What you messing with Martin?
Graphics dumps
- Thread starter guddler
- Start date
Nothing exciting - well, I assume not anyway!
I have a couple of very nice Amigas here. A fully expanded modern remake with 060 accelerator and RTG graphics running OS3.9 and a couple of nice A1200 with various bits and pieces and all I ever do with them is fire them up, watch demos and switch them off again. Nothing wrong with that as such but I wanted to actually DO something with them.
So I wanted to learn Amiga Assembly. Problem is, learning assembler and the hardware all in one go was overwhelming so I decided that I would pick something that I could break down in chunks. Work each chunk out in C to figure out the hardware (which is well documented - at least for OCS / ECS) and then learn how to do that chunk in ASM once the hardware and principles were down.
Then last week, no idea why, but I happened upon a fascinating read that details the pacman hardware in real detail and in particular all the AI and how the ghosts and stuff work. This I figure is great because not only is the game documented in fine detail but also the target hardware.
Hence my tinkering was born. And me being me, this has to be pixel perfect or it's not worth doing. Of course, I have to take into account the horizontal screen but there's enough height to house the entire playfield with scores and stuff on the side. OR, I may even be able to squeeze it in properly if I use the screens overscan but I'm nowhere near that yet.
So there we are. Like I say, probably not that interesting, especially for an arcade forum but I will be getting into Pacman in detail. Assuming I manage to actually follow up on this.
Right now I have the copper (amiga co-pro) setting up the screen and the palette and in theory allocating the memory for the bitplanes with the pointers in the copper list. But I've not done C professionally for 4 or 5 years now so I'm rusty enough that allocation isn't working! But that was 3AM, hopefully I'll solve that soon enough when I get a chance to sit down and look at it.
I have a couple of very nice Amigas here. A fully expanded modern remake with 060 accelerator and RTG graphics running OS3.9 and a couple of nice A1200 with various bits and pieces and all I ever do with them is fire them up, watch demos and switch them off again. Nothing wrong with that as such but I wanted to actually DO something with them.
So I wanted to learn Amiga Assembly. Problem is, learning assembler and the hardware all in one go was overwhelming so I decided that I would pick something that I could break down in chunks. Work each chunk out in C to figure out the hardware (which is well documented - at least for OCS / ECS) and then learn how to do that chunk in ASM once the hardware and principles were down.
Then last week, no idea why, but I happened upon a fascinating read that details the pacman hardware in real detail and in particular all the AI and how the ghosts and stuff work. This I figure is great because not only is the game documented in fine detail but also the target hardware.
Hence my tinkering was born. And me being me, this has to be pixel perfect or it's not worth doing. Of course, I have to take into account the horizontal screen but there's enough height to house the entire playfield with scores and stuff on the side. OR, I may even be able to squeeze it in properly if I use the screens overscan but I'm nowhere near that yet.
So there we are. Like I say, probably not that interesting, especially for an arcade forum but I will be getting into Pacman in detail. Assuming I manage to actually follow up on this.
Right now I have the copper (amiga co-pro) setting up the screen and the palette and in theory allocating the memory for the bitplanes with the pointers in the copper list. But I've not done C professionally for 4 or 5 years now so I'm rusty enough that allocation isn't working! But that was 3AM, hopefully I'll solve that soon enough when I get a chance to sit down and look at it.
Sounds interesting, the ghosts ai is really quite clever for the little processing overhead.
Good luck
Good luck