| Posted By
javierglez
on 2024-01-07
07:13:59
|  Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
Last year I realized a review from Zzap had been uploaded here.
There was two things that caught my attention: the author said the game was better for the VIC than for the C16, which may be true but I didn't expect it to be as noticeable.
So I checked the source code again and saw that a last minute bug that I had detected and corrected had somewhat stayed in the C16 version or made is way back. Now I can't remember what it was, but probably had botched the rules controlling the movements of the aliens.
The other thing that caught my attention was the author said the game was boring, which I agree, but not the reason.
So as I had the code in my mind again, I decided to give the game a last shot and changed the control, I made the fire auto. That way the player was released of what I thought was a chore. The game took another rythm and I liked it.
So I decided to add the other 4 maps of the arcade, add some complexity to the background, some other changes. I planned to release it this year, but as the news of the 2023 +4 game competition came, I decided to speed up development.
For now you can download Sidelsa rev.B from the +4 game competition page. I will try to update here the original Sidelsa without the bug and the rev.B in the following days.
If you want to run the disk image by drag&drop in the emulator, you need to select a Jiffy DOS ROM for the drive first.
 
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Posted By
Luca
on 2024-01-07
12:29:47
 | Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
Before I find the time to read your interesting text, I can already say something: STOP USING VICE. If I would have gain one cent for any time I wrote this, now I can rebuild the whole Commodore industry 
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Posted By
javierglez
on 2024-01-08
07:54:12
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
There's an interesting thing about VICE and SJL264: while loader_routine, which loads the body of the data, works well, sjl_busin (IECIN), which gets each one of the two bytes of the load address, sometimes gets wrong the 7th bit.
Obviously I know the load addresses of my own programs, so the fix I used was to read the two bytes of the address and discard them.
I tested this on Yape too, and it didn't happen. But I didn't try enough times to tell for sure.
I tested this on the real machine too, but although only a few weeks have passed, and I can remember I go back to the emulator, I can't remember if this specific bug was happening too.
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Posted By
Haegar
on 2024-01-08
08:07:08
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
I had the same challenge for my contribution to +4 Competition. My submission is not error-free and, above all, not complete.
I will use the next week to fix errors and finish it.
Unfortunately I haven't gotten around to watching your game yet, but I'll catch up in a few days.
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Posted By
SukkoPera
on 2024-01-08
08:29:50
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
Sorry for the OT, but I think it would better if, instead of telling people not to use VICE, everybody did what they could to improve it: report the bugs! This can be done here. If nobody reports anything, nothing will ever be fixed!
The dev team seems to care, as I reported a bug last week and it got fixed in a pinch!
This is particularly important because YAPE is rather Windows-focused and the cross-platform SDL port is not as feature-rich as the Windows version, so we non-Windows users have a hard time. On the contrary, VICE is fully cross-platform and allows us to have a decent emulator at hand.
Remember that open source stuff, both SW and HW, is open because YOU CAN HELP to make it better! So just do it! 
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Posted By
Luca
on 2024-01-08
08:42:53
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
@SukkoPera I appreciate your active participation to a great and long standing project like VICE, which all of us love. Unfortunately, you're talking to noone, because there's nobody there taking care of the 264 emulation since years.
Ah, and never use VICE xplus4 for your projects, did I say it? :D
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Posted By
SukkoPera
on 2024-01-08
09:22:04
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
Even if you're talking to noone, bugs should be reported so that they get tracked.
Then you don't know, maybe if we open 100's of bugs, someone will realize how bad the emulator is and will get back working on it.
As I said, the only thing you can be certain of is that if a bug is not reported, it will not be fixed either.
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Posted By
Gaia
on 2024-01-08
19:22:14
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
Alas, it's not that simple. There will be "bugs" which aren't just bugs but more like incomplete and/or incorrect logical implementations of features of the original HW. Just saying that 'XYZ' demo isn't working will not help unless there is someone in the team familiar enough with the expected behaviour AND the VICE architecture AND the original HW AND enough time on their hands - to be able to fix it without breaking something else. There are deeply non-trivial aspects of the TED that can not be implemented any other way. I actually submitted a few patches to VICE like 10+ years ago but the inherently instruction based architecture at the time was simply too ill-suited for a convenient implementation of most TED quirks so a major code refactoring would have been desirable first.
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Posted By
SukkoPera
on 2024-01-09
03:48:14
| Re: Sidelsa for +4 '23 competition
I understand your concern, but I think we should at least try to respark some interest in xplus4, maybe get VICE integrate the YAPE core (wishful thinking, I know), or at least get a statement from the developers that they are not interested in fixing anything.
In all cases, I still think the bugs should be tracked so that users can learn about them.
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