I’ve decided that since I have absolutely no experience whatsoever playing RPGs, that I am not a good candidate of programming one, so instead, I’m going to work on a fighting game (while I also have no experience playing a fighting game, I’d figure it’d be a lot easier programming one than an RPG.) So here’s my latest brainchild: Insect Combat. Right now, it’s just a warning screen and a title screen. The only two characters I’ve thought of so far are Gi-Ant and Behe-Moth. Any other punny names you guys can think of would also be appreciated.

Attachments:

1. ic.vb

Turns out it didn’t work after all. Should I try increasing it to 4,000?

VirtualChris schrieb:
Turns out it didn’t work after all. Should I try increasing it to 4,000?

I will have to make some tests to try to infer how big a value is needed to achieve the 200usec wait. In the meantime, you could give 0x4000 a go (or even 0x10000)

BTW: How quickly are you turning the VB on and off? I’ve noticed that our game doesn’t work if I turn on and off the VR very fast. Although, I haven’t checked if the problem happens with commercial games, will check it tomorrow.

I turn it off, then wait for about a second, then turn it back on again. One weird thing that was happening was some of the levels weren’t showing on one screen. Another was one line of pixels of the PRESS START message was showing during the intro, just weird things were happening all around.

I did a quick, and not very scientific test, and 0x2000 should be enough to prevent the access to the work RAM before it stabilizes. Besides that, I wasn’t able to reproduce a similar problem with our game by turning on and off the VB very quickly. So, my conclusion is that your problem is either related to the usage of local non-initialized variables or some other bug in your program. Sorry if that is not helpful enough.

I’m just going to give up on the whole thing. I can’t fix it so the game displays the logo and ant on the intro screen. Here’s what I’ve been doing:
>Starting the game. Everything goes as normal.
>Turn it off at the fighter select screen.
>Wait one second.
>Turn it back on.
>The ant does not display where it is supposed to be.
WHY?!

VirtualChris schrieb:
I’m just going to give up on the whole thing. I can’t fix it so the game displays the logo and ant on the intro screen. Here’s what I’ve been doing:
>Starting the game. Everything goes as normal.
>Turn it off at the fighter select screen.
>Wait one second.
>Turn it back on.
>The ant does not display where it is supposed to be.
WHY?!

Could you send me a ROM? Maybe I’m not fully understanding the problem and seeing what is happening could help.

You can download the latest ROM here:
http://www.atari2600land.com/insecticide/ic20170324.vb

VirtualChris wrote:
I’m just going to give up on the whole thing. I can’t fix it so the game displays the logo and ant on the intro screen. Here’s what I’ve been doing:
>Starting the game. Everything goes as normal.
>Turn it off at the fighter select screen.
>Wait one second.
>Turn it back on.
>The ant does not display where it is supposed to be.
WHY?!

Don’t give up Chris! You’re so close and this sounds like a problem that could be fixed. I wish I had any ground to stand on to say “it’s easy!” but it’s probably 10 leagues removed from my realm of understanding. I just really want to play the game :p

VirtualChris schrieb:
You can download the latest ROM here:
http://www.atari2600land.com/insecticide/ic20170324.vb

Hey, I was finally able to test your game on the VB to try to reproduce the problem that you’re experiencing. I was able to see it only by quickly turning on and off the VB while on the character selection screen, and I only noticed different behavior in the third screen.

Here are a couple of things that you may want to check:

1) Make sure that all variables in the problematic screen (where the ant passes by) are properly initialized.
2) Make sure that you are erasing all BGMAP and CHAR memory when entering that screen and before drawing anything to it.
3) Make sure that you are controlling properly the WORLD layers that each image is assigned. It is possible that the ant and the label are being rendered behind the background.

I tried everything and nothing helped. If it was displaying correctly the first time, then why not the second time? Why would the worlds move? Here is the .c file, hopefully someone might look through this and see what I’m doing wrong?

Looks pretty good. Can’t wait =)

Argh! I am such a moron. I wondered “Well, if the stupid intro screen is giving me a problem, and it’s not needed, then why not remove it from the game and see what happens?” So I removed the part where the ant runs across the screen and the game after the screen setup screen now starts with the backstory (which you can press START to skip by the way.) So I tested it the way I was testing the other one. It works fine as far as I can tell. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

VirtualChris wrote:
You can download the latest ROM here:
http://www.atari2600land.com/insecticide/ic20170324.vb

Wait…aren’t you the same fellow who did Stickman for the Atari Jaguar :)?

KGRAMR wrote:

Wait…aren’t you the same fellow who did Stickman for the Atari Jaguar :)?

Yes, I tried to. I had to give up because Jaguar programming is really difficult.

VirtualChris wrote:

KGRAMR wrote:

Wait…aren’t you the same fellow who did Stickman for the Atari Jaguar :)?

Yes, I tried to. I had to give up because Jaguar programming is really difficult.

Oh i see. Stickman is good and simple fun 😀

VirtualChris wrote:
Argh! I am such a moron. I wondered “Well, if the stupid intro screen is giving me a problem, and it’s not needed, then why not remove it from the game and see what happens?” So I removed the part where the ant runs across the screen and the game after the screen setup screen now starts with the backstory (which you can press START to skip by the way.) So I tested it the way I was testing the other one. It works fine as far as I can tell. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?

If it’s any consolation most of us would have never thought of it at all :p So is the game now 100% complete?

So how’s this coming along? =)

He sent me a second test cart. I sent him an e-mail saying everything was ok with it. I’m just waiting for him now.

Whoa, did I correctly see the mention in your other topic? Is Insecticide finally completed? Congratulations! You been admirably at work for quite some time on it.