Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I apologize that I am reincarnating this thread. I just finished reading IT'S BEHIND YOU -- a book written by Bob Pepe -- the author of R-Type on ZX Spectrum. It's a fascinating story how software houses 'employed' programmers in the 1980s, how commercial games were developed, and how R-Type was created & programmed. The book rekindled my interest in R-Type, Katakis and the like ports, including Alpharay. The book is freely downloadable here: IT'S BEHIND YOU. I hope you find it interesting too.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Shizzler? I dunno, I think you misread it "Sizzler", as in "one that sizzles", is an adjective meaning very hot, and in this context it obviously means fantastic, very well made, etc.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Nice review! 91% is a really great score!
Update (just my personal view) Actually I watched the longplay videos of both R-Type and Alpharay on YT (when you are in game, it is hard to check the fine details due to the enemies :-) )
Although it is hard to compete with the C64's HW sprites, the Alpharay is really up to the legendary competition. It requires more planning and little slower paced game, but Alpharay is a "more brainer" game.
I found Alpharay is more complex and interesting than the C64 R-Type, and knowing the HW limitations, it should definitely reach a higher score.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Just a quick note in order to congratulate with Stefan, Starbuck, Róbert, András and friends: Retro Gamer 202 gives the Sizzler mark to Alpharay!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I've just recorded a Longplay Video of the game.. It's somehow a spoiler, but a longplay was somehow missing on my task list.. If you don't like to be spoilered please don't watch the video :) ..
Btw: I noticed that one weapon can not be collected in this version.. So the final will have one weapon more :)..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hi Istvan,
Thanks, I will inspect the code. Actually, I looked into it earlier, I just didn't have enough time/energy to make sense of it. I think I have already run into the bitwise AND thing you mentioned during my experiments.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 @bubis:
> As for the HSP routine: Please don't ask me to explain how it works, because I don't fully understand yet. I am sure that there are some inner registers and states in TED what we don't see in the $FFxx area and some $FF1E values trigger some events like pointer incrementing start, pointer incrementing stop and pointer reload (there are things like that mentioned in some TED tech doc without explanation) and I am messing with these events by setting $FF1E to the right values at the right cycles.
If this is of any help, the following source file contains most of the TED event related code in plus4emu: https://github.com/istvan-v/plus4emu/blob/master/src/ted_main.cpp There is indeed a similar logic for two pointers, in the source code I named these DMA position (for color memory reads) and character position (for bitmaps). Each of these also has a "reload" register that latches the position at the end of a row of characters, writing $ff1a/$ff1b therefore changes the character position reload. At the beginning of each line, a few characters before the end of the left border, the positions are reloaded from the latched values, then they start incrementing for 40 characters. A few characters before the beginning of the right border, the incrementing stops, and depending on the current line within the character ($ff1f), the positions are stored in the reload registers. For the DMA position, this happens in line 6 of the character, while character position is latched if the previous line was 6. One more interesting bit is that with certain timings of writing, a "corrupted" value can be stored that is the result of a bitwise AND with the current position.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Lavina the French guy, and the Russian long recording one. Also, here comes the second review on paper, just released as free on Kilobyte Magazine 2019/2.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Lavina: thank you for this video, because it was so funny... ...and the guy is much better than me in the gameplay...
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 gerliczer yeah Luca is right. The HSP only does it for 40 columns, then we have to copy the whole screen. That's why very seldom there are wrong colors somewhere on the screen. (It can only happen at every fully scrolled screen of 40 columns).
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 gerliczer in Alpharay colour clashes between background elements and sprites sometimes occur, it's part of the cross compromise between the HSP bitmap scrolling and the softsprites' colour clash reduction's code. It's a little fee to pay for all that stuff
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I was watching the recording of someone playing Alpharay when I saw something strange: https://youtu.be/TMFGFUbFJfU?t=4714 Watch the bottom of the floating rock as the ship passes right underneath.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 @ Mad That "recharging lives" thing is a quite cool twist, I did not know about that before. So no need for a "Continue" option if you ask me. I also only recently realized that touching the background does not kill you! That's very unusual for this type of game. It makes it a bit easier to play I think. BTW, now that I've learned the attack patterns of the first boss I never loose a life there now. That applies for the game in general: It's hard but fair! (Only with those shooting, humanoid jetpack guys I have some problems. I died often in front of them when I thought I hadn't touched them. Maybe it's me with my rusty reactions but to me it seemed I got killed while not yet close enough. Maybe you could check that. But as I said, I may also be just too old. ) And yes, Thunderforce IV, besides Streets Of Rage II is my most played game on the Genesis as well!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Ok guys, Alpharay D64 changed, download it again, we're going to act just like the bugged version did never exist The itch.io distributed version should have been updated too, so ppl involved: let's warn Kenz ;)
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanx Tyrex.. That energy bar idea indeed is a good idea. And thanx for the hint with Thunderforce IV, that's the game I just loved the most to play on my MD/Genesis, thanx..
There is some sort of "continues" already implemented. If you are able to finish the second level and other levels there are some "recharge" points which again give you full power. For a continue system there is not enough space, currently just some very few bytes free in memory and on the disc..
Greetz Stefan
Edit: I got a go from Psytronik for improvements. I just added the "slower" energy bar suggestion for apprentice and normal modes. :)
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hey Stefan, congratulations for making the technically most advanced game ever (once again!) on the 264 series. I am playing it on my real machine. I had no problems transferring it to disk, using a 1541U2 with Turbo Nibbler on C64. (I suppose there are way better copy tools, but it worked for me anyway.) The game plays quite well considering the amount of sprites on screen. It's just a bit too hard. Continues would be nice, and perhaps if the energy bar would not empty so quickly. The latter could be another good way to do different difficulty levels. But anyway, I'm making progress. Slowly though, but still. I managed to get to the second level in Normal mode. Thanks for the info about the "Pause" bug. I thought there maybe was something wrong with my hardware. Glad it's not. What I especially like about the game graphics is that the (many!) colors of the sprites seem to be independent of the background colors. At least it looks like they are. I've never seen that in any other 264 game, not even yourselves before. Finally the player sprite has the same colors in every level. Yay! And I spotted many references to Thunderforce IV besides the obvious R-Type and Nemesis. Great game!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hey Guys,
We somehow found some bugs with the game (there wasn't a testing period before releasing the game this time) - an randomly "pressing" of run/stop leading to the pause of the game (seems to be fixed here now) - when you got the 8th place in the scoretable, there could be some errors with the score routine (seems to be fixed here now) - One guy mentioned that his 1551 needed some longer time off after playing Alpharay, it just couldn't load files afterwards for some ?days?.. - Luca got a bug about halve a year ago, where his 1551 couldn't load Pets Rescue fully, but his 1541 could read it propperly though, after a new d64 transfer this bug was gone - One guy got problems with his 1541 version of Alpharay, but after a retransfer of the d64 that never happened again
I just mention this here to be collecting all the bugs that happened. Perhaps that could be good for future projects.
I have no clue how to fix these drive related stuff or where these problems could be in the code of Bitfire, if that's the problem..
I supplied Luca with a fixed version for the non drive / disc related stuff..
If you found more bugs, just tell! The same is with Pets Rescue, it's somehow the same codebase!
Edit: For now it just seems that these 3 drive related bugs are just some single pointed bugs. No serious ones. A lot of people played Pets Rescue to the end, without having drive related problems, as I just got told.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Mad I really like the fact that you (the team) sell a box with artwork for the game. I think thats very important. The artwork boosts the imagination on every 8bit game. I remember some games of that days were also realeased with small comic-books (Yars Revenge, Atari 2600) with a background story. I am also a great fan of cartridges (so rare on our system). Reliable and plug&play.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 register putting a smile in a sentence should symbolize just the opposite to be in anger! I supposed you were aware of that, by reading our chat, that's why I smiled in curiosity, that's all nothing more :)
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hi Luca, back at the time when I was a teenager I only wrote BASIC programs ( and just a little bit of ASM for some basic raster effects) in multi-color text so I wasn't aware that TED allows to change 2 colors in bitmap color mode. I admit my ignorance: that's why I asked again. Now after having read this: http://mclauchlan.site.net.au/scott/C=Hacking/C-Hacking12/gfx.html I finally understand. If you recall our chat I asked you whether "it was changing color map every two frames" and this shows that I didn't understand anything even during our chat. Don't get angry if people doesn't know the Plussy as you. Everybody has been a beginner at some moment in their life. I still am so I will keep on asking naive questions.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 -2 free colors per single sprite, and white
-> How it this possible? If I remember correctly multicolor has only one free color and not two. Where can I find some documentation about how to achieve this?
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Finally I managed it to copy the 40 tracks disk without error, just one more hour passed You need to do the following steps if you have XU1541,ZOOMFloppy etc. 1541<->USB adapter: /Thanks to Siz, who helped me a lot to debug it /
1., Pull out and plug back then the usb of the adapter 2., Go to the command line, and then type: 3., cbmctrl reset 4., cbmctrl detect 5., cbmformat -x 8 test,tt 6., d64copy -e 40 alpharay.d64 8
This game is fantastic, but veeerrry hard to play (magyarul: "szemétparaszt játék"). It doesn't seem to have a learning curve, you need to practice a lot to fight through the obstacles. Fortunately there is a lot of checkpoints. I cannot reach the end of level 1 yet, because I lost my patience The other weird thing I mentioned in my previous post was the "framedropping", I see now this is intentional. Sorry Gaia, its not your fault One final thought, it looks best on real iron + CRT!
Congrats to the developers, I like a lot of the visual atmosphere and the music.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanx MMS!! It was not really clear at Evoke.. But in the end we won this compo! It feels always strange to be with a game on a demoparty!! :D
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanx Luca!!
The game will be available to pre-order from this Sunday from Psytronik..
Btw.. Kenz from Psytronik just send me the ??final?? box cover made by Trevor'Smila'Storey ... I have no clue how this happened, he had only two days to come up with this box cover.. Don't ask, it's beyond my understanding! But here it is:
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I could check it aswell, once at home, nonetheless I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work with a 1551 just like the previous Pets Rescue Also, it works with 1551 CPU emulation on any emulator as expected. Carrion are you sure you've transfered the D64 image on a 40 tracks extended formatted disk?
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 @carrion
There are several reports of people having problems transferring it to disc. I thought the problem is the 40 tracks stuff. In the past I have seen a video of Luca using the game, I think on a 1551.. And Degausd too showed a video of the game on a disc drive. I have no clue about what's up with that. Did someone be able to transfer it to disc here?
It uses the same routines as Pets Rescue, perhaps there is a bug.. I am checking this right now again..
I thought after seeing it at Lucas and Degauss Screen it'll work then. If there is a bug we'll fix that!!
@Luca: can you help?
Sorry for this..
Edit: I checked it, there is exactly the same code as in Pets Rescue executed line by line directly at start to initialize bitfire.. And it works in yape and plus4emu.. I have no clue what's up with that.. Perhaps some people with a working disc drive could confirm, this? (Because several people reported problems with transferring it to disc)
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 @Mad Is it only my setup or the game doesn't work with 1551? I'll try to us another diskette today and check again and report. the game works perfectly with Ultimate1541 - connected to c64
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Sorry for my very bad and very very black humor here. I would formulate it another way.. The SD2IEC isn't working with our game. Again sorry for my really over the top humor.. You know germans don't understand any humor. I hope people can handle this..
Edit: For real, there seems to be no solution for Bitfire and SD2IEC!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Doesnt work on sd2iec.. bummer..
It's a very nice game, and I wanted to play, but..
1, Yape bugs it to a hell out, even with the latest version produce framedrops (I think its not the game's fault) 2, It needs a special 40 tracks disk. I tried to make a working copy but doesnt succeded yet (Its my fault, I know, win10-xum1541) 3, Plus4emu doesnt work on my machine (Its my fault too. win10, 64 bits, fli converter works, emu not.. )
I'm getting frustrated :D
So guys, next time please please consider using something simplier technique :D
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Lavina could it be, that the joystick is the problem? There where some gamepads showing up here some months ago.. And it's even possible to use cursor keys + shift to control the game.. In the second level, there are some small ships flying around which are a little bit unfair.. But that is nothing against the last level... Dunno if it's even possible to beat the last level even with some propper training in apprentice mode before.. I think I just did this once or something.. Our advanced age could of course be a problem, too, like you correctly stated!
Btw.. At first some game crew member asked if we wanna have background collisions too, seemingly because many old games have that!! :D
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Doug,
My patience is nothing compared to Istvan V's. Just think about it, Plus4Eme emulates all of this flawlessly for many years. He actually understands TED (as he basically reimplemented it) we are just trying to figure it out. Too bad we don't have him on this scene anymore.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 ...meanwhile at the Omikron Company's sector... I'm having difficulty in following everything that moves on the screen. I find it really hard to survive. Mainly I'm having a bad time evading the small fragments.
I know it's a bit late but energy depletion would make the game much easier for pensioners like me instead of instantly getting blown away from the galaxy. Practice, practice, apprentice!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hi,
Mad: Thanks for the technical details, awesome!
As for the HSP routine: Please don't ask me to explain how it works, because I don't fully understand yet. I am sure that there are some inner registers and states in TED what we don't see in the $FFxx area and some $FF1E values trigger some events like pointer incrementing start, pointer incrementing stop and pointer reload (there are things like that mentioned in some TED tech doc without explanation) and I am messing with these events by setting $FF1E to the right values at the right cycles.
Yes, I experimented a LOT! At the begining I only had stable routines for some shift values, but those also ruined the PAL signal. First, I fixed those to work properly. Then, I tried to extend them many ways to work with close values and looked for a pattern what I can generalize. I managed to do 0-37 with one routine using two $FF1E writes, but that didn't work for 38 and 39. It turned out I need a third $FF1E write, a part of the final routine deals with only those cases. And of couse, the final routine is the result of a lots of polishing.
I will publish this code later this week or next week. I ask for a little patience!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I am thinking about releasing the sources at some point.. But cannot clearly say if and when.. If I get the help of Bubis the first thing I would try is get this game to NTSC, but perhaps that's impossible.. After that perhaps "we" may annotate and release the sources .. But currently I am not so certain if this will really happen.. Let's see! Nice to read that you too are a Shooter enthusiast since ages! All t3h best! :)
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanks Mad! That is certainly useful, and now it is much more clear what is happening. I have been playing around with double-buffered screens and multi-color sprites, but it's very difficult to get it to perform. I'm not giving up, as I'm still learning (some sort of code profiler would help). I have been reading other people's code (sprites used in Pets Rescue), and I learned a lot from it. Will you release your (annotated) source code?
I've been wanting to write a shoot 'm up on the plus/4 since 1984 (thinking it was impossible). It will probably take me a lot of time to do anything, but I'm having fun, so who cares? Again, awesome game, I'm waiting for floppy disks to come in, so I can make a real 1551 disk, and get it running on real hardware.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 To make me ungodly again.. Some of the stuff used which is just remembered.. I think there was more involved but that's the parts I remember just now.. Edit: my tabulators are not shown!! :D Perhaps I should do a website with some "indepth explanations".. Hope that here already helps..
The decission for bitmap mode was just made because of the challenge I suppose, I don't remember the reason. Charactermode graphics where taken to a limit with Pets Rescue (perhaps period).. I think an R-Type Leo video on a Playstation was the thing that triggered this decission for me.. I was sure that bitmap mode will lead to very good graphical results, even comparable to early arcades..
Since the $ff1a/$ff1b bitmap pointer just display the bitmap with a different offset. The sprites can be painted in a slower way.. (ranges from 2nd to 5th frame most time more like 25 fps to 12fps..) So the scrolling is done with 50 Hz and the sprites are painted slower.. Bubis HSP saved the day because it too just delays the readout of the colorram, which is pretty nice in combination with $ff1a/$ff1b, both, bitmap and colorram pointers, give a good and almost fully working "synergy" there.. :)
Funnily we didn't have to take care of the rasterbeam position at doing the sprite updates.. It's almost not noticable that the sprites are modified (painted / cleared) directly on screen..
Here some of the things I remember from the technical side..
1. Scrolling - features: -- single speed (25Hz), double speed (50Hz), tripple speed (75hz) -- right scrolling, down scrolling, rightdown scrolling - is done in interrupt at 50 hz. - Bubis HSP trick used for X Scrolling -- after 40 columns the whole colorram gets copied 40 chars further in a nested interrupt - Y Scrolling is done the usual $800 colorram copy in a one framed way, but in a nested interrupt. (sometimes just very very few rasterlines left, sometimes too few) - of course the softscroll registers are used for fine scrolling 8 pixels - the appending on the right was easy.. At bottom there is much trickery involved, and the status bar hides some of the build ups.. 2. Single Buffer - We just have one $2000 bitmap displayed and one $800 colorram used. So just a single buffer.. - Scrolling is done via HSP and single frame copy of colorram - The Singlebuffer Sprites (i would need a graphic to fully explain that) Perhaps CPC, Spectrum and other people can use that or even use it already.. -- There is a 40x25 char matrix used in the background to tell the type of the displayed characters -- There are several bits for every char entry in this matrix --- one bit tells if there was a sprite in the last frame on this position --- one bit tells if there is a sprite in the current frame on this position --- the other 6 bits are also used for shots (in the same manner), background element types and collisions and other stuff -- So here comes the bit logic.. --- first I paint the sprite of the current frame after that the same sprite at the last frame is cleared.. working as follows: --- if sprite clearing ---- just check if there is the sprite bit is set for the current frame if so don't clear ---- else if sprite bit is set for last frame then clear --- if sprite painting ---- if not current frame sprite bit is set. Just store the 8 bytes there no masking. (extremely fast painting) ---- if current frame sprite bit is set.. Do combine the sprites by color clash reduce and masking. --- so this way only the left overs of the sprites are cleared (the "borders") and we can reduce the need for masking or the need for color clash fixes. -- Color clash reduce is not done if the sprites share the same luminances -- I had to use the $80 bit of the luminance ram, too for notifying background elements because of the colorram copies (not full AGSP just HSP).. 3. Color Clash Reduce - If sprites overleap. We just take the both brightest colors of both sprites and paint some checker 2x2 pattern instead of the darker colors. (Have to check that again in the code) - Ingo has some more advanced approach used in the past. But this approach already did a lot.. The checkering of the colors was the key to give an impression of mixing. And the brighter colors are always more noticable.. Have to check the code for it.. I will update this here then.. At least the checker pattern is the key! :) 4. Sprites - X Shifting for non 8x8 movement .. Done with tables as usual no masks or preshifts.. (feel free to ask how if it's not clear).. - Support for 256 (max 32x40 pixel) sprites in memory which sometimes is almost used (176 or something have to check later). - Automasking (bit %00 means it's transparent) inspired by Mike Dailly (as Degauss told me) - Luminance animation possible - 2 free colors per single sprite, and white - 17 Sprites possible sometimes all visible. - Char Collisions and after that rectangle collisions for more precission - X flipping on the fly for all sprites. For some sprites (16x16 ones) also Y Flipping. 5. LevelData - RLE decrunching of the levels on the fly. - 16x16 tiles - A level can be any width (like 1024) and 64 in height (like 2050x64 tiles) - There is a special packer "opcode" to notify y mirroring of the 16x16 tiles. So we don't have to duplicate graphics data for mirrored tiles. - Since we have many empty parts in the level the RLE does a fairly good job on the memory side.. 6. Bubis HSP - DMA delay never done before on Plus/4. Something Ingo said that it's an historical achivement on the machine. - Doug: Yes it can be used on character screens. This feature can be extremely useful later on! But that's Bubis part to explain somewhere. 7. Scripting language - Around 64 Opcodes - Inline assembly supported - Almost all animation in the game is done with it, even the "get ready" letters, joystick queries and the endbosses - Supports different enemies and behaviours for different difficulty levels of the game 8. 50 Hz Player Sprite - Just possible because of the use of a single buffer engine. Double Buffered it would be very hard to implement performantly.. - Supports 32x24 pixel sprites - Player Sprite is updated and controlled every frame 9. Small Split Screen for the Status Bar - not so advanced but is solid for x and y scrolling. - seems there was just one cycle left after storing all registers at a badline. Yape 1.1.6 got problems with this one cycle it seems. ## -- 10. Big Lasers later in the game done by just adding and removing single "chars" on the bitmap screen .. And other stuff...
Have fun! And perhaps that can inspire someone.. Some ideas could perhaps be useful for other games..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I second that call for information! I have been poking around in the code (I'm sure I'm not the only one!) to see what's going on (so sue me!). I can see the 'what' and the 'when', but I'm struggling to get the 'why' and even the 'WTF' about what's going on! I'm sure some more reverse engineering on my part will get me there, but I'll probably miss some of the subtle stuff - and I'm sure there's lots of that. For me the big question (for Bubis) is how did you figure this out in the first place? I know from bitter experience that TED hacking is a supremely frustrating task. One cycle out, or a silight misunderstanding of what the device is actually doing results in garbage. You must have spent months on this. Total respect to all for pulling this off.
Presumably something similar can be done for character screens.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanks George!!
Hendriks I would love to share the technical details of it.. But I don't know if a post here would be sufficient.. I can try to make a post here later on, with a little bit of explanations.. For some parts I think even some explaining images would be needed.. Have no clue to do that, but I would love to share the techniques involved.. Perhaps Bubis also wants to describe his DMA delay a little bit further.. Dunno.. Let's see..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 This looks amazing! Is there a way to learn more about how this was actually done?
I understood it uses bitmap mode, and that horizontal scrolling is done by delaying the drawing of scan lines? Why bitmap mode and not characters? How can this be single-buffered? Are the "sprites" removed and redrawn every frame? Where does the bitmap get drawn when it scrolls like this?
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Some friendly competition always brings out the best in us as far we keep the respect for each other and share some good words for the work of everyone. That motivates for keep going on a project i think. I am really happy for this shooter, because one of my fovorite games of all time is a shooter (arcade phoenix). Thank you agai for focusing all that knowledge in this one project make this miracle happen. Every Sharp X68000 get jelous now! i played the game yesterday i really like the artwork and the gameplay. You can see the all the talent and hard work in every aspect.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Yeah!! Good point! I think some of the other "gods" (like you, too) are also doing hardware pushing right now.. I know from several really tough coders, that they do some demos, which should push the boundaries even more, currently. Seems the plus/4 is alive again!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Kinda' OFF
Btw. I'd also like to see a new demo from BKN between some games.
Demos are the R&D of the scene... Usually - and also by definition - it's the demos that push the limits of the HW and SW, it's also mentioned here earlier in a sense.
And then the new techniques are used to create new and better games... It's like the military applications appearing in civil life later on, or something.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Lavina :D :D :D Thanx!!
Kichy Yes thanks for pushing through despite me beeing not sure if we really should do this game! THANX!
carrion You're the man! Yes I always loved the friendly atmosphere of the plus4scene.. It's for me also a big advantage of our scene.. So I just can't wait to see your work later on then!! And of course you are on the list for forthcoming Bauknecht games! Your graphics are unbelievable on this machine! Thanx!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I convinced MAD to do this game ignoring the disturbing factors, so if anyone has any problems, come at me!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 hehhhe apologizing for creating this masterpiece is like apologizing for painting Mona Lisa because someone else was also working on a female portrait for more than 10 years (!) and he is half ready.
MAD, you are a living god on our scene, face it. You can do whatever you want. You can drink my blood, I give it willingly. Period.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Say What? A Drama here on this forum (or FB) in Plus/4 world? The place I considered (and still consider) the best peaceful scene (and I know what I talk about as I took a part in many CSDB and Amiga dramas). Plus4World and plus/4 itself rule and I'm actually really thinking moving only to this scene as I achieved a lot on C64 and Amiga/Atari (a bit ) and doing stuff for +4 at this stage of my "career" gives me so much fun and peace of mind...
As Kichy said I also lost track of what is going on and who this Mike guy is, and what is the drama about anyway, but I have few words to you, authors of this masterpiece (and all +4 scene) YOU KEEP DOING WHAT YOUT DO! You all are great. The Plus/4 scene is kind of example of peaceful place to me and it is thank to you all! ( and I know what I'm saying) Oh - And next time invite me to do some gfx ... just kidding just produce more games/demos.
I'm making recently a picture, you know - for Xenium Multiplatform party (Katowice/Poland 30.08-01.09) and it was planned to be C64 pic but now I'll do it C+4 and dedicate it to you authors of Alpharay. (I'll do c64 version too - sorry ) But what I want to say is - lets do more C+4 releases as this machine is the best 8bit machine there is - at least gfx wise.
Peace to everyone and don't ever feel sorry for doing 8 bit stuff. I've been there and believe me - it's not worth it!
ps. And the party pic is going to compete with Amiga pics again. Last time I did that was with Zak pic of mine and it run 2nd. first one was Amiga OCS pic So keep your fingers crossed.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 OFF Dear Mad, I think there is no need to excuse youself. You and the team just did a great job, achiving we are waiting here in the last decade.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Kichy
Mike wrote on FB, that we use blocky (i think chary) movement. That it's easy to copy a (i think $2000) bitmap screen in 8 frames. That we don't do sprite masking. That the colorclash reduction is the same in spectrum games. And used the word "bleh" in the initial comment for the game (Seemed because of the "inferior" technique).
No big deal.. But I got affected.. :/ Let's focus on other stuff..
Technique wise this game is the most advanced stuff I have done on any 8-Bit machine.. And it's hard to read that we just did a Basic V1 Programm in his eyes.. Whatever..
On my plan today is some meditation then later on.. :D
I think his reaction was inevitable.. And it's even a soft reaction.. We don't have lawyers at our backs or something!! :D
I stop this now. It was just my fear materializing in reality, I always thought Mike will be grumpy because of the game and got that way triggered by his reaction now.. Cheers..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Would be nice to beeing able to delete all comments about this Facebook thread from my side. We can't delete comments anymore here.
I mean ok I understand Mike having a bad time seeing someone doing stuff he intended to do. But that is not the point of this thread. Or what we / I wanted to achive with this game. I am 190% sorry, that I did this game in the face of others doing the same and loving it for a decade. It was not my point to disappoint anyone.
I kindly asked several people if we could start a Shmup whilst having another game being developed in the same field. It was not my intention to offend anyone.
But seems this was inevitable. And I am sorry. Atleast I would also be upset if I do a project and others release in the same field before. I already had some even worse situations in my coder live.
So sorry for others having a hard time seeing this release. Perhaps this "concurrence" can be used to light the XeO fire again. I just love Shmups since a very young age. That's why I would love to see the game from the "evil facebook thread guy"(sorry) beeing finished, too..
I tried to prevent this and hope the other game will be done, too..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Off:
MMS oh wow didn't know that.. Perhaps the difference between an adult and a child is that you are able to control yourself. I have sometimes problems with that, not beeing affected is sometimes not so easy. Especially if people make wrong claims to belittle or discredit. Whatever.. I think other coders always love to learn new tricks.. Perhaps I should talk with Mike or even makeup a Webpage. I think in this game are around 10 different novel techniques.. With Bubis having lead!!
On:
After Lucas comment I just "map" it to common "scottish behaviour"!! :D
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I think we all happy to have such a new gem, a new milestone. Thank you for your hard work and dedication!
OFF There is NO game, you cannot find an area of improvement, or does not fit to someone's personal taste. Even some legendary games could have done something a little "better". We should accept it, and the ppl who phrase critics, should accept that he is maybe alone with his opinion. Honest opinions should be also welcomed, till it adds a "new brick to the building", if not just made to demotivate ppl.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 I deleted my answer there, like here, too.
I could tell him a lot (like ff1a/ff1b).. Dunno but I am not the guy to be involved in "fights".. I try to limit that. Live and let live.. Or something..
Btw.. From my view the biggest achivement which made this game possible is the singlebuffer. All the other bitmap games before where very limited in a lot of ways. This game features a 50hz Player sprite and has some additional 10k to use by this. And some color clash reduction easily fit in this way. And some other synergies. Bubis routine finally made the singlebuffer perfect colorram wise, so yeah his routine is an important key. Like Degauss said: The HSP is a historical achivement! :)
Perhaps the HSP would be a keystone for XeO3 then, too..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Mad you're right, just appreciate the Scottish spontaneity as a form of friendly chitchatting I would expect (and I hoped) you would have answered on that topic
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Luca I've to read the thread again..
We used sprite automasking, Degauss told me that it's Mikes invention. So yeah somehow he contributed, too..
Hope that you finish XeO at 12 then.
Edit: Mike still makes more wrong technical claims there.. But anyways hope you finish XeO3.. I will not use the very professionsl word "bleh" and claim that it's technique is simple then. I always loved XeO3 and even postponed the shooter ideas for several years because of that project.
I hope you and Mike finish XeO3..
And the HSP from Bubis of course could help you, too..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Indeed, I've betatested the versions with all the glitches occuring when there's a bitmap vertical scrolling, and I was amazingly surprised when I played the fial version, valuating that all the glitches were gone! :o Mike Dailly started a notable thread on a Facebook group, supporting his interesting thesis about the characteristics to absolutely save for a valid shmup game, offering is undoubtable professional view, and I must admit that my thought about Alpharay matches his words in several points. Nonetheless, the incredible effort characterizing this fantastic shmup, summed up with all the technical achievements involved, rank Alpharay up to a degree of "milestone" Excellent game, guys! And some words apart comes from me straight to Mad: thinking back to 1999, a year when I supported the scene practically by alone, and looking where we are today, I can't thank you barely enough for having embraced the Plus/4 carrying it on at this point along all these years!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Yeah Doug we started without HSP and had a lot of graphic glitches at start. And used a doublebuffer. I always told Kichy, if Bubis delivers all the bugs will be gone. And finally he delivered. We have to copy the screen from time to time currently, though. It's not an AGSP "just" an HSP. But it saved a lot of the games appearance.. Hats off for Bubis!
Edit: There are many other tricks involved.. Degauss coded a Colorclash reduction some years ago. And instructed me on the idea behind it.. And a lot more novel technical stuff. Like decrunching the levels on the fly etc..The HSP is the biggest achivement technically. It made the singlebuffering approach a lot easier for us, too..
And yes we don't move the sprites by 8 pixels (like it was told on Facebook). And yes we mask the sprites if needed. And yes there is a lot more technique involved by several people. I am even happy to be able to use Bitfire with all it's features. It's a good time for plus/4 coders..
I am just happy that it all worked out in the end.. The first versions of the game looked a little bit disturbing because of many glitches.. Some really seemed unfixable for a very long time.. Thanx for the patience of the team especially Kichy.. The game seemed more like a glitchy Kamikaze project.. Happily no one complained about it..
Thanx to all involved..
Have to sober from the party now!! Thanx for the kind comments of you guys!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hi,
I am very happy to see such a briliant application of my HSP routine. Congrats guys, you are my heros! Actually, there are no demo application of it yet. IstvanV's p4fliconv uses a 24 char shift, but I don't know of any other demos or other prgs that use a full 0-39 horizontal shift routine.
Worth mentioning that this is a hardcore $FF1E routine and Plus4Emu deals with it without any problems for a very long time! (Yape only recently supported it.) Hats off, Istvan!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Ooh - I was completely wrong! I spotted that it was bitmapped, but assumed it was double buffered 'doing it the hardway' so to speak (losing 2x memory and lots of rendering). I had no idea that fancy TED tricks like HSP could survive outside of a demo and actually be usable in a 'general sense'. Very impressed!
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanx Carrion.
It's bitmap mode. The scrolling works at 50hz but we just have some fast sections where it moves every pixel per frame. One key technique is, a horizontal screen positioning, done by Bubis. Which finally made all this possible. And yes you are right the player, too moves every frame.
Edit: Lavina and Murphy you are right. It's Bubis new HSP trick. The most funny aspect is, that it's fully single buffered.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Yeah it's bitmap mode. We were just discussing this with Murphy. We suspect that color attribute ram is not entirely scrolled by cpu power.
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Mad, Kichy, Bubis, Nero, Guys! Let me say just one more time. This is amazing achievement once again. Played it for a while and will do more + probably record some gameplay to put on my YT channel. Wow. Congratulations!
technical question Is it char mode or bitmap? from what I can see the play ship moves every frame, but what about the other sprites? is scrolling done 50fps or 25fps?
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Thanks guys!! The difficulty level of the game btw. Could be more for shooter pros.. I am apparently no pro, it needs some lives for me.. :) So we added an apprentice mode to train for the other grades. Let's see if someone manages to play this through some days.. Hope it's doable..
And thanks again from all of us!! We had a tough ride doing this..
:)
Edit: First place in interactive compo just now btw..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Vielen Dank für dieses Juweel. Euch Sind die Eigentliche Plus 4 Könige. [ Gebrochen Deutsch ist Gebrochen. ]
Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019 Hey Plus/4 guys,
We just presented Alpharay at the Evoke 2019 in Cologne, Germany. Now there is a free R-Type like space shooter for anyone who is able to use a Plus/4 available (or a C16 with 64k). I will upload it tomorrow or even tonight if it is possible.. So have a good evening and here a little Video showing a small part of the game..
Hope we did the Plus/4 it's justice again with this game..
Re: Alpharay Plus/4 just released at Evoke 2019
"Sizzler", as in "one that sizzles", is an adjective meaning very hot, and in this context it obviously means fantastic, very well made, etc.
You need to do the following steps if you have XU1541,ZOOMFloppy etc. 1541<->USB adapter: /Thanks to Siz, who helped me a lot to debug it 
