good. The sinus was all over the place. That's not what we really want for a game don't you agree?. Well the good news is that I have renewed the sinus movement for the aliens, and after they get shot - they will disappear as they should (and not reappear on screen).

The second issue was the background. When the player jumps out of the screen, it seems to mysteriously die outside the border. This was quite a weird thing that was going on. I do have to admit. Anyway to resolve this problem I lowered the border jump height. So that no collision's made up there.

The next issue was that I programmed the lives and sprite/sprite collision. The sheep has too much on it's plate (Thanks for pointing this out Shaun) where the enemies appear on screen frequently. Oh dear :( We don't really want that to happen do we?. So I have come to a decision to add a delay/timer before letting loose the next batch of aliens. This will give the player chance to jump over platforms on to the next one. To make the player die. I added a little routine which made the sheep jump to the top of the screen, then fall into the water. The basic idea is to have an amusing frame, for where the sheep goes up, then add a splash sprite to make it look as if it had jumped into the water. I also did some jingles where one made the sheep scream if hit, then a splash sound for when it ends up in the water.

One final issue which I spotted, but pointed it out to Shaun, was a mapping fault. Basically the platforms were too far from each other in parts of the map, making it virtually impossible for the poor sheep to jump over. I also noticed a silly bug today in which killed the sheep when on top of the shaded area of the platform where the meat hooks hang. That will be simple enough to fix. Simply locate the charset number

I also had two .D64's from Shaun, featuring his new sprites for the game. So I loaded up the Sideways SEUCK (As Shaun used this to make them) and attached the .D64 with (what was meant to have been) the source files. Sadly I could not get those to load. It turned out that the disk image was corrupt as the file name ended with a *PRG inside the disk directory. This is known as a splat file. Perhaps the .D64 wasn't detached from VICE before I received it. Anyway I received the latest disk with the sprites. Those were Power Ups, alien species and of course the player animations. Looks absolutely great :) I will be looking forward to the final sprites :)

Attack !!!

2011-09-10T18:18:00.002+01:00

10th September 2011

Today I have been working on the attack formations of the enemies in the game. To do this I created various routines which checks for all sprites being out of the screen. If they are offset then the formation gets switched over to the next one according to the table. I have created 8 formations. At the moment the formations still need some kind of tweaking as they are quite buggy, but the work seems to be turning out quite nicely. :)

2000 Kung Fu Maniacs - Final Touches

2011-09-04T18:25:00.008+01:00

3rd + 4th September 2011

Flippin' heck. I have been too active haven't I - an I'm still enjoying it. Anyway during this weekend, I have been concentrating on doing some more stuff for 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs. Actually I think it is all done now.

The first thing I thought about was the player's status bar. Now being that 2000 KFM will be for one player only. I decided to do a little something useful to the status bar which is inside the border. So then what did I do? I moved it to the centre of the screen, simply by adjusting the X/Y attributes of the sprites that formed the status panel. Great!

The next thing I did was programming the new front end for the game. Due to restricted memory I had come up with a simple idea, which would display a bitmap logo, and some animated game sprites. I decided to have the whole screen in red, apart from the raster which holds the logo in place. I painted it in black. I also added the colour washing routine, using brown, red, orange, light red yellow and white. It looked pretty nice on the front end. I also added page flipping and timers. So that the title screen will flip from the credits to the high score table. This worked quite nicely. I also wrote a scroll text and programmed a smooth scroll which would display that text. Then I added the animated ninja sprites and the player's sprite.

As soon as I was happy with the front end I decided to work on the Get Ready and Game Over sequences. For this, I made a grey screen, and did the player chasing after the ninja, for the get ready sequence. Then I did an animation, similar to the Get Ready sequence, but instead of the ninja running off the screen. I got the ninja to punch the player into the air, and go splat on the ground. I thought that for this kind of scene it was quite funny to watch. :)

The next task was to program in the usual high score / name entry routines, as before. Like with 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs, I was hoping to add the rankings to the name entry message. Sadly I was unable to do that this time due to being completely out of memory for any more code. So I had to cut the high score routine smaller by missing that out. Otherwise some of the crucial data would have been overwritten by the high score routine.

As soon as the high score routine was finished. I tested everything to see if it all worked okay. It seems to be working fine. Now the final touches. The Galway Ninja loading music and the tape mastering. - Complete! Hopefully this is another SEUDS 2 game finished and ready.

Sheepy Goes 'A Shootin'

2011-08-31T19:31:00.004+01:00

31st August 2011

Wow, quite a stroke of luck I had today. Winning 1st prize in a quiz at the work place (6 bottles of wine) and also getting a new Sheep sprite up and running. I converted the image of Shaun's sheep into Sprite Pad V1.8. It flippin' worked too. Awesome!! Once I got the sprite frames, etc.

I took on board some of Shaun's suggestions that the sheep can jump on to boxes and barrels too. I loaded up Arkitec and checked out which characters should be used to make the sheep jump on to the barrels. I added the characters, which represented the value of the character sets that form the boxes and barrels. I also managed to get the jump routine working slightly better. The player cannot jump too high in one go. The player can also jump outside of the game screen :)

Now the bulk of the background scrolling / collision code was virtually finished. I decided to work on getting some nice effects into the game. Well, not really effects, just explosions. This is for when the player shoots an enemy. It will then stop the enemy and let the enemies that get shot, explode. Then after the animation, remove the enemy off screen. I had to program an animation engine per enemy for this, because if I actually made the explosion animation on the player's bullet. It just wouldn't work right - plus there'd be a delay with the bullet firing. Since I was happy with the enemy blasting and the enemies are exploding quite nicely. I decided to call it a day with this game. For today. :)

The next task (Which will be some time this weekend) will be to get the enemies shooting bullets in one of 3 directions. Also I will be working on enemy movement formations, according to a random table (Depending on what the enemies will be). Stay tuned on Sunday, to see what happens. :)

Kung Fu, POW!

2011-08-28T16:22:00.005+01:00

27th August 2011

I was going to do a little more on Woolly Jumper today, but decided to leave that until Wednesday afternoon :). Instead I received some text and graphics for the ending of 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs. The hardest part was actually getting the actual .C64 file to save in CCS64. The best option I had was to store the all data (For the ending) and put that on to a .tap image. Load in the Sideways Scrolling SEUCK in WinVice, and then load the .tap image into it. That method worked quite nicely. I watched the example of the end. It looked interesting, and I thought to myself that it was most definitely worth a try.

Before I got into the programming side of things, I had to try import the charset from the SEUCK ending into Cuneiform. Then import the font that Alf made for 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs. We imported the files okay into the PC C64 char editor, and I copied the background chars (which formed the Master of Exposition's HQ) and put it into place with the 1x1 charset, which I used for 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs. I save the charset data, and raw data as well. Now was time for the next phase.

Because I can't really use more SEUCK background for the ending, I decided to import the character sets into the Graphic Editor by Firebird Software. It is quite an interesting piece of kit for the Commodore 64. So I loaded it up from the original .tap file that was created using the DC2N. Set Vice to warp speed so that the program loaded quicker. Then loaded the charset in. I also opened another window with VICE, and the Sideways SEUCK with the work file which Alf originally made. I then designed the background (Made it similar to the SEUCK background) although found a slight glitch in the FB Graphic Editor. The white pillars should have been hires, but they seemed to have ended up in multicolour instead. I then captured the image with the Retro Replay and used the MC monitor to transfer the screen to $2000 and colour to $2400. I then saved both files and then imported those into the ACME SEUCK Enhancements project file for 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs.

Next I copied Alf's text and I input it into the ACME cross assembler source. I saved and imported the sprite data into Spritepad 1.8, and I selected the sprites that were used for the ending. I also used the sprites of one of the enemy ninjas as well as the player - for the Get Ready and Game Over sequences. That will do for today, as I'm off out in a few minutes time :)

28th August 2011

Today was probably the most important of the day with 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs, where it comes to the end part. I have decided to program it in today. Mainly because the end part will probably be one of the longest parts to make in assembly before the Front End, Get Ready, Game Over and High Score entry parts :). So I programmed each frame, checked the ending out. Had a few problems at first, but they were resolved. The ending features the Master of Awesome and the Master of Exposition. But I will not tell you what it's all about though. It's a big secret and pretty much a funny ending :) There's still something that needs sorting out with this ending. Getting the background's pillars the correct colour. That should hopefully be no problem. :). On to Woolly Jumper on Wednesday. :)

Let's Shoot!

2011-08-26T11:21:00.003+01:00

Thursday 25th August 2011

Okay, so I got the Sheep to jump, got the background to scroll. So what now? Well, this phase was quite a short phase for yesterday, but it was worth the effort. Since I last worked on Woolly Jumper, I got the player to jump, and also shoot, but there was still something missing. Yes, that's right. No collision or animation.

The first thing I worked on was the collision detection. A simple software Collision routine which uses the box-type collision (Sometimes that cannot be reliable, but if adjusted correctly the box collision should work okay. That's the method that I used for Sub Hunter :). The first thing I did was to write a subroutine that would read the player's virtual/ghost position and store it into a table of four bytes. I did this for the player's collision, and I also did that for the player bullet collision.

Now for the most interesting part. To get the collision working, I had to type in a string of code (quite a long string to be honest) for the player/enemy collision and enemy/bullet collision. Mainly by simply comparing whether or not the player, the bullet or the enemy collides into the target range of each other. If that happens, then something happens. At the moment I got it where the player crashes into an enemy, the border flashes (a temporary indicator to show the player dead). Also if the player bullet's sprite hits the enemy, both bullet and enemy disappears.

I got the aliens to move at different speed, but that was just a temporary thing. I also added temporary animation frames for the enemies and their bullet as well.

I received an email from Shaun about the jumping, it still does not seem to be right yet. Also the player stops at the very top border when jumping. It has been suggested that the player should be able to leave the screen if jumping at a high position, otherwise it would make the game unfair. I have a possible solution, but it could probably affect other sprites (after being shot). Basically open the top border, which the player can jump over.

He also suggested to me that the sheep should also jump on to the barrels (and possible crates as well). Which I originally thought was just simple background. Also the player seems to sink in part of the background by a few pixels. Well, those should hopefully be no problem for me to fix. As on Saturday (Because I'm taking a programming break tomorrow) I will be fixing this, and also (if I have the time) make the enemies trigger happy. Then it's the random movements for the enemies - some bouncing ones too) . This should then turn into a game to play :)

Prepare for more awesome!

2011-08-23T19:22:00.003+01:00

23rd August 2011

Heeyaaaaah! (Smack!). Another new project. Well, it's not really that new as I had it earlier on this year. Yes, it's 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs - Way of the Exploding Fish. Yet another game for the Shoot Em Up Destruction Set. I was originally having a laugh working on 1000 Kung Fu Maniacs, but 2000 KFM promises to be more silly and hilarious compared to the first one.

Today was my day off work, so I decided to work a little on this game. Well, actually the majority part of the in game enhancements was done to be honest. First of all I explored the sprites and discovered some sprites which were not used. I also replaced a sprite of the Van Damne type of character with a 2 - way Poodle boss - which requires 5 hits before it's defeated. The idea was to have the big dog guard

ing the tinned fish while the master of awesome was at the Moose Mart. I also copied some of the power up sprites and mirrored those so that the player will be able to have power ups when it comes to the enhancements.

The next task was to do the enhancements of the SEUCK game. Just like with Super Tau Zeta, the player gets a new weapon/surprise. This will only happen if the player picks up a scroll. I programmed a small routine that cycles through the 7 power ups in which the player could have. If the player picks up a scroll, the power up gets randomly picked. So either the player could have something useful, or probably useless, or even something very daft. I will not let you know what the actual power ups are. You will have to wait until the full game's finished and released on SEUDS 2 :).

Power ups have been sorted out now. So next was to add the linked explosions for whenever the boss gets hit. Well, I had one slight snag with the boss death. If the boss died, other enemies would explode as well. I then came up with a solution to that problem. The bosses could carry a smart bomb with them, so the enemies will explode if the boss has been defeated. This can be a reward. Of course that will not happen to the little dog boss, guarding the tin of Exploding Fish.

There's a stage that features a gallery. I've added some interesting twists to exhibits in the gallery. Some are good, but some are bad. Again the player should pick up the scrolls. Inside the gallery are two other collectables, but I have added two surprises there. One item triggers a smart bomb, while another triggers a punishment, where the player loses 1000 points due to collecting the object. There is also another twist involved as well. You will have to wait and see :)

The enhancements seem to be shaping up quite nicely. I shall send Alf the work that has been done so far to this game - and see if he can give me tips on bullet speed and duration for the power ups. :)

The squadron invades the loading screen

2011-08-22T10:03:00.008+01:00

21st August - 22nd August 2011

Yesterday as well as doing some work for Woolly Jumper, I also have been a busy man (As Sundays are indeed boring TV wise) and I worked on some loading music for the Super Tau Zeta tape loader. It was composed using DMC V5.0+ and is basically a rendition of my composition, which I originally did using Madtracker for the Super Tau Zeta promo video on YouTube. I thought the music sounded quite good for one reason or another.

Later on I stumbled across a loading picture which was made for this game drawn by STE'86. The loader pic was uploaded on to the CSDB and I was very impressed with the work he made with the pic, so I downloaded it (As I know that it'll be exactly the same loader pic for the game) and saved the image to koalapaint format, ready for the next tape master.

Alf Yngve got back to me with a text for me to put down for after the game has been complete to replace the original ending which hardly fit one screen - and that was all I had left memory wise. Manually typed in the end text finding it to be quite a sad ending, but would suit the game nicely, although the ending is a remix of the Super Tau Zeta video tune (again). Once I tested everything the game's working fine, the ending works - no crashing. So I mastered the whole thing to tape using the same loader as I did for Bloodwheels (All of those games except for the bonus game by Alf, himself will be using the

Ocean style loader colour cycle scheme). Finally it's done :)

My next project for SEUDS 2 will be 2000 Kung Fu Maniacs. Alf Yngve has given me ideas for the new power ups (Which I will be implementing into the game this week) but I shall not tell you what they are anywhere in the blog ... They're really a big surprise and guaranteed to have you gamers laughing as well :).

Through old pastures new

2011-08-21T14:00:00.003+01:00

21st August 2011

I received some nice new graphics from Shaun this week and imported the data into the source code for Woolly Jumper. The graphics were nicely drawn in Arkitec (For those of you who want it, it was on the Cabana User Tool Disk CSDB ID 42413). However, I had hit a slight snag after importing the graphics data into the source code. It was nothing too serious of course. Just a little thing where I was required to update the platform land routine corresponding to the characters which the player's sprite landed on. So I called up a few subroutines which will manually check for which characters (which result as the top platforms) will stop the player from falling. I even set some of the characters for where the player will die if it hits a deadly character. I have a video here of the new map. Enjoy :)

Now that I am quite happy with the platform chars which the player can land on, or die when touched, I can move on later on this week by programming the main game attack waves engine, which will be executed according to a sequence of numbers through a data table. Once happy with all of those, it'll be time for the animation engine. I shall also get the player to do some shooting as well. :)

Get ready for some real carnage

2011-08-14T19:55:00.011+01:00

14th August 2011

Sundays are boring, I have to admit. Well, only one thing for it. MORE PROGRAMMING. Well, that's what's been happening today? I have been very busy on a project for Psytronik Software. Since Super Tau Zeta has been finished (Only awaiting Kenz or Ste's loading pic) I decided to work on another game. In fact a very long awaited title, which appeared in Games That Weren't. What game am I talking about? Well does Bloodwheels ring a bell? This game was written back in 1994 originally for Psytronik Software. Perhaps Alf was waiting for someone (before I got involved with SEUCK enhancements at the time) . Sadly it never got enhanced for a commercial release back in the day.

Yesterday, Kenz contacted me via Email asking me if I could implement the logo which he painted for this game on to the front end. Well, I gave it a go, but when I checked out the old title screen I originally did for it back in 2010, I felt that the front end was just too plain. So I decided to make a brand new front end for this game today, and feature some amazing animations and add some extra stuff to the game as well.

The first thing was preparing the files to import into the source code. Those of which were the SEUCK files, music, new charset (which I used from the Pour Le Merite SEUCK game - my charset of course) and also edited the charset to make some frames for the title screen animation. Once all preparing was done, I worked on the programming side of the project. First I programmed a few routines which will hack SEUCK to do amazing things and play music during play. Then I programmed routines that could animate the water (2 chars rolling downwards continuously) and also fixed the score routine, so in 2 player mode, the correct player gets the points per hostage rescued.

As soon as I was happy with all of the in game features, I programmed a new front end, which featured Kenz's cool Bloodwheels logo (from the loading picture) and also got the front end animating and playing music, flashing the "Press fire to start" text. I also added the ability for the players to press fire in either joystick port. Joystick port 2 allowed the player to start a game for 1 players only. Joystick port 1 allowed both players to participate in the action. I also added GET READY, GAME OVER and MISSION COMPLETE scenes. I was really happy with what was done so far.

To end the session, I decided to work on the tape master. I decided not to play around with the loading stripes this time round. An Ocean style loader would be perfect for this compilation, but I used the tape loader source by Martin Piper. Nice loader system, displaying a neat loading picture, based on Alf Yngve's original artwork.

Let's bounce

2011-08-13T15:33:00.004+01:00

Saturday 13th August 2011

I am feeling afresh from my 2 week break in Somerset. Now I am ready for some more programming and music composing. On Thursday (Although I didn't mention it in the blog) I have been drawing some test graphics and sprites for the "Horizontal scrolling platform framework" for the 16KB cartridge game for the RGCD competition, which is currently in progress (And I am aiming to get it released down there in November). I also designed a map for the framework. Looks very basic and sort of rubbish graphics, but well, it's not the actual game graphics for Woolly Jumper. As Shaun's working on those :)

Today I felt like doing some more programming on the platform scroll engine. Although on Thursday I did add the new map to the project, I decided to update the scroll engine slightly. It appeared that I was using the KERNAL IRQ vectors, using #$37 as the $01 value. Because this was limited. I decided to switch off the basic KERNAL vectors, by simply changing the value of $01 to #$35 and then I changed all $0314 and $0315 vectors to $fffe and $ffff. I also add pointers to $fffa and $fffb to disable the RESTORE key from crashing the program. As soon as I was happy with the interrupts, I added an extra interrupt in which uses a standard multicolour for the water, and also a different colour scheme for the platforms. I made the default map colour to use a red scheme. Okay, not really bad. :) I tested the scroll and the scroll seems to work well.

There appears to be something missing. Those of which are SPRITES :). I imported the test sprites into the source code, as raw sprites. Then I got the sprites to display on to the screen. Well, just the player sprite for now that is :). Next I worked on the joystick read routine, so that the player can move up/down left or right (no shooting yet). Once I did that, the next job was to program in the self-modifying Sprite to background collision detection. So I check the value of the character sets which were being used for the top of the platform. The basic idea is to test to see if the player touches any part of the upper charset that represents the platform (anywhere on screen). If the player touches it, the sheep will flash until it is off the background.

After testing the routine was working, I programmed some additional routines that will make the sheep jump continuously. So that I could get the jumping slightly more at an accurate level. After a lot of tweaking with the jumping routine, I altered the joystick routine even more and got the player jumping and falling perfectly. Finally I added the moving aliens (Which still require a variety of movements, which will be implemented later on this week.) I also enabled the player to be able to fire bullets as well. After assembly of the framework so far, things are starting to take shape quite nicely. Enjoy the video! :)

Let's Scroll It!

2011-07-16T18:03:00.004+01:00

15th - 16th July 2011

Well, there's one kind of game I have not really done before, which my 16kb cartridge game will require. That is a block and map horizontal scroller. I have noticed that this type of technique is quite popular with shoot 'em ups. Anyway, I needed to learn some new stuff, so I decided to try and experiment with something. Before I started programming the map scroller. I loaded up SubChrist's CharPad64 V1.8 and I took a look at one of the examples which was ready made. It was a horizontal scrolling map, called "Sooperdooper". I extracted all of the data as raw binary files, into the ACME cross assembler sub folder. Then I took a look at a tutorial which was one of the rants on the Covertbitops web site. It was about the dissection of the C64 CGC 1999, game Escape from New York. I took a look at the tutorial and noticed that it was for the DASM cross assembler. I have always disliked using DASM, and converted the source to ACME cross assembler, then I implemented the routine into the ACME cross assembler.

The first thing I did was to initialise everything, by clearing the screen, and zero filling it. Once I did that, I set up the colours for the scroll. Those of which refer to the border and background colour, multicolour 1, multicolour 2 and actual char colour. After that was done, I initialised the interrupts and the music, then added a CLI and synchronised timer routine. Then I typed in the scroll routines, which included converting the 4x4 blocks on to the edge of the screen, and scrolling it across inside a loop. I also had to manually type in the low and high byte addresses for where the block data lies, to place into the map on to the screen. After testing, I ended up with some silly things happening.

It took a while for me to get the map placing and scrolling to work, as I had some silly thing going on - a miscalculation of the block size and map size. Once fixed, I got the map to scroll and display nice and smoothly. I tried implementing the mixed colour data tiles into the source, which did work, but sadly there was one problem - using charset tile colours and putting it into the colour RAM can cause major loss with raster time. There is a way out of this problem, to actually implement something to stop that from happening would require some more research.

After finishing my scroll experiment, I decided to draw some test graphics and import them into the source code. Then make a little video of what I have done with the scroller. The reason for making and testing a 4x4 block scroller is because I want to make a horizontal scrolling platform shoot 'em up called "Woolly Jumper" for the 16kb Cartridge compo, run by RGCD.

Maybe some time in the future I can implement the scrolling routine to support SEUCK tiled maps from Charpad, then I can do a remake of another classic crap game for the Masterchronic label :)

Here's the video of the map running:

Hunter's Moon ending music originally by Matt Gray, DMC V2.0 version by Richard/TND

16KB Cartridge Game compo - Ideas. Now which should I choose?

2011-06-26T21:44:00.004+01:00

26th June 2011

While I feel to have the urge to finish of Super Tau Zeta for Psytronik Software this week (If I finish from work at 4pm on an 8am - 4pm shift). Another game idea has come to my mind. It is also something for the 16KB cart game competition. I attempted a few things when it came to Commodore 64 assembly programming. It all started with moving sprites around and having to dodge them. The crappy "Target-X" series (I actually did do a Target-X 3 in 2001, but it never came to the light - the disk had died on me at the time), the Gravity series, and in 2004-2008, a pure milestone of a shoot 'em up with varied challenges called "Sub Hunter". I also did a couple of psychedelic games, like Sheepoid and Camels in Space, created in the Jeff Minter style mode (Except for the graphics, which used my own sprites and multicoloured all the way through).

There was however one type of game, which I never actually produced, and it is something retro gamers mainly loved in the 8-bit world. We have seen many of those, but this genre does not die out whatsoever. "What is this retro geek, called Richard/TND talking about then?" you may ask. Well, it is the "PLATFORMER". The question is what type of platform game could I write, and how would I come around it?

Well, I could I suppose, do a single screen which uses the Lode Runner style of mode, in which you're a player having to grab dots. Well, this could be quite appealing. Or perhaps I should do a platform game which uses the horizontal scrolling map. Come to thinking about it, I can only scroll 256 chars. Block/Map scrolling is very tricky. Thankfully I can refer to a framework source which was used for the Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge source code. Or perhaps I could do a simple single screen platform game. Well, I have a few ideas, but I would need to think about what I could implement for the C64 16KB competition. Here are some simple ideas I have come up with - theoretically.

The Death Saw Challenge

An evil scientist has created several rooms, which consist of moving circular saws, which move along the walls, horizontally, vertically or possibly diagonally. Your player must move around the platform maze, climbing up and down ladders having to flick the switches to disable all of the saws. The only problem is that if you flick one particular switch, a saw may stop, but other saws may keep on moving. This would be quite a gory idea, but sounds quite appealing. Later levels could have faster moving saws, and also some trick switches, that will trigger traps.

Sheepoid II - Wooly Jumper

A psychedelic platform game with a slight twist. You are a Sheep which has to get across several levels. The platforms will move at a constant pace, while your sheep is happily bouncing up and down. The player must avoid falling off the edge. Also to make things more interesting, alien ships can fly across the screen in both directions, sapping the player's energy. The sheep can collect laser pods to fight back the aliens.

Put the Kettle On

I remember a classic VIC20 game called "Wacky Waiters" by Imagine software. Now, I'd love to do a C64 conversion, but I had something completely different in mind. It's a funny game idea in the mode of Wacky Waiters, but instead, you are going to one of the kitchens, and then try and serve cups of tea to the customers who are waiting. The only problem is that you have to carefully enter the lifts which are moving up or down. There could be various objects appearing in the background to slow you down, such as banana skins, bottles, etc.

However, I think Wooly Jumper could be the game I may possibly create for this competition. It sounds like a good laugh and ... but you will have to wait and see what gets released near to November time for the RGCD 16kb cart compo :)

Building pipes

2011-06-07T16:45:00.004+01:00

7th June 2011

I originally started to do some graphics for the "Pressure Pipe" game yesterday, but for some reason after saving the VICE snapshot in V2.23, I ended up with VICE crashing. So today it was back to the drawn board - Literally :) Okay, don't laugh. We do make mistakes I must however admit. Anyway, today while I was listening to some C64 media on the "Armalyte" CD, and Remix.Kwed.org, I have decided to work on the in game graphics and character sets. I had second thoughts about designing everything on Multi Screen Construction Kit, as it would take me longer. Also I had feeling that VICE may have a popup which could shut everything down.

I loaded up the cross-platform tool, "Cuneiform" and worked on the charset and graphics data. Then saved everything and exported the stuff in PRG format. Once I exported the .PRG file and imported into the .D64, I loaded up Jon Well's Multi-Screen Construction Kit and then loaded up the D64 with the graphics charset. It was then time for me to design and save the objects data, which I did. I had to play around with some of the graphics, as they didn't quite look like how I would have wanted those. So after a few alterations, I succeeded with it. Now all I had to do was for the screen, put everything together. Well, yet again, I succeeded with that. A screen's built and stored, and here's my result for the first level. Maybe I could do some more level designs later on in the project. The programming of the game will be more important now I have a graphics mockup ready for the game. I just need to paint some balls in a Sprite Editor (Might do this tomorrow) and then start programming the game.

Here comes Mario :)

2011-06-07T16:29:00.003+01:00

5th June 2011

It's official. Mario is coming to the Commodore 64. Okay, I fibbed there. I bet that caught you attention huh? Well, I guess so, who else would be reading this? So then, I have a week off work this week (as I have to use up ALL my annual leave before 30th June 2011). I decided to work on a brand new game project, which should hopefully be a free download from my web site once finished and tested.

This time round it's a new genre puzzle game (or probably not new) for the good old Commodore 64 called "Pipe Pressure" (Probably would sound a lot better if it was called "Pressure Pipe". You decide for yourself :o)). The concept is a very simple concept, which could probably become an addictive puzzler if all goes to plan. The idea I come up is a very simple concept and was sort of an inspiration from those PC flash games you tend to get on line.

Anyway, the concept is pretty much straight forward. (Yawn). When you start the game, a series of four balls of a different colour will appear on to the screen for a few seconds. You must then memorize what colour balls should go into which pipe (indicated with arrows). Then you get to play the game. You have to race against the clock to get 40 correct coloured balls into the pipes within a certain time limit. To increase the confusion. There will be additionally different coloured balls appearing. If none of those match the ones which you had to memorize. The user would have to throw those into the disposal chute at the bottom (simply by pressing the fire button). To make the game idea more confusing if a wrong ball ends up in the disposal chute, or a wrong ball enters the pipe. A life will be lost. At the moment, it is planned to have 10 levels, but if I find that 10's not enough, then levels can increase later on in the game. Tomorrow, I shall work on the game's graphics. Then maybe later on, I shall program the game.

Richard @ RetroVision 2011 - Llamasoft jolly!

2011-05-22T12:23:00.008+01:00

22nd May 2011

Well nothing new to show you at the moment, I did not even take any photos at this event as I really got carried away with enjoying myself (Oops, now that was silly). It started when my brother, Phil and I got up at 9am, had some breakfast and tea (Put the kettle on Philip). I was on the IPod Touch checking for new emails before setting off to the event. We both got ready and driven from Solihull to Oxford, getting stuck in traffic for about 40 minutes or so, due to an accident in one of the junctions. When we got there, we found parking to be really awkward, so we had to use the city centre multi-floor car park.

Anyway, after I got to the Foly Bridge pub, I bought a glass of cola for Phil and also one for myself, then I headed off to the function room and said "I have come for the Retro Vision event, I am Richard, Sheepoid programmer, and this is my brother Philip". Kenz was very surprised to finally see me in person at the event. I went over to the C64 and thought I surprise the people by playing Sheepoid, and then entering on the high score table "Richard Bayliss is here". This was where I then bumped into Vinny, followed by my co-op assistant of Sub Hunter. Frank Gasking. They both were also delighted to see me in person down there. One of them even bought me a drink and offered to buy Philip a drink, but he turned down the offer. Frank also got out his copy of Sheepoid and asked if I could sign it. Which I did. Kenz also came over to me and got a copy of Sheepoid out and asked if I could sign the inlay as well. Which I also did.

The computer, which I was mainly playing games on at the event was mainly on the Commodore 64C (Just like what I have). The C64C also had a 1541 Ultimate device plugged into the back of the machine, with LOADS and LOADS of Commodore C64 games on there, including Sheepoid. I might consider ordering one of these later on this year, as my 1541 disk drive keeps playing up. I also talked to Frank and Vinny about how I was involved in programming games. I even brought a disk with a couple of previews (Super Tau Zeta and Up In The Air), but I really should have brought it on an SD Card.

Later on, after looking around, I went straight back to the C64C and got Philip sitting next to me, and did something which brought memories back. We had a Vioris challenge :) After all these years (1993 or something like that), Philip and I were playing Vioris and he, unfortunately beat me at this game. Pah! Typical ... I'm not that good at gaming am I? ... I decided to then play the classic "Commodore Force" cover tape game, Relax ... Ooops, he beat me once again. Then afterwards, I played Trailblazer against him and I still lost at it! ... It goes to show that I am more of a games creator than a games player today :o) I was then interviewed by Paul Drury from Retro Gaming magazine, asking me questions about how I was involved on the Commodore 64 and why I was involved. I was happy to answer those questions, and as soon as the interview was over after 2 or 3 minutes or so, I went back up and played "Star Sabre" for the Amstrad CPC, as well as Drop Zone on Kenz's Specadore (Commodore 64 with a painted casing to make it look like a Spectrum). Man, that "Star Sabre" game was awesome, I wish there was a port of it for the Commodore C64. Hope a programmer (not me) would be able to take on this challenge).

RetroVision had some great competitions, I participated in only one, but I shall tell you about it later on. One competition, which I did not participate in was Hiper Viper for the BBC computer. I saw the game in action. It was one of those classic remakes of the traditional Worm/Snake style game.

The next competition was "Sheepoid". Vinny was the man in charge of the scores, and the game appeared on the big screen. Darn. I forgot to take some photos of this event. Pff! There were some players playing really well at this game, and there were some players who failed with embarrassment. Especially where one particular person scored NO points at all. There was one person who put their name down for this competition, but they did not seem to be present for the competition at the time, so I got my brother to cover for them. Oh dear. Bad move. He did not do good at all. He scored 30 points, and lost a life straight away. This really made me laugh!

There were also some people speaking to me about Commodore 64 stuff. Colin showed me some classic games which he was involved with, or had friends who made the games - which unfortunately never actually got released. Colin also showed me his music editor, which he's working on for the Commodore 64. One particular game, which took my attention on the C64 was an unreleased blaster, which was written back in 1993. I cannot remember what the game was called, but it reminded me of Firebird Software's classic shoot 'em up called Galax-I-Birds. Another game was some kind of underwater platform game. I said to the person who showed me the two games, if those were released back in the eighties, they would have made great Mastertronic / Firebird releases. Also if the game was released in 1993 it would have made a great cover tape game for one of the two UK C64 magazines that were still alive at the time.

Another gaming competition come up. I signed my name for it, and I signed my brother's name for the compo. Not realising that it is a tournament for more than 5 players. I played my brother up by putting his name as "Philip/Pork Pie". The compare asked for the compo entrants, "Richard/TND" and also "Philip/Pork Pie". I was laughing when I heard that. We played a few bouts of the tournament. I lost completely, Philip made it to the finals, which made me a bit jealous. Well, as I have said before, I am more of a game creator than a gamer in general :)

Before I decided to leave the event and head for home, I was sitting outside speaking to Philip until Kenz come along and asked me to sign a Sheepoid framed poster for the charity auction. I was very happy to oblige to do this. The auction went on for ages, and in the lot sixty something was the picture, signed by me. Philip missed the picture being sold at the auction. After this, I went over to Kenz, Vinny, Frank and some other people. Shook their hands and said I had a great time and sure would love to come to RV2012 next year. What a fantastic event it has been.

Oops, I had a great time at RetroVision 2011, but I had forgotten a couple of things. One was to ask for a tape and premium disk version of Sheepoid, before leaving and another which was to show the work of Up in the Air (A project which I held back, due to feeling uncomfortable with parts of the project and also due to work) and Super Tau Zeta (Which is currently still under development). Sorry to Alf and Wayne for failing to show the previews from my floppy.

Joy-sticks :)

2011-05-17T17:13:00.009+01:00

Tuesday 17th May 2011

Just as I thought it was nearly all over for Sheepoid (Baaaah!), I've had quite a big surprise today. First, when I was coming home from work, I bought two ice creams from the Ice Cream van. One for myself, and one for my brother. I sat down, relaxed enjoying my 99 with flake. Then my brother said to me "I have a done a surprise project for you, Richard.". I originally thought that Phil must have been secretly working on a C64 style game on his lap top for my PC or something similar. Well, How wrong I was. My surprise was much bigger. It's not a game this time, but something which I never expected. - A brand new, and pretty special joystick for my (Take a guess) Commodore 64.

I am guessing that Phil found it really difficult to use the SpectraVideo joystick, which I have had for so many years (and is still working today), while he was playing Sheepoid on Friday last week. He even failed to get past the first level, due to the joystick being pretty awkward. So I showed him how to play the game properly. Well, either last week or this week. He secretly ordered various parts and components, and he built a new arcade style joystick inside the garage, and also used some unused wood and boarding, and he coated it with white paint. It must have took him some time to do this, especially the electronics. The biggest problem would probably have been to find a suitable port for the joystick. So he found one of my old joysticks and wired that up to the new joystick. One problem ... The wire's too long :)

Phil also worked hard on making an additional feature for this special joystick by wiring the direction controls, to move the player according to direction of movement. The red button was wired to act as the usual fire button. Finally the blue button was something special, which joystick manufacturers failed to add for the Commodore 64. Especially for driving simulators and platform games. The blue button was used as an extra UP command. This is so that when playing platform games, the blue button could be used to allow the player to jump. What a clever chap ;o)

To finish off his secret project, Phil decided to test the new joystick on my Commodore 64. He had to fiddle around with loading stuff using the DC2N, while I was away. Then he managed to load up the cute and hilarious Thalamus game, Creatures and he tested the joystick on the game. Worked a treat.

I was impressed with the amazing work and time, which Phil spent on this secret little hobby project. I loaded up Hewson's Uridium and played the game using the new joystick. Hmm, it is something I would need to get used to. Mainly because I am used to having the fire button on the left and the direction stick to the right. Instead the buttons are on the right, and the main controller was on the left. That did not really matter because I played Uridium quite well with this device. Huge thanks Phil.

A new front end

2011-04-18T19:02:00.003+01:00

Monday 18th April 2011

It was yet again my day off work and I decided to work on the front end for the new Alf Yngve game for Psytronik Software. I had some nice looking ideas for the front end, which unfortunately required a lot of time with raster timing. I got the logo to display and also the credits charset, however I had come across a slightly annoying problem with the source code. The timing of those nice looking colour bars. I had to muck around with the source a little before I got the final result for the static text. I just have the scroll text raster timing to work on. The front end looks quite nice, but is still unfinished. I'm considering to add a simple sprite star field on to the title screen, and also some game options and high score table. Anyway, results are looking good so far. :)

Power Me Up

2011-04-17T18:29:00.002+01:00

Saturday 16th April 2011

Okay, something completely different and I think the game's author will feel relieved after he reads this blog. I have been taking a look at one of Alf Yngve's new games, which he has specially written for Psytronik Software, and he has waited ages for a new version of his great sideways SEUCK game. Finally the wait can be shorter, specially for him. I also said that I'm aiming to get this game done in time for Retro-Vision 2011 as well. But can I get it done on time? At the moment there is a great percentage that I can get it done. Enhancing SEUCK games don't really take all that long for me - as long as what I programmed, already had things working properly.

I took a look at some of the production notes on what power ups I should add to the game. I captured the work file, disabled the SEUCK editor and then split the memory into segments. Then I exported the 2 files into the project cross-assembly folder. Once I done this I wrote some new music for the title screen, and took the title screen from TAU ZETA and extracted that into the cross-assembly source code.

As soon as the file preparation was finished, I was able to do a bit of ACME cross-assembly programming. At $0801 (Which will be the run address after Exomizer decrunches the game), I added some routines which will cleverly hack into the SEUCK code to make way for the enhancements (and also fix additional in game bugged routines, such as the scoring, etc). Then I added the power ups code and linked it all into the source file. So now after the player collects a flashing green thing (whatever it is) the player will gain a specific power up. Which could be: A temporary shield, directional fire, fast laser (and longer distance shooting), mega bomb and also a score converter (which converts the alien score into digits). I also made it that a power up is lost after the player has lost a life. The player will then have to battle really hard on quite a longer flight before he or she can pick up the next power up. - and probably lose it again :)

Sunday 17th April 2011

Today I designed the front end logo, simply by using Alf's original front end logo (I liked it a lot), resizing it and then anti-aliasing the image. Then I worked on the new front end character set, in which the main chars are 1x1 and the name in the credits are 1x2. Sorry, but I have no screen shots of the project to show you at the moment, because I have nothing (the new front end) to show. :)

I still have a new front end to program, and also some Get Ready, Game Over jingles, Mission Complete jingles to work on, but that can wait until next time I get round to it.

Sheepoid - Finished - Or is it?

2011-03-31T20:44:00.005+01:00

Thursday 30th March 2011

Ok, so you have not really heard much about Sheepoid since the last part of the blog? Well, don't panic. I've not given up with it, in fact I have finished the game itself already. "When and where will it be released?" you may ask. Well, after having a discussion with a few of my regular contacts, I have decided to release this game to Psytronik Software on disk or tape, and of course, you'll be able to download the game FREE from The New Dimension and/or the Psytronik Software web site, as soon as it is released. Although the whole game's finished, I have a secret program to program into the game's warning notice, and of course the most important part of the release. The disk/tape mastering :) This project has been great fun to create and develop :)

More enhancements and memory preservation

2011-02-27T17:43:00.007Z

27th February 2011

Today I was sort of brainstorming on how to preserve some more memory for additional/final touches with the code. Well, I found a solution. Redesign the front end screen using the Multi Screen Construction Kit, and make a new library with the existing graphics. I redesigned the front end (using another VICE window to help) and then saved the new library. Then I reinstalled it into the game project source. I also moved some routines around and removed one of the screen files, as this was no longer required. I assembled the source and run Sheepoid. BRILLIANT! MORE MEMORY SPACE for the final touches. Excellent :)

Now before I can add the new exploding sheep death to the game's source code. I've got to redesign some of the sprites again. So I loaded up the Sprite Editor V1.3 by Faces and redesigned some of the sprites. As well as created some new sprites. I changed all Space Invader sprites into assorted animals, and my version of the Ancipital creature (Half man, half goat?). Then I renamed the level "They have escaped from their pens". I also recreated the Llamas, my own version of the Zzapstars, dogs, and I got rid of the beer to make it the "Horus and the Sands of time" level instead.

The next job I did was to implement the baby sheep explosion routine, in which will displays the sprite "NO, NOT ME!" and make the sheep squeal if it was shot (and lose 1000 points). Well, thankfully I fixed this routine. I come a cross a small bug in which was aliens dying using the Sheep's death. After a moment or two with the fixing phase, the problem was solved. Now I added the infinite lives cheat routine for testing the whole game. I then assembled, and ran the game in WinVice V2.3 (XS64 mode). I played through the whole game, and was pretty much happy with what has been done through this game. I think the game's pretty much finished now. All I have to do now is the disk / tape mastering system and maybe a possible tweak with the game's colours or something like that. Here's a BETA video of what could be the final version of the game in action!

Flash Bang, What a picture

2011-02-27T11:20:00.008Z

26th February 2011

Earlier on last week I have been working on new sound effects to suit the game. I'm much happier with the sounds, but there are some effects missing. Many of the great Yak's psychedelic games used options to use strobe effects. So I decided to implement and program some strobe effects for when either the player dies or when an alien gets hit. Before I done this, the Game Over and level complete was lacking some colour over the text. I also wanted to change the Level Complete sequence a bit as well. So to make Level Complete much better. During the bonus countdown, the void scrolls downwards faster. Then I added a routine to remove the whole game playing background by filling the screen with the level's void. Then I added a colour wash routine on the WELL DONE text, followed by the GAME OVER text.

Once I was happy with the Well Done and Game Over text, I had a task which was to make the player lose 1000 points if a baby sheep was shot. So I programmed a little routine, which would deduct points off the player. If the very first digit was detected as a / when decrementing the value, I added a routine which makes all characters 000000 otherwise this would have been a bug in the game. Once that was done, I tried it out. Now the players will be LESS inclined to shoot the baby sheep, and will have to save them. Therefore the game is more challenging now.

One final routine to add was the in game strobe effects. I decided to only use $D021, because if I used $D020 as well, you could see the flicking spots at the bottom of the screen where the raster split lies. Plus using $D020 as well as $D021 could be too much for the gamer as well. I used two colour schemes for the player. I used the blue effect per baddie shot, and I used the orange/red effect for the player death. Something disappointed me though. I should really do an effect, which says NO for when a baby sheep dies, but I have unfortunately run out of memory for my code. There's just too much there for this little tweak. There might be a solution to the problem, perhaps I should reproduce the title screen using the Multi Screen Construction Kit. That will preserve $0400 spare bytes to expand my code a little for the sheep death effect. Which I shall do tomorrow. Then it is on to the improvements/tweaking of the game sprites and then the final phase bug fixing. Once all final phase fixing's finished. I'm ready to release this game to Psytronik Software. :)

A fleecy high score and ending

2011-02-20T18:25:00.004Z

20th February 2011

Well it's another fleecy furball adventure. Sheepoid seems to be progressing more nicer and today I've been doing yet more music composing and additional programming. This time round, I decided to write a dance style ending tune. So I loaded up Goat Tracker and loaded up the "Sheepoid" theme tune and started a new track number. I added some more instruments and after an hour or so the music was made and I was pretty much happy with it. Great!

Now it was time to add a high score name entry routine. I decided to make this part of the game very basic, because I would have had to muck about with interrupts. After I finished the high score entry routine. I added some improvements to the ending, which uses a psychedelic ending and a special scrolling message. I also tweaked the fire button routine so that the player can't shoot if he/she holds down the fire button. Therefore constant pushes of the fire button would be needed. I also made a routine in which checks if both lasers are off screen. If so, then they can be fired otherwise the process is ignored. One final improvement I have made was that the coloured raster bars can scroll upwards. The result's great so far. All I have to do now is some final tweaking/enhancements and bug fixing, for the game. Then hopefully it is ready.

Let's go Psychedelic ... Baaaaaah!

2011-02-15T18:10:00.005Z

15th February 2011

The past 2 afternoons, I have been working on Sheepoid - again :). I think so far the game's coming out quite nicely. Yesterday afternoon, I was working on the end part for the game. To build the end, I captured the field at the bottom of the screen and turned it into a straight field, without the upwards field from level 1. Then I saved the colour and screen data of the modified field.

After that was done my next task was to program some imaginative ending in a style of Yak the Hairy. Well, I could not really think of much of an ending and opened my imagination. Caught in the world of psychedelia. I decided that I had no option but to do an ending where there's a washing machine, someone throws a brick into it while the wheels are spinning and then self-destruct. Nope. I could have done that I suppose. Nah! What I really done was based it where a space ship lands back on to the field. The sheep jumps out. The space ship takes off and then the rest of the ending - a big surprise. I shall not tell you, but it does involve some hairy beasties :)

Today I decided to redesign my front end and implement it into the code. The first thing I did was remove those horrible looking thick raster beams. Recreated the title screen logo. It looked too much like 1985 or something like that. There was also too much flashing, so I decided to do away with some of it. I added an extra raster split and programmed a routine for the top scroll text. I put the flashing text on to the PRESS FIRE TO PLAY message. The top scroll was made for a purpose. After playing Revenge of the Mutant Camels and Sheep In Space, I decided to base the high score table on typing silly phrases of 40 characters. Just the way how the great Yak did for those two games. I also added a scroll text which scrolled the high scores across the front end slowly.

The worst part had come for the front end. I wanted to get rid of those horrible colour bars and replace them with something that would look much nicer. Any guesses? Yes, that's absolutely correct, demo-style raster colour bars. Glerk! They're easy to program into the raster split, but the worst part of it for me was timing the darn things so that they are straight. So I spent about an hour or so fiddling around with the timing tables and come up with a nice looking front end.

The last part I did today was updated the music using Goat Tracker. I wanted to make a modern version of the title screen tune for Sheepoid, as just using one sawtooth instrument was so 1984. So I added a few leads and also some drums (Oh no, Master Bayliss is going to put some techno/trance style beats to the production - gibber!). Then I altered the notes to play a rock-style tune for the title screen. No techno/trance for a change. Then I imported the remixed version of the sawtooth tune into the title screen code. It turned out very well :)

Bahtastic new look to Sheepoid

2011-02-12T15:04:00.003Z

12th February 2011

Well Sheepoid seems to be turning out quite nicely, although I cannot say that this game's finished. There's still some more things to update to code. Today I have been programming my own in game sound effects, and tried to make it as sort of Minter style as possible. I created various sound effects for the Get Ready screen, player shoot, enemy hit, baby sheep pick up, player hit and game over tune. After assembling the code from Turbo Assembler. I saved the sound effects player and data, but I forgot to save the actual TASS code. Doh! Trusty me to do that.

After finishing the sound effects and importing it into the game source. I imported all of the level data into the game code and also altered a few routines, where I could animate all 8 different voids. I also set up the game to display the screen from the MSCK library, according to the level in which the player was currently on. Something promising here :). The game is 76% finished now, I think!

Gardens, sea, pyramids. Everything, Baaaaah!

2011-02-11T18:03:00.009Z

11th February 2011

My main code for Sheepoid's finished (I think), apart from the ending (Which will be changed) as I felt that the ending for Sheepoid would not really be what people would have wanted. A better idea is planned for that, and I have plenty of time to get this project finished beforehand. Anyway, I decided to take a little break from programming today, and work on the main level schemes and graphics. So off the PC cross assembler, and straight on to my real Commodore 64 I go. ;o)

I loaded up the Multi Screen Construction Kit by Jon Wells and I loaded up my character set from the game project (Which I converted from my PC on to a C64 floppy disk). I created a few other character sets. The game uses a mix of hires and multicoloured graphics, so I created a few chars (from char $60+) to make those the scrolling voids. I also made some additional characters for the bottom and side panel, for where the player will be based. I didn't want to use the same panel as I did for the WIP version of the game. So I decided to draw some additional features, which were 1x1 chars to build flowers, trees, Egyptian, pyramids, water and hot desert (although it looks like custard :o).

After finishing the character sets, it was then time for me to create the objects, for putting on to 24 of the level screens. So I built the different scrolling voids (Alth

ough MSCK does not scroll those), and also different versions of the bottom and right panel which the player's always on. After this I found something to be not right. The panel on the right looks ugly without a curved character between the last 2 rows and columns. So I built a curved panel to put on to the background. It looked much nicer. After designing the 24 levels (Which in all, took me a couple of hours to do, as I was remixing some of the existing pane

ls and voids as well). Finally all 24 screens were built. I saved all the data on to the Sheepoid disk, built a final library (On the same disk). Then I ported everything back on to my PC (in the Sheepoid ACME project folder) using my XM1541 and CBMXfer application.

My next job will be to get all the level screens into the game source code. Then program some arcade/Jeff Minter style sound effects as the sounds I made using the Cult SFX editor wasn't really suitable for this type of g

ame, due to it's restrictions ;o).

Sheepoid - Progress so far

2011-01-29T13:39:00.004Z

Saturday 27th January 2011

Bleatings everyone :)

This shall not be a big blog, as I have a little update for you - or probably a huge update of my progress with Sheepoid and some other news about this game. Just for now as there's not really any new designs, etc to show you but here's some stuff I have to mention about this game so far.

Well today I've mainly been drawing the sprites, and manually typing in the sprite frame tables inside the ACME cross assembler. But I could get more done later on today :) So far I managed to get 4 levels active - as I have been struggling with the Laser Zone char-style explosion routines, which thankfully were working correctly after a week or so. With special thanks to C64 programmer and TND's contributor, Achim Volkers. The explosions of the enemy are starting to look a bit like laser zone, but I added some additional enemy disappearance sprite, which was an animated diamond/star that shrinks (while the chars fly through the screen diagonally).

As well as the explosion effects, I started implementing random X-Y directional speed, delay and colour of the enemies (according to the levels which they are on) and silly 1-liners. This made the game feel very Jeff Minter like and ideal for a Llamasoft tribute game. The other things I added were the enemy types as well per level. I only have 4 levels working right at the moment, but there's plenty of time for me to implement all 24 levels of game play. :)

Today I have just finished drawing all of the sprites (From $80-$FF) using Cellux/Face's Sprite Editor V1.2. All of the captions have been typed down in the source code. I also extracted the Sprite Data and imported it into the source code, ready for compiling.

There's some other things I have in store for this project but I shall not tell you. You'll just have to wait. ;)

The Cyber Sheep are coming

2011-01-07T10:45:00.008Z

Friday 7th January 2011

Laser Zone. What a classic game that was for the Commodore 64. It's quite a memorable little Arcade classic, which was on a compilation of crazy and really fun games, called "Yak's Progress" by Llamasoft. After playing Laser Zone, I came up with a nice idea for a tribute game. The game's name is Sheepoid, and last night I was just playing around with some raster splits and experimenting. Okay, so no game yet, but I ended up building a front end for the production instead. Probably a wrong move.

Anyway about the game. Laser Zone had two satellites in which had to blast aliens that appeared on screen before they reached to right or bottom surface and captured one of the satellites. The plan for "Sheepoid" is pretty much similar, except for that the game will have some differences. The starting levels may be quite similar, but the actual game itself will have some differences in attack waves - causing this game to be more zany and psychedelic than before. Instead of satellites, the player will be controlling laser powered sheep. Also instead of a small screen area being used. The sprites will use expanded positions. Therefore the game area's going to be pretty much big.

The official release date of this game is not really known as there's quite a bit of work to do, but I doubt that it'll take longer than 2 months or so. I will not be rushing on this game for a sake of a quick release, as there is seriously no point in rushing it for a sake of a quick release. Hmm. :)

When the game is finished, it will feature a variety of different aliens/psychedelic objects to battle against, wacky sound effects, bizarre get ready , level complete, life lost, game over messages, a possibility of an end sequence. Plus a nice looking psychedelic IRQ tape loader system as well. The final production will be uploaded on to my web site at: http://tnd64.unikat.sk.

We've pushed SEUCK to it's limits! - Nyaaaah!

2010-11-02T18:24:00.005Z

2nd November 2010

I have left this blog alone for a while, but production is going quite well with Nyaaaah! - 15th Anniversary Edition. After successfully importing the game project's work file into the SEUCK Redux source code, I managed to fit in some power ups, to enhance game play, additional in game enhancements and even a brand new front end. Things for me to do before the game is finished, is add a high score detection, a GET READY and GAME OVER sequence and END SEQUENCE. And of course adding the new score/status into the bottom border inside the game.

Implementing the new front end into the game's source was a bit of a bugger, due to the original title screen IRQ used in it. Thankfully I had a solution to this problem, which was to program my own IRQ inside the title screen code. Well, I wanted the Nyaaaah! logo to swing left and right, and I also wanted a scroll text with music. All seems to look good so far. There's still some work to put into the game, itself but hopefully in a couple of weeks time or so, I should be ready to release this game into the Public Domain.

Below is a mock up of the status bar, I plan for inside the game - to make it look less SEUCK. :)

Nyaaaah! 15th Anniversary is coming SOON!

2010-10-15T15:31:00.002+01:00

Friday 15th October 2010

Things have gone pretty quiet with my blog, but I have been busy with this project and another Psytronik project. After sucessfully finishing off the main game, attack waves, etc. I imported the work file into the SEUCK Redux source, added a bit of programming, played around with the player's parameters and wrote some tunes to insert into the source. The colour schemes worked a treat. Especially after I set up the level parameters to change the colour scheme and behavior of the game, itself.

All I will need to do now is put in the power ups, and then a new front end + high score table. Then the job is done!

November should hopefully be the release date of this.

Taking a short cut

2010-10-03T17:58:00.003+01:00

3rd October 2010
I have been working on level 3 and also the final stage of Nyaaaah! 15th anniversary. This time, level 3's the castle underground. After Snodge successfully escaped the water stage. He finds himself in a deadly underground of the evil biblet ruler's castle. Poor Snodge has to fight his way through the hardest part of the castle. Where wall climbing biblets and lava biblets roam and make things hard for poor snodge. Then he has to face the death saw challenge.

When I was designing the level's graphics scheme, it was very tricky to work on at first. It actually took me over an hour to have the correct pixels for each block for this level. Plus level 3 is sort of inspired from Imaginator. The idea of this stage was that Snodge has to persue up and down ladders and platforms to fight the evil biblets, etc before meeting his next challenge - The death saw challenge. Well, this was probably one of the most easiest boss stages I came up with for such a hard stage. Snodge has to face a giant circular saw, in which he's to avoid contact with. After this stage has finished, Snodge goes to the final stage, where he has to meet the evil biblet ruler. Sadly I have only 2 valid objects left for this stage, so I decided to reuse level 1's boss and add a crown and different behaviour to it. That solved my problem.

Now that I have (I think) finished the main game, itself. I can import the work into the SEUCK redux source engine and test the game in action with infinite lives ... Stay tuned!!!

I'm forever blowing bubbles!

2010-10-02T16:58:00.008+01:00

2nd October 2010

Yet another productive day with Sideways SEUCK. This time it's level 2 of Nyaaaah! 15th Anniversary edition. I know that Saturday last week I worked on the background graphics for level 2, but I wasn't really all that happy with those. So today I decided to spend some time making some much nicer graphics for level 2. Since I didn't want to use the same colours scheme as the first level - as the second level would look ugly with this scheme. I altered the multicolour colours to make the underwater graphics look nice. I used black, blue, light blue and purple - to make it look as if every thing's under water. I wanted to add some pipework to the levels, but I didn't want the game to look like Mario, so I pixelled my pipes, made some spikes then put things in place.
Well, it seems that all this hard work with level 2's graphics paid off and the level looks quite nice.

Now that the stage was designed. It was time for me to set up the attack waves. Before I did, I wanted to make some new enemies for this stage. I don't want to have biblets all of the time in this stage. So I created some fish, water snails and even a mean green boss fish, which the player has to defeat. Then I inserted the wodge load of enemies for this stage I also altered player 2's settings for testing the level. It seems to me that level 2 was just too chaotic. I had to alter the enemy firing rate, as it looked too silly and was way too difficult to play for this level. Much easier, although this stage is still quite hard to play. Maybe I shall work on level 3's graphics (the cave) tomorrow after work. CIAO for now!

My Digital C2N experience!

2010-09-23T18:55:00.006+01:00

25th September 2010

Although we are very close (or probably already are) in the digital revolution, where technology expands their horizons. There are still Commodore 64 hobbyists and techbuffs, creating new pieces of hardware for this beloved machine. You would probably ask to yourself "Why are people are still making hardware, software and games for this obsolete machine?". You should never judge a book by its cover. We don't that's for sure.

Anyway in early parts of 2010, I was recommended to try getting myself a DC2N for my C64 tapes. I sent a PM to a member of Lemon 64, to ask about what they thought of DC2N, and the person responded that he had the prototype of the DC2N and that it was remarkably great. So I read a lot of information about the DC2N site and decided to pre-order one. Within 6 months, the device was ready and shipped over to me (after I paid £90.00 for it of course).

Okay, so who remembers the old days where you are loading in programs from tape on your Commodore 64, left the room to eat something, make a cup of tea (or go to the toi..... okay, I better not mention that one)? Then you come back to your room to find either a program has loaded, or a blue screen or load error has occurred? Well most of us TAPE users had to suffer this problem. The datasette can be a problem at times, as it required a steady hand and good head alignment and major cleaning around the capstans, etc. Thankfully for the Commodore 64 fanatics, you can clearly watch your C64 tape deck face the digital revolution. As the DC2N is born.

So then, can you insert tapes into a DC2N to remove those bad loading woes? No, not really. The DC2N does not have abilities to insert a real tape into. Besides that would have been plain silly. You can't exactly read a tape without mechanics, and DC2N is digital. However, you don't really need this. All you would have required was a 5 volt PSU with a correct plug size (No higher voltage as it could cause serious damage to your device), a Commodore C2N datasette, or clone (Fully aligned and cleaned) and a 2gb SD Card for dumping. Oh and the most important of them all (Boo, hiss) a fully functional PC, and a SD card reader (Most PCs have internal SD card drives, like mine does) - and a Dumping utility which converts dump files into TAP files. You will also need - A COMMODORE 64. If you don't find one, I'm sure you can find cheap working ones on EBAY. :o)

So then, how did the dumping of my tapes work on a DC2N? Well, first of all, I plugged in the 5V adapter, and plugged it into the back of the device, I also plugged in an SD Card to the SD card slot of the device (as my SD card was formatted to FAT16) and then I plugged the datasette into the back of the device. After switching everything on, I got the welcome message "F. syst. mounted". This represented that the DC2N was ready for beginning either the dumping process or load .tap files through to your Commodore 64 computer.

The device has six buttons, which are set up the same way as the Commodore C2N tape deck. Because I wanted to make a dump of one of my tapes. (I started with my Sub Hunter tape, to try it out) I rewound the tape to the start (plugged into the DC2N) and then pushed the record button on the DC2N. After pressing record, I pushed the Play button on the DC2N, then the tape deck. Dumping of the tape was then in session. During the dumping process, I could see that the DC2N's light was flashing merrily, showing that the data pulses from the datasette was being read to the DC2N. Once the tape reached the end on the C2N tape deck, the DC2N read the STOP. However, to ensure that I had to keep the correct dump stored on to the SD card I had to press the STOP and EJECT buttons on the DC2N - otherwise I would have a blank .tap image with nothing readable on it (after conversion).

After the Dumping process was finished, I booted up the PC, logged into my user profile on my desktop and then downloaded a program called DC2Nconv. This was a Windows based utility (once installed on to the PC) which can convert a DC2N tape dump file (DMP) into a executable .TAP file that can be stored to the DC2N or loaded from WinVice, CCS64, or Hoxs64 C64 emulators.

Now for the fun bit ... Loading a program from the DC2N to the Commodore 64. I had to switch off the DC2N device from the mains and unplug everything, then plug the device on to my Commodore 64. I stored the .tap file from the SD card into the DC2N and then put it on to the Yes, that's right - it goes into the C64's tape port :). I also selected from the SD card, "SUBHNTR.TAP" (As the DC2N reads files in MSDOS form, so I made it 8 chars so that the filename was easy to find. Then I loaded the device the same way as a Commodore 64 did and everything loaded wonderfully great.

I do remember dumping some other classic C64 tapes, including the Off the Hook compilation, into digital TAP form. One of the games which I always had problems with loading was Black Thunder, due to the unsteady or unstable loader which was used for the game. After dumping and splitting the tapes, in digital form I found out that although this game loaded fine in WinVice, CCS64 with the loader, but when stored on to the DC2N it didn't work. I scanned the loader using FinaTAP and discovered it was PAVLODA pulses - and that to me general opinion was one of the most annoying loaders in C64's history. Well I did have loads of problems loading Tony Crowther's classic fun game on most C2N tape decks. Perhaps either the tape was faulty or the awful loader system was bugged completely. Thankfully to replace this version, I used a version from my old Zzap 64 cover tape - using a more stable loader. :)

Dumping TAPs is indeed hard work. As I have said earlier on, using a C2N with full alignment makes dumping a dream. But if you failed to do this, or tried dumping faulty tapes. Then unfortunately this will not work very well. As there were too many tapes to dump (which would have took too much time). I chosen an alternative option, but I will not go any further than this. I dumped tapes to .tap form, according to the ones that required dumping.

15th Anniversary for Nyaaaah!

2010-09-05T21:54:00.008+01:00

5th September 2010

I've been a bit burned out with game programming, since Bionik Granny Returns got released a few weeks back. So I fancied a little change this weekend, so I started on working on a new game. Because near to the end of September (or beginning of October 2010) is the 15th Anniversary of Nyaaaah! (A well know PD SEUCK game, which was released back in those days). I decided to make a final Nyaaaah! game, to mark the celebration of the 15 years of (putting up with) Snodge the Biblet, and his crazy antics.

This time round, I gone for Sideways Scrolling SEUCK, as I thought this could be an ideal engine for a new Nyaaaah! game. Hence that using the editor for Nyaaaah! 11 and also some of the game's existing graphics for the first level. Well, it wouldn't be Nyaaaah! without those. However, I created some new blocks to make a sort of village huts for level 1 of the game. Yes, you have guess it. It's called Biblet Village. I was bored with using plain background with trees all of the time, so it was time for something sort of different.

When it come to adding enemies into the game, I used the angry and bad biblets for the first level. There are no other enemies for this level. Just two types of bad biblets.

I had some clever ideas for the end of level 1's boss stage. I created frames of the same background graphics for the boss stage and set up the level settings to wait a second before some magical effect occurs. This starts with a blue mad biblet (tapping his foot) saying "Hello there little one. So you wish to enter the hole? You got to get past me first!". The blue biblet disappears then a barrier appears to block the hole, and further to the right of the screen, the ground begins to crumble. Then the blue biblet comes back - as a big boss.

The plan

I don't want to make this a standard SEUCK creation, but add additional programming/hacks to the game production. One plan is to use the potion bottles in the game as power ups. Where some are strong power ups. Meanwhile the red bottles will lose Snodge's primary weapon and he has no other choice but to lick the baddies to their doom. Snodge will collect a Snorkel at the end of level 1 for the underwater stage (level 2) - after the level 1 boss stage of course.

Other plans I have for the game is to use different background colour schemes, depending on which level Snodge is likely to be on. For example, level 1 uses the standard colours that I set up for the first stage (The biblet village). The second level uses a blue background and some nicer colours for the underwater stage. And I might use some nicer colours for level 3's platform/ladders stage.

I also have plans to add a new front end to this game, add a high score table, options screen and some music. Hopefully around about October 2010, this game should be finished and available on my web site!

Anyway, here's a Youtube video of the very first level of the game - in action!

Sea Software's Rocket Man Blog

2010-05-19T17:56:00.006+01:00

19th May 2010

Not my blog this time, but something quite interesting for SEUCK gamers out there. It's still related to the Sideways SEUCK competition. Enjoy!

At first the game should have been some kind of a "Super Bruno" Remake (Pictured below) (Super Bruno was one of the main characters from Sea Software in the early nineties), but many things made me change my mind; first of all, the skin should have been pink, while the cloak should have been red, but I thought I couldn't manage such a weird colour scheme! So I gave up, deleted the big nose, painted the character grey and put a helmet on his head: The Rocket Man was born! But... Why "The Rocket Man"?

In January 2010 I received a Christmas gift from my brother, a box with 2 DVDs and 5 CDs by the french band "Rockets": "The Rocket Man" was their first, rare single (issued in 1974), and one of those CDs contained the instrumental version (the original version, the A-side I mean, was on the first box, that my brother gave me the year before!); this title came to my mind when I was designing the game, and I decided to name it after that song. In general, the
game was made with Rockets' music in mind; I would have liked to make a SID cover of one of their songs for the title screen, but I gave up, mainly because of the copyright issue, but also because I thought I wasn't able to do it  :) 

Moreover, if you have never heard about this band, they used to dress up like alien robots (they also used to paint their body in grey), so the character of the game can also be considered as a homage to their strange and funny make up  :) 

When I read that there would have been some enhancements for the winner, I had the idea to put two different "power ups" in the game: the "P" was meant as a power up for the weapon (if you check the sprites you'll notice I made three different kind of weapon - I picked up the third at the end because it was bigger and more precise), while the "B" was meant to be a bomb: looking at the game, the B's are put in strategic locations  :)

Note: Sadly this game did not make it to first place as Pour Le Merite had an overwhelming number of votes, which made the game a winner. Thankfully this game made 2nd place, which still won a new front end. :)

Ok, that's all...

Some SEUCKcessive Moments - Sideways SEUCK Compo 2010

2010-05-14T20:21:00.018+01:00

14th May 2010

Okay, slightly late than usual with this blog. I have been busy, and the last two days were quite disastrous. Anyway, I am happy to blog about The Sideways SEUCK competition 2010. First of all I launched the competition back in January 2010 and gave the Sideways SEUCK'ers just over 2 months to design and create their own game using the Sideways Scrolling Shoot Em Up Construction Kit - Downloaded from the official SEUCK Sideways web site. I originally expected about one or two entries, but after the submissions were finally over, I received 8 entries. 7 of them looked really nice, and one looked pretty rushed.

When I checked out the entries, I was really amazed with the quality on the graphics front of MOST of the SEUCK games.

Barney - The Cow Fish

Starting with Barney by WEC/Cosine. It isn't really a shoot 'em up, but a collect 'em up adventure, with some wonderful background graphics. Something that I have never seen done with SEUCK before. The game concept was very simple, but rather than frantic game play. WEC made this game into a relaxing title. The sound effects were very atmospheric, and ocean like. The game is slow and quite easy and overall it is very relaxing. I was asked if I could do the music for the game, which was a C64 conversion of a classic video game. The game was very short, but was relaxing to play. A few weeks later, I received a bitmap picture to use as the tape loader picture for Barney, and also I did a special version of the same game (Which is available from CSDB, although I could have uploaded it on to the friends/contributors page on my web site.

Tau Zeta

No SEUCK compo can be without an Alf Yngve SEUCK game. I love his SEUCK games, such as Twin Tigers, COPS, Holiday Cops, Tau Zero, Tau Omega and a couple of games that appeared on magazine cover tapes (First Strike , Cyforce 1 and 3D Spacewar). Alf made many classic SEUCK games in the past, and it sure was a privilege to include Tau Zeta as an entry. This game is based in the future. It's an interstellar war against an enemy empire. The game has some clever tricks with background graphics and the sprite objects. Usually when you have a player in a SEUCK game. You usually control one space craft, soldier, alien, etc. However with Tau Zeta - The player controls 5 allied ships. There are some clever parallax effects later on during this game. Alf also made (What I thought would have been impossible with SEUCK) very possible. For the main space background, he used hi-res colours to plot the star field. Looks awesome. The game itself, despite the faulty collision in the original Sideways SEUCK - When inserted into the SEUCK redux - game play is excellent. Alf has created another masterpiece, but there's an even better game in the pipeline. I won't say any more. :o)

The Rocket Man

I know this was a famous Elton John song, but was this game based on the song? Absolutely not. The Rocket Man is a nice and funny sideways SEUCK game by Gaetano of Sea Software. The player controlled a superhero, who calls himself The Rocket Man, and has been held captive by some of the evil dragon's guards. The rocket man manages to escape from prison and sets off to find the dragon, and of course defeat it. To be able to do this, The Rocket Man starts from the Factory.He has to fly through and defeat the deadly guards, and reach the end where he will meet a robot. Then the rocket man, has to fly through 2 other zones. Where one is through the ruins and past volcanoes. And secondly through the dark damp cave, where the dragon dwells. This game was very imaginative and good fun to play. It's a really colourful title as well. Very pleasing and hilarious at times. Gaetano did a great job with the graphics and game play. There weren't many SEUCK slow down faults during the game either, which was a good thing. :o)

Pour le Merite

Bamse showed off his SEUCK talent with Pour le Merite? What the heck's that supposed to mean? Well, using a translation web site, it came out as For Merit. I know I did a bit of French as school, but sadly as several, several years have passed. I can only know basic French words (And one or two naughty words as well, as someone from my previous work place taught me those. LOL). Anyway, the game itself looks very movie like (I thought the film style background looked appealing, as if it was an action movie based game). The game was based on the year 1917, where Europe was at War. The player is a keen pilot, who wants to achieve the Pour Le Merite. To do this, the player must battle through the enemy front in their Red Fokker (I beg your pardon?) and also take part in a series of Dogfights against a skilled enemy pilot. Graphics wise, this game feels as if you're back in the mid-late 1980's, where those kind of games ruled. This game was an excellent attempt at making something purely nostalgic and fun. The author sort of based this on Blue Max, by U.S. Gold. Sadly parts of the game had to be left out. This was originally going to be a Silkworm style of game, but the jeep part did not work out very well in the Sideways SEUCK. This game was very playable indeed. If a C64 magazine played this, back in the days. They would have loved it and submitted it on to one of their cover tapes.

God Slayer

I wasn't too sure whether or not this game should have been entered for the 2010 SEUCK compo. However, as I was a bit worried about the theme for the game. Thankfully, it was a fictitious storyline with fictitious and quite funny characters. You played a God Slayer, who has been assigned by the Alfather, to go around and slay down all the fictitious but evil gods, that dwell around three different zones. This game looked sort of Zelda (esque), and is graphically nice. To gain bonus points, you could collect sacred stones, which spin. The game itself could have been improved slightly, for example - traps to avoid, etc, more powerful bosses. but he game itself is pretty good. Very nice graphics as well.

The Earth Superforce

Mad Scientist productions came up with The Earth Superforce. Well, quite a fun game with a hilarious story line. :o). The game itself looks very rushed, but I had good fun playing this game, however there are parts which are bad in the game. One of the major flaws are the positions of some of the aliens that are shooting. You cannot shoot at them, because your player ship cannot reach that position, due to the max-position boundaries set as player limitations. Some of the aliens are quite hard to see, and where the player's flying through the tunnel. What does that look like? A black hole maybe? :o). Despite those bad flaws, it was Joonas' first ever attempt at making something with the Sideways SEUCK, but we praise and thank him for his effort, at making an entry for this competition. :o)
Sylphwyrm

When I first read the title of this game, Sylphwyrm. Straight away I thought to myself. This is going to be a spin off to Silkworm. How wrong I was here. Sylphwyrm by Anthony Burns, was based after Legion of the Damned. There is a long story to this game, but I'll cut it short for you. The villagers of Hameria cut down trees of the forest, to keep the fires burning. After Queen Stryxia was defeated, her sister, Lamia takes reign and seeks revenge after for her sister was defeated by a warrior from Hameria. This game is set out in the dark depths, where you could control one of the two players. The game has a Ghouls and Ghosts feel to it, and was all monochrome. The idea of this game was to fly through 3 different zones, and fight against all evil that comes near by. You could collect crosses to gain bonus points. Anthony made some clever features in this game. One of which he made the portcullis doors, using enemy bullets constantly. The second of which there were balls that explode after a while. There are also clever tricks with the end part of the game. It is good that you can choose which player to use (by pressing the fire button on a joystick) as the game is for 1 or 2 players.

Verde

This was the last entry, which was submitted just in time for the deadline. It was a cute little game by Aldo from Sea Software. You played Verde, a cute little green creature, who has to save his kind, The Rosa Tribe from the evil guards. You had to fly through 3 different levels. There's strange creatures, which makes me laugh, some of which are bear type of creatures that throw off their heads and grow new ones LOL. The game itself is quite clever. The graphics are nicely presentable. Especially, when Verde enters level 3. Level 3's a still stage, where each screen flips but there are plenty of baddies to defeat in this stage. A couple of SEUCK slowdown faults in level 3, but apart from that, the game is marvellous and good fun.

The SEUCK Compo Results

The SEUCK compo final standings ended up like this:

1. WINNER - Pour Le Merite
2. RUNNER UP - The Rocket Man
3. RUNNER UP - Sylphwyrm
4. Barney
5. Tau Zeta
6. Verde
7. God Slayer
8. Earth Super Force

The Sideway SEUCK compo page and releases are available from HERE.

Richard - YOU PLONKER! - 2 Broken Datasettes?

2010-05-14T19:46:00.003+01:00

14th May 2010

Well, a bit of bad news yesterday. I have been trying to align the tape heads of the two C2N tape decks, but unfortunately had an accident with both of them. The mechanics on both of those messed up when I tried to align the tape heads. When I pushed play, the tape made a horrible clicking noise. I opened the unit and noticed a rubber band came loose. I tried to put it back, but that unfortunately snapped and the same for the other one. I also realised, what happened was that I used the wrong type of screw driver, and pushed too hard on the screw, for the sake of aligning the heads. A very stupid mistake - which I will never forget. -Remember folks, If your C64 C2N tape deck needs the tape heads aligned. Use an azimuth screw driver, or a screw driver that will fit perfectly into the screw. Don't do what I did - it certainly does damage to the C2N, and unfortunately it happened to me. RICHARD - YOU PLONKER!

I had one problem where one of my tapes, that I was trying to load snapped up due to one of the spindles not moving correctly. I'm not too sure whether or not that Zzap Megatape 26 is repairable. Probably not, although I was VERY lucky to find a spare (yep, you guessed it) Zzap Megatape 26. So hopefully when I get another C2N tape deck (I will make sure I look after this one, and when it needs aligning, use the correct equipment - which (fingers crossed) will take a very long time. I'd need another C2N anyway, as I pre-ordered a DC2N a few weeks ago. - Which would be more handy. (That spoils the fun of screaming about load errors, don't you think? Nope. I thought not).

Thankfully, I have just bought a C2N deck for £10.00 on Ebay (Inc. P+P costs of course) so hopefully in a few days time, I can play Alleykat on my Commodore 64 again. :o)

Granny's the Terminator

2010-05-03T21:41:00.003+01:00

3rd May 2010

I had a terrible day most of yesterday. I needed cheering up. So I booted up my PC to check out my email and Kenz emailed to me a tape inlay cover preview for Bionik Granny Returns. After I saw this, I was laughing hysterically. This was really funny stuff, which I just can't resist showing you. Maybe after Bionik Granny Returns has finished production, I'll include a tape master and tape inlay for you to print off and have a laugh with - as soon as it is done :)

Granny gets some real action now.

2010-02-28T18:44:00.003Z

28th February 2010

Today I have been working on the tweaking of the IRQ routine. Seems that I was using one that runs on the BASIC kernal, so I decided to switch that off and use the standard non-Kernal interrupt vectors $FFFE & $FFFF and also switch to NMI Lock using $FFFA & $FFFB. Works fine, now what I want to do is get those enemies stopping at a certain Y position, then move an X position, then walk the rest of the way downwards off screen. To get this working, I need to create some loops and some data tables. I will also need to create some triggers to make the characters stop moving Y if they are moving X. Also depending on which X direction each character should move, I should create a table with switches to show whether the characters have to go left or right. In theory this method should hopefully work.

I tested the movement for the first character with the random stopping position movements for just one character and it worked a dream. Next I implemented the same routine to all of the characters (except for the store assistant) to get them moving. This wasn't working properly at first, but after a few tweaks or rewriting of the code, I got all the characters moving through a random basis, to make game play slightly more interesting.

Now was the time to work on the sprite to sprite collision. I used the same collision method as usual as it makes programming much easier for me. I know I have used this collision routine time and time again, but it is something that could be remembered really well, without having to do so much research. I created separate routines corresponding to each character and linked all of the collision routines to the player's fire button press routine. Unfortunately there seems to be a silly error in the code, in which all but one character stops if Granny hits that character with her cane. I found where the problem lies. It seems that I RTS the movement command which causes all enemies to stop. So I made some multiple JMP to next routine commands to make things work correctly. Well, it seems to work now. I also got the coin routines to work nicely as well.

After all the collision routines worked correctly, I worked on some sub routines that will show the death animation sequences for the player, and also for the enemies that have been hit as well. Seems to be working fine. Now to add the scoring and lives counter, then I shall call it a day for today and do some other time.

Granny waits outside the Supermarket

2010-02-22T18:49:00.004Z

Monday 22nd February 2010 On Saturday I got Bionik Granny to move around and worked on the whacking animation. Today, I did some more programming on this comical game. First of all, before I get the main characters on screen. I decided to program an animation routine, and test each animation on one sprite. Unfortunately the animation never worked. I wonder what went wrong? I did create timers and pointers for the animation and increment those the way I usually do. Apparently there was some strange bug inside the animation routine, which did not allow to cycle. So I decided to reprogram the animation sub routine and was lucky this time round. Unfortunately the animation for each character was a bit of a mess. It seems that I made a few typing errors in the byte tables that represents the animation frame for each character. After correcting those (by testing sprite frames one by one) , I got a better result. Animation's fine.

Now the animation has been updated and the correct animation has been added to each sprite. I programmed some subroutines that will give the bad character some bad behaviour. The supermarket assistant, that hangs around outside doesn't like Granny hanging outside Tezco, so he moves around left and right and throws a supermarket trolley at a random place. I made the supermarket trolleys move downwards. I also got all the other characters to move downwards, but next time I program on this game. I will make random X/Y stopping positions for each shopper character, so that we get more variety and unpredictable X/Y positions for the shoppers. Making it more enjoyable compared to the original Bionic Granny. :o)

Granny is on the loose

2010-02-20T15:43:00.006Z

20th February 2010

I done some more work on Bionik Granny Returns today. First of all, I drew some more sprites for this game. I created some shoppers, store man, trolley, ghetto blaster, etc. I shall not tell you everything as that would spoil the surprise.

After dealing with the sprites, I went back to do some more game code. I created some data/byte tables to represent frames and colours of the characters, which Bionik Granny will want to whack during her day out. Also I created some frames for the various hazards that hang around during the game. As soon as I got the byte tables sorted out, I programmed routines to initialise all the sprites, positions.

After the initialising of the character sprites I got started working on the game loop, which will expand the sprite position limitations and also I got the player moving, and animating. Now it is time for me to prepare some logic to this game, so that granny is using her cane to whack anything that comes along. Well, after a bit of logic I successfully got granny's cane moving. Whenever the player presses the fire button. She can use her cane. Now my next task will be to get some characters come into the game, but I'll work on this probably some time tomorrow or Monday afternoon. I do also have the Up in the Air project to work on as well. So I might do UITA tomorrow instead.

Bionic Granny travels to the future

2010-02-19T20:28:00.011Z

19th February 2010

Bionic Granny. Either you would have loved this game, or you would have hated it. Well, I played this Mastertronic classic yesterday for a laugh and decided to create a remix of the original Bionic Granny tune using DMC V4.0. I even did a rubbish SEUCK game based on Granny's antics yesterday as well. Am I terrible or what?

How did I come up with this silly SEUCK made after 1 - 2 hours? Well, basically, I was on an Instant Messenger client and mentioned that BMX NINJA was one of worse games to ever have hit the Commodore 64. But, little did I realise was that there were C64 games worse than that. That was of course Bionic Granny by Mastertonic in 1984. I tested the original Bionic Granny game for myself. It was complete and utter pants. It was one of those games you would have seen made with the Games Creator or Creations game maker tools. (The best game I ever saw made with this probably was Golden Head, an Indiana Jones style game).

As I was discussing with a friend on MSN messenger, I came to a very daft decision to bring back the infamous granny and create a tribute game. That's right fans, Bionic Granny is going to have the Crapcade Games makeover.

For any of you who wants to know what Crapcade Games is: Crapcade Games is a fun label where we give existing game titles a makeover just for fun. And try to make them better, unlike their crap counterparts.

However, although this game is going to be taking a makeover. The concept of the game will be simple, but more fun. For example, we will want some real action involved with this silly game, so the player shall have the opportunity to move Granny left/right (like in the original), but instead of running into the people she wants to whack with her cane. Pressing fire will activate the cane. There will also be a hidden quota. As soon as enough people have been hit by the cantankerous old lady, a coin will move downwards. If the player collects enough coins (by whacking enough people with the cane), they will move on to the next level. Also the speed for each character will depend on the level which you are on. Also planned is a front end with a different piece of music, with flip pages. First showing the credits, then the game instructions, then the high score table.

Anyway, today I got started on working on some in game graphics for this game. I used the Multi Screen Construction Kit utility to design my own screens for the game. It took a while for me to design those screens as I wanted to add some quite nice detail to the actual game's graphics. The result for outside the Mini Mart turned out quite nicely (See pic below).

Other level screens I designed using MSCK were the Park, School and Public Toilets. (I might do a boating port or pub if I get round to designing some more screens. It depends how well the first 4 levels will turn out. There could also be a possibility of some more screens later on if I can think of any more levels for the game. (Huge grin). Then I used the WinVice Monitor to capture all colour and screen data of this game and stored it to the .d64 using:

s "name of file" 8 (source add) (destination add) and that worked out well.

My next step was to make the game sprites. So I dug out the Sprite Editor V1.0 by demo group Faces and drew the characters (sprites) for the game, starting with the Bionic Granny frames (Look much better than the original Bionic Granny), then I drew the kids and lollipop lady and the spinning lollipops. The sprites part is still unfinished, but this will be ongoing for a short period of time. Finally after that, I decided to improve slightly with the Bionic Granny remix, by adding a touch of extra melodies. As soon as the piece of music was finished, I decided to work on the game code. As well as the school stage, I am hoping to add some other characters like, dogs, angry shoppers, drunks, ghetto blasters (blaring notes at you) and some other interesting things.

Unfortunately not much time was spent on the game code for this game, as it was time for tea. So I only programmed in the game screen, IRQ player, etc. But hopefully I should work on the actual game and have something in action some time soon.

As soon as the game is finished and has been tested. It will be released on my web site as a free download and I'll make an authentic tape loader based on the Mastertronic Visiload loader (blue screen and flashing multicolour border) but of course, with loading music.

Oh no ... The aliens are back to invade your loading screen

2010-02-03T12:32:00.012Z

3rd February 2010

Do any of you remember back in the late 1980's or early 1990's, you inserted a tape and loaded it up to be presented with a little game like Micro Painter, Invade-A-Load, and Load 'N Play. Well, Interceptor Software and Mastertronic may have done this back in the days, but a new kid is in town. Moo-tilation (also known a Moo-tiload) :)

I came up with this little game idea after someone contacted me to ask me if I am able to implement a game into Martin Piper's IRQ Turbo Tape loader source (available from http://codebase64.org) that I always have used to master tapes for Psytronik Software and for my personal collection for the TND web site. After finishing Mutilator on Saturday last week. I originally drew a silly loading picture for the tape loader of this game, but it was complete and utter pants. Well after all I am no artist :o). I thought to myself. Why should I present this game with a duff and stupid loading picture when there could be a possibility of adding something slightly better? So, let's mutilate some cows :)

1st February 2010

I decided that I should give making a loader game a try and also attempt to link it through to the IRQ Turbo Tape loader. So I got designing (using the Multi Screen Construction Kit) to get the game background design. As soon as I was very happy with the final screen design, I captured the screen data, colour data and char set data by using the WinVice Monitor and also Action Replay cartridge. I saved each part separately and then composed some music for the game, using Music Assembler V1.1. I fancied composing something in a sort of Italo disco remix style and ended up with a pretty neat, which the main beat reminds me of the introduction bass line to Around the Planet by Laserdance although the tune isn't like the original cover. I know that FCS of Finnish Gold did a really good C64 remix of the tune using Future Composer. Because I really liked the tune that I composed. I used Goat Tracker V2.26 to do a remix of the same tune I did, but because the instruments were example instruments. I decided to stick to the version which I used.

After finishing the music, it was time for me to head off to the programming stage. So I got started with the main code. Unlike how I normally program games (by SYNCing outside of the IRQ interrupt) I had a simple theory in which is to put the main game subroutines inside the interrupt of a tape loader (Where music usually plays). Because I wasn't that ready for importing this work into the tape loader. I programmed the usual IRQ raster interrupt routine. You know which one I mean? The JMP $EA31 type of thing? :) Yes that's right.

The first thing I did to programming the game was to get the graphics to display, and then get those enemies moving around the screen. My first idea was to have the player as a cross hair, but sadly it did not work out. So the player became a tank instead. Now although the main part of the game was finished, I had some problems, which I will have to resolve tomorrow, as it is getting late now. Night, night.

2nd February 2010

Man, what a blasted annoying morning I had. I was pestered too much by the family dog, and I have been rather poorly as well. Still I was able to continue with this loader game project. The main body of the game was finished, I just had a problem - The Mutilation. It took me a few hours to work out and correct, as what I wanted was an alien to charge down and mutilate a cow. So I programmed a routine which will use a timer to pick an alien (from the mutilation table ) to charge down and mutilate a cow. Well, that sort of worked, but my major problem was collision. When a sprite was moving down and it was shot. The sprite still moves downwards or upwards during the explosion process. I managed to fix this problem, by comparing whether or not the alien was hit during movement. Well, seems that the alien stops when dying, so that worked fine. Now the final part of programming the game. To check if both cows on the ground have been mutilated. If so, then bring back the credits text.

Finalising the data was quite a challenge. Well, it wasn't much of one. I created a routine to initialise the the game data, so that the background, etc is shown. Then afterwards removed the standard JMP $EA31 irq routine, and used the game loop as a JSR play routine. I estimated the initialise and play addresses of the game data and then linked it to the loader source. Oh dear, too many blocks to count (50 something odd blocks of data, included wasted memory). After I linked this and altered the IRQ tape source, it sort of worked, but the long loading time would not be worth it for a loader game. So I decided to try and use Exomizer's level packing method and then link the decruncher at the end of the packed data. Then I put the packed data into the IRQ turbo tape source. Altered the INIT/PLAY routine again and I successfully got a loading game. Bloomin' fantastic, 21 blocks instead :) Time to show this loader off to some of my contacts, who might be interested to see it running.

3rd Februrary 2010

I had some emails back from my contacts/friends about the loader. They thought it was pretty cool. I'm very happy with the overall result, however I really could do with updating the source, so that the loader looks more professional. So I decided to remove the annoying loading noise, alter the colour bars to make them a black border with thin lines. After each block counted, the loader cycles backwards through the colours of the thin lines. You might have also noticed that when I use the Turbo tape routine. And below, specially for you is the Moo-tilation video. Expect to see this loader game appear some time in the near future on C64 productions by The New Dimension :)

Mootilation (Moo-tiload final version of loader, tested on Mutilator)

At the moment, the loader will not yet be available from the TND web site, until after the release of Mutilator (Which will be shortly after Digital Talk #90 has been released). There may be a chance that I might create a little tool which will master Moo-tilation on to a tape along with your game in the near future.

Tips on making a tape loading game:

If you are a C64 programmer and feel like tape mastering your own games, demos or other work and you are unsure how you could make a loading game? Well, there's a simple theory to it. If you take a look at the IRQ Tape loader source by Martin Piper (published in www.codebase64.com) then you will notice that an IRQ tape loader uses INIT and PLAY addresses for music. What you need to do is set up the correct raster positions (as we don't want bugged sprites during a loader game do we?) and also change INIT and PLAY address to initialise the game (not music) and then play the game (not music). The whole of your in game routines MUST be inside the PLAY address inside the IRQ's interrupt of the tape loader. Both INIT and PLAY must use RTS as the end/loop for your game. That's how it worked for me. :)

Let the Invasion Commence

2010-01-30T15:41:00.012Z

Saturday 30th January 2010

I felt like playing around with the Sideways Shoot Em Up Construction Kit as I had this rather funny idea for a a new C64 for diskmag Digital Talk. Well, after 4 days or so, this 'ickle project is finally finished, but will not be released on my web site until a week after Digital Talk #90 has been released with the game and could this game be going to the 2010 Retro Computing event in Oxford? Well, just have to wait and see, despite that I will not be down there.

27th January 2010

Okay, so what was the idea behind this game? Imagine this, you are an alien that wants to take over another planet so that you can make it your own home. Well, Mutilator was born. But why is the name Mutilator used? Well, just to make things pretty funny in the game, you are able to mutilate cows during your travelling across planet Earth, as well as fighting the army forces. What a cruel thing 1 alien vs loads of armed forces :)

I did an earlier unfinished SEUCK game called Kick Ass. Unfortunately Kick Ass did not turn out very well, so I decided to use the background from Kick Ass and import it into Mutilator, as the background looked better compared to an earlier version I did. All I had to do was create some additional designs.

After getting the background finished, I worked on the main sprites for the game. Quite unusual ideas came to my head. I wanted to create a suitable looking alien ship. Well, I drew one. It sort was based on the player in Mastertronic's Erebus, but the sprite in my game was my own work. I also created a few frames to make the player's smooth animation. Looked much cooler. Now it was time for me to draw various enemies and other objects and insert those into the game's map. Then redesign the front end and charset. :)

28th January 2010

Phase 1 complete. Phase 2 was to write the music for the game. Done :) Phase 3 was to import everything into the SEUCK Redux source. No problem, but there was still a lot of work to be done as I did not want this creation to be a typical SEUCK game. I wanted to add some to the game. One of which was extras. One of which was that if you mutilate a cow, you will be given a smart bomb. Also if you do not lose a life and you mutilate more cows (before activating a smart bomb) it gets more powerful. Quite an interesting idea.

29th January 2010

It wasn't until today where I had some more interesting ideas. For a start off the front end. It still looked very SEUCK ish like as all text was using a silver colour bar scroll effect. So I decided to add some more flashing colours to the front end. It looked much better. Now the next bit, was background animation. I programmed some character scrolling routine for the flowing water background. It looked much nicer. I came across another idea. The LEVEL stages. Would be nice to add some effect to the intermission to each level. So I went back to the Sideways SEUCK and created a brand new block and made 7 frames in the character set. Saved everything again, and imported the new work into the redux source. I added a subroutine to animate the laser beam character sets. Looks great. Now the game is finished .... I thought!

Whoops there was still something wrong. The smart bomb effect never worked very well as the wrong sprite was detected to activate it. So I corrected this problem. I thought the game score looked pretty naff, I had to do something with it, so I centred the score panel and expanded both x and y values of it and repositioned all those sprites that formed it. The score panel looked much better. There was still something I wanted to do to it. So I linked the flashing colour routine from the title screen, to the score sprites. It looked much nicer. Now I'm ready to send to Digital Talk!

30th January 2010 (Today)

Ah, no. I should not have sent that version. There was still some tweaking to be done and additional ideas came in place to improve the game. So I updated the in game music, added a game over jingle. I also thought that the game would look cool if when the player is temporarily invulnerable, it will flash one of the colours from the front end. Well, that looked much better. I had to make a tweak in Sideways SEUCK to alter the front end raster bar colour. I also had to tidy up the level settings and delete a few enemies. As I wanted to use the last of the unused enemy sprites. A giant gun boat. I imported all of the SEUCK data into the redux source and finally, a Sideways scrolling SEUCK game that looks commercial :)

Lumme, this is cool. I wanna play this game. Can I get it yet?

The game was produced for Digital Talk #90 disk mag, and will not be released on the TND web site until a week after release of the diskmag. Hopefully some time in February. You should be in for a treat. However, I have donated an earlier (un redux'd) version of this game and the unfinished (and scrapped) Kick Ass game to The SEUCK Vault and should be released hopefully soon. :)

Enter the Master! (Get it taped)

2010-01-15T21:48:00.018Z

15th January 2009

Well, well, well. Been a little while since I last wrote something in this blog. Finally (although it is getting rather late) I can blog something. Well, once again I have been very creative. Last week I wrote a Koala Paint 2 Frame Picture Animator V1.0, but this week I worked on something better. The Tape Master Pro V1.0.

I'll give out a story and explain about this program. Over the past year or so, I went on to Codebase 64 and read about the Auto boot tape turbo loader source, by Martin Piper. I thought that I should give this open source a try and modified some of it to make my own loader routines. The scroll text routine was written from scratch and also I added routines that can display a loading picture. Although my knowledge of loaders, etc is limited. I started talking to Martin via email, about his IRQ loader. Gave him some ideas, which included Marty Load, a tribute to the Cyber Load loader. I was also given kind permission to use this source whichever way I like.

I used the same auto boot type of loading source for a couple of Psytronik Software releases (As I was a very kind person) and prepared the auto booting tape masters for The Last Amazon Trilogy and also The Wild Bunch. Now I decided earlier on this month to write a program that allows people to master their own files from a disk and write it to tape with an auto boot turbo loader (Also by Martin Piper) which will play loading music and the loader can also draw a koala paint picture during loading (Just like the Ocean Loader back in the 1980's). The user can also choose whether or not they want flashing sprites or loading noise during loading.

This program is nothing like any ordinary disk/tape transfer tool. As this is probably somewhat more special. Have you ever saw a disk/tape transfer that allows you to choose the type of flashing border you like before mastering to tape? Well, have you? I thought not. Hahaha. Anyway, the overall result was great.

I was very pleased with this tool, and I showed an early version of it to Martin. I think he also liked what he saw. Here are some example loader experiments I have been doing:

1. Sharkz II loading with the Cyber Load style colour bars and a flashing tape sprite at the bottom left corner of the screen.

2. Snacks 4 Snakes (Protovision friends/contributors entry) with a black border and thin light grey stripes.

3. Finally, Hyper Duel, with the classic multicoloured border :)

Where's the tool? How much does it cost? I wanna try it! (Drool, grovel, glaaargh!)

Like with my other C64 programs, the Tape Master Pro V1.0 program has been distributed as freeware for anybody to use it. So if you wanted to, you could create your own master disks and send them to or a retro software that releases new games or upload on to your web site, but it would be nice if on the loading scroll text you credit Martin for the tape turbo, and Richard/TND for the loader's additional programming.

I have uploaded this tool on the tools page of the usual TND web site address http://tnd64.unikat.sk

The source for the original autoboot tape turbo loader + explanation about it by Martin Piper can be found here on Codebase64

Bah, Humbug.

2009-12-29T21:01:00.006Z

21st-24th December 2009
Christmas is coming and it is time to do something of a novelty. I did want to do a game in time for Christmas 2009, but unfortunately because of less spare time, I had my own limitations. Well, I suppose I could have done a 1 level preview of Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge but I would not have had that one done in time. I was hoping to have a new game produced this Christmas, so I decided to do a quick small game called "Bah, Humbug". Because of my own limitations, it took a a couple or 3 days to produce. I mainly worked on the game code first, before I did the in game graphics, music and SFX.

Bah, Humbug! is a game, in which you are Mr. Frosty, a snowman who has be sent out to the freezing cold places to collect presents for Santa (As he has had a bit too much to drink the night before). Mr. Frosty discovers that the only way he can gather presents is by bouncing on a spring board. Mainly because some idiot has laid down candles on to the ground. So it was up to Mr. Frosty to jump and grab presents, avoid falling into the candles. But the idea was just too basic. So I decided to make additional characters to the game to make things more interesting and fun. Each character was given a different feature to enhance game play. Here's what I did:

Present - Scores 300 points (Collect enough to complete level)
Humbug - Scores 200 points
Pudding - The brandy makes Mr.Frosty drunk, so controls are reversed for a short period :o)
Grinch - Swipes 200 points off your score
Smelly Stocking - Swipes a chunk off the bonus timer (The higher the bonus timer, the more points awarded to the player)
Candle - Kills Mr.Frosty

At the end of the last level, I could not resist to add a little joke reward, which the gamers would need to play hard to find out what this little reward could be. It was quite funny.

As soon as the game was finished and the front end was done, I decided to do some tape mastering. So I dug out Martin Piper's IRQ tape loader source from Codebase, made some interesting alterations (No more Dance-A-Load now. I got fed up with it for the time being) and I made a nice black & blue flashing border with loading picture and music. The loader also uses a flashing tape sprite at bottom left corner. This is to represent a positive load, just like what Cyberload did back in the 1980's. Final result looked pretty nice, but why the heck did I add a noisy load on boot up and while loading the music data? Bah, Humbug!

Care to be a stunt man?

2009-12-07T19:25:00.004Z

7th December 2009
Programming C64 games has been a major hobby of mine. Even if it is programming C64 games using a PC. For the past 2 months or so, I have been very busy with the co-op production with Wayne/Art Ravers' game called "Up in the Air". So far 4 levels have been done, but I have decided to put this on hold until after Christmas is finally over. However, I decided that rather than do nothing, I thought I should dig out one of my old unfinished games and create something new out of it. This is where Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge came.

I was actually going to call this Professional Stunt Boat Simulator, but Ultimate and Challenge sounds much better, compared to Professional Simulator. Don't you agree? Plus professional and simulator kept getting used time and time again. We know who the culprits are, but the games were pretty good. I'd have to admit.

Anyway, my general idea for this game is somewhat different to what some people would expect. USBC uses the code and graphics from my scrapped Real Speed We Need project, and over the week I have been busy reorganizing the type of sprites, and redesign the level map designs. Also yesterday I have been organizing the enemy sprite types and also sprite movements. I was impressed with the work done so far yesterday. All I will need to do is add sprite/sprite collision, sprite/background collision, add the ramps for the boat, so that it can go over the background in some levels. I was very determined to get a special 4 level version of this game done in time for Christmas Day, but I best not rush it for the sake of Christmas. Plus my full time job takes over most of my time. I do miss the good old pub sessions since I was made redundant at my previous workplace in the end of July 2009.

Here's a video of the game in action:

Treasure Hunt

2009-10-21T16:26:00.003+01:00

21st October 2009

I thought I have a go at transferring some of my Commodore 64 disks over to PC. Many of my old disks are unlabled, so I don't really know what was on each disk. Many of the old disks are either formatted or corrupt (Except for the ones I have bought of PD libraries in the late 1990's). Now while I was trying one or two disks out on WinVice. I first tried a disk which was labelled in red writing"Assorted Charsets". The disk contained the charsets that were saved from the " 99 Charsets" program by Danish Gold. While browsing through the directory. I came across some particularly weird filenames (File names were the track and sectors of the disk which were recovered with "Dir Master V7". With curiosity, I decided to load the file from disk on to WinVice V2.1 and then typed in run. I run the program, and it defrozen (as in those days I used the action replay MK VI cart for my stuff). I was presented with the C64 BASIC screen. What a waste of time that was.

BUT Wait. There's more. I browsed through the memory with the M/C cartridge and entered the fastload reset mode. Then I entered OLD: and typed in RUN. Well, seems I have unearthed an old unreleased SEUCK game of mine which I have never released. I typed in RUN, but the BASIC did not work for me. There was also some music at $1000-$1xxx, which I did using Music Mixer that I also forgotten about. Although the game itself is crap. It is a mystery unearthed, but the game is not good.

Up in the Air - Relocate, relocate. Ooer!

2009-08-18T16:02:00.001+01:00

17th August 2009

Today, Andrew passed me another .D64 with the Up in the Air prohject graphics. This time yet more great sprites, and a new version of level 6, which I could implement into the game's code later on this week. Anyway, I loaded up the sprites. So many of them, in fact too many of those. It did not put me off though. I decided to relocate the graphics data and use BANK 2 instead of BANK 1, as that way it would make things much easier for me, as the sprites overlapped if loaded at $2000. So now the game source has changed its memory. Here's what we have so far:

$0800-$1000 - Spare memory (That could possibly be used for extra variables, or maybe additional code for the title screen.
$1000-$2400 - The music (Although if the music is larger, as some music editors players like DMC, I could expand it more, otherwise, I could add the exomizer decrunch code in this place)

$2400-$2800 - Decrunched screen data
$2800-$2c00 - Decrunched screen colour data

$2C00 - $4000 - Spare memory, maybe for crunched screen data and exomizer decruncher

$4000 - $7300 - Game sprites data (Bank #$02). Wayne filled a lot of memory with various sprites. Perhaps he got carried away here. Heheheh. Still not to worry, that's where I have placed them.

$7400-$7800 - That will be for the actual screen used!

$7800-$8000 - Game charset

$8000-$C000 - Game code. I am not too sure how big the game code will be, but I have switched the Kernal off by setting #$35 at $01. Which hopefully means I can add further code here. Good eh?

$C800-$CC00 - Title screen logo colour RAM data
$CC00-$D000 - Title screen logo video RAM data
$E000- $FF70 - Title screen bitmap data.

Sadly I did not get round to doing the randomizing of data, scoring, etc but I can continue with that later on this week. So stay tuned. :o) Okay. Now for a can of Foster's lager and a spot of C64 gaming! :o) Oooh, nice!

The darkness arises. Baphomet has risen.

2009-08-04T12:05:00.006+01:00

Tuesday 4th July 2009
Don't panic. Darkness has not arisen. Friday last week, I had received another C64 game by Anthony Burns (Created using the Sideways SEUCK) called "Baphomet". The game was deeply inspired by some art by H.R.Giger and also the book "At the Mountains of Madness", by novelist H.P.Lovercraft. Anthony made a few H.P.Lovercraft games in the past, two of which were The Call of Cthulhu and also The Dunwich Horror. I was very happy to add music on to this game as well. But I wont be talking about my activities on this game, just some general information about how this game was made.

Anthony has been working really hard on this game. I am not too sure how long it has taken him to make a game like this, but I was well impressed with the in game graphics. The game starts with the usual SEUCK style title screen (or front end or intro as we all like to call it) with some instructions on what to do to play the game (I done a note file on the disk as well) and the game starts of where you should stand by and not do anything. If you move your player, you will end up crashing into the background which is deadly and die. I did something silly once by starting the game with a joystick in port 1, where the player just could not move - how silly was that eh?.

The game is split into 2 parts. The first part is where you are on foot, fighting against enemy guards and also having to smash some of the cannons (except for the flame throwers). The player could collect the spinning star emblems to boost up their score. The major drawback to this mission is that when the player touches any part of the background, they will die. The background is very deadly, which can be tough for the gamer, but it is a good idea anyhow. When the player goes on to the top part of the screen. It wont be able to move any further than about an eighth of the screen at the top (If I have calculated this correctly that is) . The player has to face two different boss enemies. The first of which are some heads shooting bolts. Later on, an evil skull-type of demon. Once past that stage it is then time to switch the joystick port over to port 1 (as prompted by the message).

Joystick port 1 controls the flying character, who has to fight against various enemies. Instead of this part being a push scroll, it is a continuous scrolling game so there is no need to try and push yourself across the screen. There are enemies that will self-destruct if you can't kill them in time. This is a very clever and probably new idea, which Anthony came up with in SEUCK. At the end of this level, you have to face a big demon, Baphomet and shoot hell out of it :o)

The graphics in this game is well drawn, very nicely detailed. Although it uses the black, white and grey mood. But that does not really matter. The only drawback to this scheme was that the walking player had a *red* score, while the flyer has a *white* score instead. I guess the red score did spoil the theme a bit, but I noticed that with SEUCK or sideways SEUCK, the player's score sprites have always been red if the changable sprite multicolour of the player's object was black. Back to the graphics ... The theme was well detailed and the mood of the game was dark. The theme was based in darkness, and the graphics really suited the theme. What a masterpiece Anthony :o)

This game would have been nicer in SEUCK Redux source, but I did not use it this time, due to the bugs left in the source, which unfortunately crashed the game (I did test the redux version with infinite lives, and not all was working. Player 1 score was black instead of red, the sprite/background collision animation was bugged and also the game crashed somewhere in part 2), but I will release this game on to the friends and contributors page of my web site, as soon as the original, but clean and compressed version is uploaded on to The SEUCK Vault.

Below you can see a video footage preview of Baphomet for the C64. This only features the start of the game. Well, I don't want to give too much away do I?

Up in the Air - Come Fly With Me

2009-08-03T19:00:00.004+01:00

Sunday 2nd August 2009

Well it has been yet another busy afternoon, and still a lot of work is to be done before I can get a fully working level. Last week I was working on preparing the labels for the enemy parameters. Well, today I have done some programming, using parameters and it took a long time to prepare and program, but it was worth the Sunday afternoon for 3 or 4 hours or so.

First of all, I created the data tables (!byte tables) to represent the behaviour of enemy's movement. The movement tables will later on be put inside a timed loop, so that we can vary the enemy's directional movements. Each table will consist with only '0' and '1'. '0' represents the selected direction the enemy moves is switched off, and the '1' represents the selected direction the enemy moves is switched on. For example if I wanted one enemy to move to the left, directions UP, DOWN and RIGHT will be switched off and LEFT will be switched on. Or if I wanted an enemy sprite to move upwards and left, UP and LEFT will be switched on and DOWN and RIGHT will be switched off.

However, I wanted to get this routine working in a correct possible manner, and it took lines of code to program. I had to make an enemy direction store value, so that the directional table that is switched on will make the active enemy sprite move a specified direction. I had to create a LOT of routines to get this to work properly. Mainly comparing the value of the stored direction. If the stored direction label equals 1, the enemy can move that direction. Otherwise the enemy cannot move the specified direction. To make sure the enemy could or could not move, I tested each enemy by setting the first value of the 60 bytes for each table (according to the direction I wanted the enemies to move) and then I assembled and test the movement. Fantastic, it worked. Okay, so it is not ready yet, but it was a good start for enemy movements. My next task will be to vary the movements of the enemies, and then get the floating balloons animated.

Knight 'n Grail

2009-07-19T15:31:00.004+01:00

Sunday 19th July 2009

Yesterday after I got back from my 2 week holiday, I found a package in the porch and I wondered to myself, did I order anything? Yes. I sure did. I opened the package to find a new C64 game disk called Knight 'n Grail. Yesterday I had no time to play it because of the excessive new C64 releases on the internet and also because of excessive email messages.

Anyway, today I got to play it on my Commodore 64 (The real machine, not the emulators). After a short delay loading, I used the basic RUN and the front end decrunched with some funky music. Then I started playing the game. The graphics was nice, and the music was okay as well. The game itself was awesome. I just could not believe how hooked I was to this game. Could this game win the best C64 game of 2009? I hope so, as this game is now near to my favourite C64 games of all time. :)

MERCS gets SEUCK(ed) in 1917

2009-06-21T22:43:00.006+01:00

Sunday 21st June 2009

Wow what an amazing treat I had today. I was checking my email and then Anthony Burns mentioned that he produced another sideways scrolling shoot 'em up with the Sideways SEUCK. I just could not resist to try his game out to see what it was like. Anthony told me that the game was inspired on the Capcom classic on the SEGA Master System (as well as Commodore 64) called MERCS, but based in 1917, during the First World War.

So I checked through Anthony's game and played it all the way in cheat mode from the SEUCK editor. I was well impressed with the game, especially the end of level boss stages, which must have took some time for Anthony to master. I specially liked it where the huge battleship scrolls across the screen, then stops at one position and then scrolls across again. I even liked the ending of the game. Overall this game was amazing and probably was one of the best games I have ever seen done with Sideways SEUCK.

After getting impressed with the game production, I decided to add some music to the game and also import it into Martin Piper's SEUCK REDUX source. For the music, I could not really think of any new combat style tunes, so I dug out my old tune, I died at War and imported the tune into the SEUCK redux source. Also I altered the colour bars for the front end as well, from the green+yellow crap scheme into a nice blue raster bar scheme. Looks much nicer.

Once the SEUCK REDUX version was done, I decided to also do a version of the original sideways SEUCK source, but with the same front end music. The reason for why I done this is because there are NTSC users who would probably enjoy this game, and sadly REDUX doesn't cater for the NTSC machines. The normal sideways SEUCK scrolling engine uses PAL/NTSC. As I noticed with the comments section on CSDB for Trash Course.

Finally I stored the SEUCK source files and also a RAW version of the sideways SEUCK game on to my disk. Bolted the TND intro into both music versions of The Push and then uploaded it all on to the TND web site.

Loading ... Please wait!

2009-06-20T19:50:00.011+01:00

Saturday 20th June 2009

I seem to be trapped in a world of loaders, where I have been mucking around with the Martyload Tape loader source for Trash Course. I just could not make up my own mind how the loader should operate and which tune of mine I should have used. So at the end I decided to stick to the default loader (Black screen with white text) and then crack on with adding the tape master to the Trash Course disk.

Instead of wasting time with stuff like this, I should really be doing some serious stuff, Flippin' heck!

Menu Please

2009-05-24T17:52:00.003+01:00

Sunday 24th May 2009

It was another programming session for me today. But I can take a break from it tomorrow :) This time it was for me to program a disk menu for the disk version of The Last Amazon trilogy. The first thing I had to do was import all of the data which I was supplied, into the cross-assembly project. Before I could do that, I had to invert the 2x2 font, as the letters are going to be using raster colour bars.

As soon as all of the data was converted to the ACME cross assembler project folder. I started working on the code. The first thing I did was a simple test, which was to display 2 splits. One of which was for the bitmap and the other which was for the 2x2 charset. I put those inside an IRQ interrupt and then assembled those. The split worked.

Now my next job was to put all the raster bars over the 2x2 text. Which I managed to do. So now my next job was to get those raster bars straight by using timing tables. This took some time to do because when I tried to time the rasters, I ended up with the flickering moving all over the place. Once all the rasters were timed, I could add a scroll text routine in to the code and get it scrolling across smoothly.

Then I added a subroutine to read the keyboard, then routines for turning off the IRQ loader, etc and loading in the game, using a black screen and thin blue stripes - to show the disk loading. I was happy with the final result.

Update: I got an email about this menu and Psytronik Software was impressed with the work I done with this menu. I bet they were surprised at how fast such a menu project was. Just a few hours or so :)

Bang, Bang, they shot me down.

2009-05-23T18:20:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 19th May 2009 - Thursday 19th May 2009

I have been working on the Game Over sequence and also updating The Last Amazon 2, because I recieved the final version of the original SEUCK game with additional enhancements. I played through the whole game in cheat mode. I like it. Amazing new weapons, and even shields.

Now it was time for me to work on the game over routine. I was given a mockup and idea of what the game over sequence should be. So I worked on the gun shot idea which Kenz + Alf came up with. First I drew sprites, then I made some new music..

I programmed the Game Over routine by using 3 IRQ routines (Two for different sized chars and three for colours inside text) and then I created delay routines that will delay game and then delay over. Then the bullet holes come on screen one by one using a faster delay. Then we got a good result.

Friday 22nd May 2009

Back from the pub this evening - 3 pints. When I got online to check my email I was asked if I could put final scores on to the game over sequence for Last Amazon 2. So I converted SEUCK score data into text data and added the scores to the Game Over screen.

Last Amazon - Tape Mastering+Linking

2009-05-23T17:37:00.000+01:00

Saturday 23rd May 2009

Weather is ever so nice today, but I had nothing to do, nowhere to go to meet people. So I decided to do some more of The Last Amazon trilogy project. This time something completely different. I took a look at the latest IRQ tape loader source code by Martin Piper and decided to alter it to make the loader slightly shorter and also base the loader on the same loader I used for Joe Gunn tape version.

I dug out the ACME cross assembler and first of all, I altered the loader's flashing border methods. Rather than have the classic cyber load colours, I wanted something much different. So I changed the Cyber load colours to something like this:

COLOURBASE: LDA #$06
STA $D020
LDA #$00
STA $D020

then I changed the INC $D020 where the check sum counts, to INC COLOURBASE+1 so that after each check sum, the loader will change the colour of the thin stripes per load.

Once I done this, I decided to make some additional features to the routine. Starting with altering the speed of the tape loader to medium/fast speed, because duplication can be a problem if the speed of the loader is too fast. Secondly I updated the scroll text routine, and removed the on screen messages "NOW LOADING LEGION OF THE DAMNED" to shorten the loader in size.

Also to shorten the size, I deleted the routines that saves and loads the loader's flashing sprite, and the counter routine. Both of those were not required for this TND/Psytronik loader. I linked the program files of the music, picture data and then game data and assembled the source to get a tape master.

Now I test the assembled tape master file and assembled it to a .prg file and run it in WinVice. I created a test .tap (or tape image as you would prefer to call it) and started to extract all the data on to the .tap image. I tested the loader, and it worked nicely. So I did the same mastering for different games. Then created a disk menu for the master.

The other job which I did was linked all the loader pics (With press space message) to each Last Amazon game. So I created my very own Picture Linker program, which will link pictures made with the Vidcom to TNDPic converter (Only for my personal use :o)). Then I inserted all the TNDPic files into the directory of my Picture Linker source. Then I added all the C64 files (Music, the games, etc) to the source. I assembled the source and linked the picture to each file successfully. Those featuring the linked pictures (With the press space message) will only be for the disk version.

This Last Amazon Trilogy project is nearly finished, all I need to do is program a special disk menu for the disk version of the game and then that's it :)

Trash Course - Finished at last (I think)

2009-05-16T18:15:00.001+01:00

Saturday 17th May 2009

Man, what a mammoth of a programming session I had today. First of all I decided to update the second page of the front end for Trash Course. I done this by changing the top 10 ranks into the top 5 ranks. Then I added the end screen message and linked the end screen text to the end screen message display routine. Then linked the Game Over routine to the end message routine (Because even if the game is complete, the player should get a high score if achieved).

Now my next task was to program in the high score routine. So straight after the Game Over screen, I decided to add jump routine that will jump straight to the high score detection routine. Nice!

Now it was time for me to program in the actual high score check routine. I programmed a check routine for each of the 5 positions for the player's high score. If the player reached a high score, according to the rank position. The player's score will be placed there and so will the player's name. Just to make sure this routine was working. I did a test name (As there was no name entry routine added yet). I played the game to try and get a high score and it worked. The test name "PLAYER 1" score hit the high score position along with the high score. Now it was time for me to add a name entry routine.

The name entry routine gave me a bit of a headache, because for some reason after programming all joystick control, etc. I seem to have had no action happening whatsoever. It appeared that where I was trying to reset the default char/screen position for the first char, I poked the low byte twice. So instead of pasting the new char to $7E90 +, it pasted it to $8F8F. And that was completely wrong. After correcting the joystick controlled name entry routine, all worked quite nicely. So now I can update the routines so that it will work with player 2 if he/she scores a high score. After a bit of fiddling around with the code, I got it all to work. Fantastic!

My final job was to update the graphics, as the options screen looked too plain. So using SpritePad V1.5, I drew new sprites for the game options and also I drew a 4 sprite logo for Inferior Software and then I added the logo in to the bottom border, and positioned all the sprites. This looked miles much better than my previous version of the front end.

Now the game production's programming has finally finished (I think). It is time for me to send this final production to Thorsten and Stefan for testing.

Playing with SEUCK Redux

2009-05-12T20:51:00.000+01:00

Sunday 10th May 2009

Martin Piper had updated his SEUCK Redux source code, and it worked pretty nicely with Legion of the Damned. No flickers or SEUCK slowdown syndrome, and sprite/sprite collisions were pixel perfect. So this morning I have been busy updating the game a bit. First by working on the in game music for the game. I used the original LOTD title music work tune in DMC V5.0+ and then I worked on the second song of the same LOTD music and worked on with the in game music. The in game music starts off sounding sort of a bit like the introduction of a Metallica sound track, but it's not. Then the Matt Gray style drums and beats come one. Making the tune pretty atmospheric. After I done the tune, I packed it with the DMC V5.0 packer.

Now music was done, I worked on the LOTD front end. I felt that it needed a good rework, so I redesigned the front end character set from scratch. Some of the characters form swords and others formed bones. So I built the logo using swords and bones, while the rest of the stuff was done as plain text. Then I saved the final game work file and imported it into the SEUCK redux source. The front end came with a nice result. I was happy with what I done. With all music and working collision/improvements, which Martin spent a long time trying to solve. I was really pleased with the final result.

Now that was done, before I uploaded the game on to my TND web site. I decided to program a brand new TND intro. So I prepared the the source files (Char set, TND Logo bitmap data, Music, etc) and put it all together with source code. My intro looked ever so nice and quite professional (although plain) and I bolted it to the LOTD game and then uploaded on to my web site.

Trashing through more code

2009-05-12T20:36:00.000+01:00

Saturday 9th May 2009

I decided to do some more programming with the front end for Trash Course. Things needed to be sorted out. First of all the front end required an options selection. So I decided to add an extra IRQ interrupt so that I could open the bottom border and put the game options sprites into that border. Seems to have been no problem.

Secondly I programmed in the functions for the game options sprites. Not bad. Seems to work fine, except for when I tried to play the game with sound effects the WinVice C64 emulator had crashed. I realized what went wrong. I had forgotten to poke the correct place in memory. LOL. So I fixed the problem and got the sound effects working. The player modes worked nicely.

My next step was to program a Get Ready and Game Over screen for the game. I did not do anything exciting for the Get Ready and Game Over screen, because it wasn't really worth the effort. All I did was create a new IRQ and also got the routines to play the Get Ready and Game Over jingle and linked those to the front end and the game. Now that was working, I had another idea which was to get the Game Over screen to display the final score for the players. To do that I had to convert the SEUCK score plot data into raw screen data. That was easily done by adding the accumulator by $30 and pasting the data to the screen. It worked nicely.

I was working on the high score entry/table routine, but unfortunately I did not do all that good with this, due to the fact that my code was way too big as I was copying the same routine time and time again for each rank position on the high score table. I gave up at the end as I could not figure out a way to do a shorter version of high score ranks. Well, sort of. I sent a message to Martin Piper to ask if he can help me work out how I can do a high score detection using as less code as possible (Optimization).

More Trash

2009-05-06T21:38:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 6th May 2009

I felt like doing a bit more Trash Course enhancements, so I decided to add a couple more routines that would show Get Ready and Game Over. I also fixed the title screen to execute the sideways SEUCK game after fire is pressed. I also linked the Game Over part to the game after all lives are lost straight away.

Maybe some other time I shall add the game options sprites. My plan is to be crafty and turn off the sideborders and place the options sprites at the bottom left and bottom right hand corner, due to the page flipping from credits text to high score table. Once options done, my final job will be to do the high score table. - Then I can go back to Up in the Air and my Stunt Boat Challenge project.

Trashing time.

2009-05-03T22:29:00.000+01:00

Sunday 3rd May 2009

I have been a bit busy today preparing some stuff for Trash Course, now that Thorsten (Sledgie) has showed me the final BETA of the game. It was time for me to do some sideways SEUCK enhancements. Well, not quite. I booted up DMC V5.0+ to make the in-game and title screen music a bit longer first, and sound better. Seems to have worked fine. Now that I was happy with the music, I decided to use the DMC V5.0 packer and relocate the music to $9000. How lucky I was that although 4 or 5 tunes were in the same music file that the compressed music file did not go over $2000. Brilliant.

The next thing I done was loaded in Thorsten's snap shot of the SEUCK game, and then I saved the SEUCK game as a finished game from the SEUCK menu. Then I loaded the finished game from BASIC and did the usual SEUCK cleaning and hacking technique (So that the menu was completely wiped away and that there was more room for spare memory. Especially when I get round to working on the new front end for the game.)

As soon as memory was filled with zeroes, I took a look at the Gold Quest 4 waterfall animation hack that I did, and used the same technique to get the game's waterfall animated. Then I saved bits of the 2 SEUCK data (Memory $0900-$6600 and also memory $b6c0 - $ffff as those were compulsory for the game, especially that at $6580 I added the background animation routine).

Now that was done, I needed to sort out a new char set and also D-Flame/Blazon/Crypt's logo. So first of all, I took my font from my old Square Pit 64 game, which I wrote in 2007 for the Forever party. Then I used GangED to convert D-Flame's picture into 3 files (Bitmap, colour RAM and Video RAM). Then I painted sprites for the game options section for my new front end.

After the graphics were sorted out. I created a folder on the PC and converted the C64 files (SEUCK, music, graphics data, etc) into the new folder. After that was done, I copied the cross-assembly and compression .exe files into the project file and got started with programming.

The first thing I had done was a simple test file. Basically, test SEUCK to see if it will decompress and run with a hacked routine that adds the in music to the game. First, this did not work because the first half of the SEUCK game data file was at $0800 instead of $0900. Doh, very silly of me! After correcting this, and crunching again the game started fine with music in the background and also animated background. Brilliant. I am glad that worked.

Now it was time for me to program the main front end. First of all I did the text data (Presentation lines, scroll text and high scores) and then worked on with the main code for the new front end. I imported all C64 files into the source files, then I programmed routines to display the colours of the logo. I also programmed 3 different splits. The first split was for the bitmap logo, which is about 6 or 7 chars high. Then another split for the still text and the last split for the scroll text. Once that was done, I worked on routines that will do the usual Richard Bayliss colour washing technique and also I programmed a routine that will change page after a certain amount of time. One page for the main credits and the other page for the high score table. Colour washing routines change per page as well. I was very happy with this result although still unfinished, because I have a Get Ready, Game Over, High Score entry and also end screen to do.

Tomorrow is a bank holiday, but I wont be doing any programming tomorrow. I'm thinking about digging out some old C64 tapes and playing those. Like, Armalyte, Blazing Thunder, etc.

Holiday to Norway PT 6 - At sea again - Last day!

2009-04-29T21:48:00.001+01:00

Monday 27th April 2009

We were returning back to Tilbury at sea. I was very disappointed that it was our last day. There wasn't much we could do on board the ship, but we managed to keep ourselves amused - most of the time playing UNO, where I kept on thrashing Philip at this game. I am just too good at it. Then we played Scrabble, guess what? I lost again. And we also played Checkers, which I also lost.

After lunch we went to the club room for the final informative lecture about Norway, this time it was about What the Norwegians did for us. It was a very interesting and quite amusing lecture about some of the history, but Norway was an interesting and great country which Philip and I visited.

Overall with our holiday, we had a wonderful experience on the cruise and also down the Norwegian Fjords. It was fantastic and I would love to visit Norway again in say, 2 or 3 years time. Or something like that. :)

Sadly I am unable to give you any screen shots of the areas that we visited as Philip has not yet got the photos converted on to the PC. :)

Holiday to Norway PT 4 - Gidvangen + Voss

2009-04-29T21:21:00.000+01:00

Saturday 25th April 2009

Philip and I found ourselves at a new destination on the cruise ship. We looked outside the ship and it was a pretty sight. We were in the Fjords of Gudvangen. It was freezing cold outside, so we had breakfast inside the ship. Then we got outside the cruise ship on to the tender for our next trip.

When we got to the bank of Gudvangen, I was stopped by a Viking and had a photo taken with him. Quite nice. Then we got on to the coach, listened to some interesting facts about Gudvangen and headed off to the giant waterfall. It was very pretty. Philip took a few photos of the waterfall. Back on the coach again, to Voss. This was our lunch stop, at a buffet restaurant. Food was really nice. I relaxed in the park with my brother then we went to the railway station. We caught the courtesy train and the train took us to the Flám Railway. After we got off the train from Voss to Flám, we got on to the Flám railway.

When we got on to the train in Flám. The speakers turned on and said 'Welcome to the Flám Railway' in a very slow and boring way. Philip and I were laughing as it was very hilarious. Another thing that made me laugh was that one of the cruise tour guides asked the conductor if they could turn up the speakers on the train. The conductor with only 3 teeth, said "No, but you can close the windows if you can't hear". LOL that was rude, but funny.

After we done the Flám railway, we got back on to the ship for tea and it was 'casual' dress code. So Philip and I headed off to the piano bar for a beer and then to the games room, where we played Scrabble. I lost at Scrabble as well as checkers. Will there be a game I am good at? Then we went to bed. It was a great day out, but tiring when you are on the coach most of the time :P.

Holiday to Norway PT 3 - Ulvik

2009-04-29T21:08:00.000+01:00

Friday 24th April 2009

When I woke up this morning I looked outside the window of our cabin and we saw a beatiful view. We made it to the Fjords of Ulvik. We had breakfast and then got our jackets on and set off to the tender, which took us over to the banks and then we got on to the coach to start the tour.

The tour guide seems to have been enjoying his job, as he loves coach entering the tunnels. We stopped at our first stop, which was the short ferry ride across the Fjord of Ulvik. It took 10 minutes to cross the Fjord, then we moved on to the Nature Centre. It was quite interesting. Following that we went to a water fall, which was quite pretty. Then we got to an old church, which was still being renovated. After we got back on to the coach, the passengers screamed 'CAT - Watch out, watch out!' The driver had almost ran the passing cat over with his coach, and the tour guide got excited and said: 'Oooh dear, looks like that cat almost got run over, what a shame. Ah well :o)'.

The tour was very amusing but went too quick. Philip and I got back on to the ship and the ship sailed off to the next destination, Gudvangen - which will take half a day or so. So Philip and I went to the games room and played a chess game called Checkers (I think this game is called Dame in Germany, not sure TBH). I taught him how to play the game, but unfortunately for me I was always beaten. He was too good at this game.

It was tea time, we had a buffet meal and sadly the food this time wasn't that nice. It was fish and I dislike eating fish, except for salmon, sardines, tuna, pilchards, etc. Unfortunately the fish was scampi and code, rough, etc. Horrible! I did not even know that the food was going to be fish as the food wasn't labelled.

It was 'Informal' for the dress code on the ship, so I donned my shirt and trousers and went to the piano bar. Had a couple of colas and then went into the games room again and played checkers again. Sadly I still lost. Maybe I can play a different game with Philip tomorrow night. :P

Holiday to Norway PT 2 - At sea

2009-04-29T21:01:00.000+01:00

Thursday 23rd April 2009

A full day at sea today. Ah well, what is there to do around the ship? Not much. Still it did not stop me and Philip exploring around the Marco Polo cruise ship. We spent most of our time in the sitting rooms talking about how much we were looking forward to the trips. Later on in the morning we both went to one of the club rooms and listened to a lecture about The quirks of Norway. The lecture was very informative and amusing. It is funny that Norway 'loves' the Eurovision Song contest and one of the singers that was the first to score NIL points was declared a national hero for that. ROTFL.

Later on in the day, I sat outside with my brother. The weather was very nice and warm so we should make the use of it.

In the evening it was a 'formal' dress code night, so I put on my suit and set off to the restaurant again for the evening meal then went to the piano bar afterwards then we went to bed.

Holiday to Norway PT 1 - Ship Ahoy!

2009-04-29T20:49:00.000+01:00

Wednesday 22nd April 2009

I have got ready and set off with my brother on a cruise to the Norwegian Fjords. First of all we waited outside pickup point to get a coach to Victoria Coach Station, so that we could catch the special coach to our cruise ship. It took 2 1/2 hours from Birmingham to London, and the travelling by coach was boring. After we got off the coach we caught the courtesy coach from London to the ports in Tilbury and then we got on to the cruise ship.

When we got on to the ship, we had a nice buffet meal. Man I sure was starving, I have to admit. I could not stop eating the food for a while and drinking the nice fruit juices. Then Philip and I went to our cabin and relaxed for a bit. After an hour and a half it was time for the safety drill. So we grabbed our life jackets and put them on and set off to the meeting point where the muster stations were. We were surprised that people were forgetting to put on their life jackets and some people did not want to wear them either. LOL.

After the drill, the ship set out to sea. I relaxed in my cabin - well, went to sleep really because I was that tired. Then it was tea time, so Philip and I went to the same buffet restaurant and had our evening meal then had a beer or two then at 9:00pm, we went back to our cabin and fell asleep. The coach travelling really tired us out.

Enter the choppers

2009-04-11T15:32:00.000+01:00

Saturday 11th April 2009

Yesterday I mentioned about the Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge game. Well, today I have been doing a little bit more on the project. Before I could do any more to the project I converted the test run file on to a C64 tape using the WAV/PRG program and loaded the test file in to my Commodore 64. Damn, there was a major problem. The player's boat (when expanded MSB for the sprites) screwed up the scrolling engine. So now I have to work out what was causing the problem. Fortunately I figured out what was causing such a disturbance to the scrolling engine. It appeared that I used an insufficient area for the artificial sprite positions. So I altered the OBJPOS label to a different memory location. Crunched it all with the Exomizer and tested it on my real C64. RESULT!

Now that I was happy with everything, It was time for me to add some data tables and program some additional routines. I created some data tables for the sprites, and programmed a sprite animation routine. After that I worked on a small, but very easy routine, where the player can now shoot bullets. Then I started working on getting the enemies to move. At the moment they are the same enemies moving across the screen in the same place. However I can work more on making better movements and behaviour of the enemies next time I go on to this project. Which probably might be tomorrow morning.

So far, so good. Player can move and shoot, scroller is working fine (It uses DMA delay routines) and also the enemies can move - but more work is needed on this part of the project.

A new game in the works - Ultimate Stunt Boat Challenge

2009-04-10T20:44:00.000+01:00

Friday 10th April 2009

What a boring day today was so far. So I decided to make a new C64 game. Well, I got started on it really. Earlier on in the week I asked Frank if he could send me the Real Speed We Need graphics data for this game project. As I thought there may have been some boats and other action movie style enemies and obstacles. I sure was right.

Most of this morning I worked on the map graphics using Charpad V1.0 to build the level map and then later on I dug out the old Real Speed We Need source code and modified it a little, and got the new map working nicely with the scroller. One major problem for me was that the map scrolling was just too fast. So I slowed it down a touch and it looked fine.

My next task was to sort out some sprites. So I copied some of the old RSWN sprites which Frank had done before, and I paste them. For this game I wanted enemy air craft, boats and also some ramps, that the player could jump over to try and get over the bridges on later levels. I also grabbed some other sprites that I thought would suit the game.

Although in its early stages yet, and more work to be done. I was dead chuffed with the work done so far. I added some routines to get the player's sprite on to the screen, and also get the player moving as well.

Hopefully tomorrow or Sunday, I should be ready to add some additional routines to get the player shooting and also the enemies starting to take action.

Another Last Amazon front end

2009-04-08T21:25:00.000+01:00

Tuesday 7th April 2009 + Wednesday 8th April 2009

Bah, TV sucks. Well that doesn't surprise me. I had nothing else too exciting to do, so I decided to work on a new front end for Last Amazon 2. This time it was a bit of a challenge, but I knew that it should be possible. I prepared a work disk .D64 and transferred all the C64 files into the cross-assembly directory for use with ACME, the same way as I did with The Last Amazon.

Kenz had shown me the mock up screen shot of what he would like me to do for the front end. Oh no ... raster splits :( Seriously, I hate doing raster bars, due to having to get those blasted things timed correctly inside $D012 splits. Ah well, it has to be done, and I shall do that.

I loaded up the Relaunch64 tool and then I created a main source file which will link all the c64 program files (including the game) and got started on the programming side of things. I started off with the IRQ interrupt player routine to see if it will run. The good news was that the player routine did play the music after assembled and crunched with PuCrunch. Now it was time for the serious part of the programming. Getting the bitmap logo and all chars displaying. To do this, I changed the background colour ($D021) so that all small text was white and all large text was yellow. So I built 10 raster splits in total. Everything displayed successfully.

Now it was time to add those raster bars into the text. Well, this I must stress was one of the worse parts of the front end programming. So I built a colour table and a raster timing table for each raster split. It took a lot of time to time out the raster splits so that the text chars looked much more tidier. As soon as I was happy with the result, I worked on the scroll text routine (Which uses raster splits as well) and then added a routine for which the player can press fire in either joystick port to play a 1 or 2 player game. Those worked okay, but sadly timing had altered again. So I moved the raster timing table and also moved the scroll text to a higher location and got everything working. Looks perfect now. Hope Alf and Kenz likes this one.