Pacman Demo

[Hurray Banana]

Finally got my code burn't to some roms and now running on a Midway Pacman board

The scrolling is great, glad to see no tearing (the odd jump is my naff S3 lagging).

My monitor is rotated the wrong way for Pacman and I forgot to write to address &5003 to flip the screen. Had a couple of false starts due to 2532's not writing properly but got there.

Thanks to Jon Hughes for selling me his board and again for Ade and Jim and the rest of you for getting me to do this stuff.

Edit: I flip the camera over at 30 secs so you can see it properly

Next project is Spin Pac-Dizzy a tribute to Paul Shirley, getting there with this doing some data structure tests at the moment, quite complicated with just tile ram and 6 sprites to play with but definitely "doable"

Hurray Banana2015-05-16 18:35:36

 

[Baggers69]

Awesome bud great feeling isn't it seeing your code work on real hardware

 

[Hurray Banana]

Awesome bud great feeling isn't it seeing your code work on real hardware

Sure is Jim, now got to stop pissing about and put somat proper together.

 

[cmonkey]

Well done Eric. As Jim has said, it's one thing seeing your own code running in MAME but a totally different feeling altogether seeing it running on real hardware. Keep up the momentum now for Spin Pac-Dizzy! Looking forward to it. I may even buy myself a Pac-Man board to run it (and for Pac-ManicMiner-Man of course!)

 

[Hurray Banana]

Yeah just one more week with 2nd year students then I should have time for me.

Although saying that I have got to set the new a level computer science course up for September

will see if I can make some progress over next couple of weeks

still can't believe I've actually got a pac board seems very strange

 

[backflipper]

Excellent.

 

[Baggers69]

Sure is Jim, now got to stop pissing about and put somat proper together.

Yup lol have you decided what you're going to do yet?

 

[Hurray Banana]

Sure is Jim, now got to stop pissing about and put somat proper together.

Yup lol have you decided what you're going to do yet?

Gonna attempt to do a Spin Dizzy clone, can only manage 7 by 7 grid because of the the 224 horizontal res. Should be able to do the occlusion using 4 sprites, if I get my data, sprites and tiles sorted out properly. Nearly finished designing the data structure to hold the map information and have done some render tests just need to organise tiles properly to pick out all the foreground background combinations for the 8x8 tiles. Not straightforward but I think it's "doable"

 

[Baggers69]

Sure is Jim, now got to stop pissing about and put somat proper together.

Yup lol have you decided what you're going to do yet?

Gonna attempt to do a Spin Dizzy clone, can only manage 7 by 7 grid because of the the 224 horizontal res. Should be able to do the occlusion using 4 sprites, if I get my data, sprites and tiles sorted out properly. Nearly finished designing the data structure to hold the map information and have done some render tests just need to organise tiles properly to pick out all the foreground background combinations for the 8x8 tiles. Not straightforward but I think it's "doable"

Excellent looking forward to seeing it!

 

[Hurray Banana]

Got very distracted by real life

and real work

.

But back dusting off some code.

I'm still working on the Pac-Spindizzy, but I'm also tidying up my scrolling demos and building them into a single demo. I'll post the roms up later this week for anyone who wants to try it.

I'm also working on a more complex scrolling demo, that may involve pixel level scrolling rather than tile scrolling and I'll post the roms for that too, when it's complete.

Unfortunately time is my mega enemy over the next few months so work on this stuff will be slow.

 

[Baggers69]

Cool, looking forward to it!

 

[Hurray Banana]

Right not uploaded anything this week

But as I play/experiment with this I keep coming up with more things I can do, call this demo feature creep.

I've just started playing about with interleaving frames of tiles for various effects and they are cool

so this has distracted me a little bit.

I'll try and fix a few finished routines down and put them together in a nice simple to view demo instead of having loads of working bits (which I have now).

 

[Nes4life]

I've just started playing about with interleaving frames of tiles for various effects and they are cool

You tease! Can't wait to see what magic you're bleeding out of the old hardware now!

 

[cmonkey]

Having had a private sneak preview of what's in store I can safely say you're all going to be blown away with what Hurray Banana has achieved on humble Pac-Man hardware. Prepare to be well and truly gobsmacked by his technological prowess.....

 

[Hurray Banana]

I'm gobsmacking myself tbh

Thanks for the build up Ade.

It'll be a while before I post something public but I am working on this when I get the time. Gotta stop thinking of new things to add.

 

[Robert]

Hi, any progress that you can talk about?

 

[Hurray Banana]

Hi, any progress that you can talk about? Smile

Hi Robert, I've done a lot of work on this, I'm running into my age old problem, as soon as I work out how to do something I suddenly get 10 more ideas for cool things I think I might be able to do, which I then start working on. Couple this with a massive set of problems caused by a migration problem (at work) that's rendered about 6000 lines of code non-usable which now needs re-writing to work in the new environment and teaching at the same time while file servers are killing themselves and time has been stolen from me a little.

I've got several game ideas that can make use of the tech I'm messing with as well. I originally thought I'd do this demo and move onto other hardware, but I'll have to try a few things first.

And I really ought to try and do some sound programming which I am pants at

Anyway here's a little snippet of a 64 sprite ghost swarm effect that is a little part of the demo. Each ghost moves independantly of the others and are drawn independantly, they just happen to sit on the same rows and move at the same speed to enable the illusion of sprites from tiles. The Ghosts can move at 3 different (2 are shown here) speeds (in this knock up some look like they are sliding as the animation frames are skipping the alternate frames with the different wobbly bottom - that's what I'm calling it)

I recorded this with Fraps, lossless it was 3.6GB in size so I had to wait to upload this at work where we've got a 1Gb upload connection (which is nice), took 2 minutes to upload.

As always with these videos you need to watch them at 720p60 to see them running properly, any glitchy frames are down to fraps.

Hurray Banana2015-11-13 08:51:55

 

[cparsonsuk]

Great work, this is really cool, I hadn;t seen this thread before.

cNp

 

[Robert]

Nice, thanks for the preview. Looking forward to the finished masterpiece.

 

[Nes4life]

It's pretty nuts what you're managing to bleed out of the hardware... it'd blow the original developers minds if they could have seen this back in the day. Keep going as long as you're enjoying it.