Zniggy!™ Comes To Life Part III

[Anonymous No.5666334]

A third installment in Zniggy's development series.
We did a great job making Zniggy!™'s assets and I'd like to praise all anons who participated up until now. We have some amazing creative anons here who'll make this outroight classic speccy goime a top-downloaded project on World Of Spectrum.

Here are some important links for the project:

ZniggED: The powerful Zniggy!™ Windows level editor
>https://framadrop.org/r/Ub5jhuCFGf#uzuZyoo9lISkSIDx0VvfAIOQCEQntiph6idxpxvL0A4=

ZniggED source code:
>https://framadrop.org/r/deMfJHoVm3#3SCkraga+eg4/yXyl+FDolG2+w/9cLUPFWQWqgSftoU=

All the images/assets and .webms from previous threads:
>https://anonfile.com/x31d59v4n6/zniggy_6162019_rar

Source, compiler and graphics from 06/04/19:
>https://mega.nz/#F!UGI3gSwC!YoLqSMWpN9WiOE5xRVkZ9Q

Good speccy developer forum:
>https://www.z88dk.org/forum/forums.php
Sound programming tutorial:
>http://www.chibiakumas.com/z80/ZXSpectrum.php

Old threads links:
>>>5620591 (1st)
>>>5651248 (2nd)

[Anonymous No.5666341]

Picrel: roomlist state as of 6/16/2019

[Anonymous No.5666392]

Repost of 26 in case it was missed.

[Anonymous No.5666397]

And just finished up 34. I am so bloody done for today.

[Anonymous No.5666405]

>>5666334
So when's this going to be finished, be featured all over the internet, and somehow the people behind its production that appears in the interviews just happen to be jews?

This isn't even retro as it is a brand new game made after 1999.

[Anonymous No.5666417]

here it is: room 33. called simply "hello"

[Anonymous No.5666423]

>>5666405
>isn't even retro
>retro
>ret·ro | \ ˈre-(ˌ)trō
>relating to, reviving, or being the styles and especially the fashions of the past : fashionably nostalgic or old-fashioned

[Anonymous No.5666426]

>>5666417
and here's the collision thing. it's supposed to lead into another room

[Anonymous No.5666427]

>>5666417
This doesn't work. We have to start making an effort to start matching tiles and synching up with other rooms. For example, there's a ladder at the bottom of 25 which you didn't even attempt to include.

[Anonymous No.5666438]

>>5666427
i can incorporate it into the level no problem wait a bit

[Anonymous No.5666471]

>>5666438
wait actually the level works like this because like that if you go down the ladder in 25 you end up going to 41 anyways since you fall so it works

[Anonymous No.5666484]

>>5666471
Get some gems in there (maybe just one adjacent to his finger) and the level is technically up to standards.

[Anonymous No.5666498]

>>5666341
don't forget 36

[Anonymous No.5666523]

>>5666484
alright. the 00ffff tiles are supposed to be the gems i just didnt want to redraw it
>>5666341

[Princess Sevenleaf !IT2uZpX.Ic No.5666589]

>>5666341
Can I have 43?

I really love this primitive aesthetic by the way, reminds me of Lyle in Cube Sector

[Anonymous No.5666602]

>>5666417
>>5666426
>>5666523
>not calling it The gaping pit

[Princess Sevenleaf !IT2uZpX.Ic No.5666617]

>>5666602
>not calling it "The Bloody Pits"

[Anonymous No.5666618]

Under what license is ZniggED? GPL or BSD?

[Anonymous No.5666623]

>>5666423
So by that logic I can post Mario Odyssey on here.

[Anonymous No.5666624]

>>5666589

[Anonymous !IT2uZpX.Ic No.5666630]

>>5666624
Okay...

[Anonymous No.5666649]

>>5666630
anons only means no tripcodes silly billy

[Anonymous No.5666658]

>>5666602
i WOULD have but i think "hello" is funnier because it's subtler

[Anonymous No.5666703]

I'm not sure if posting these as png's via 4chanX's paste function is allowed, if I need to save them as BMPs then please let me know. Pic related is a touched up version of a potential error room, for when players manage to get Zniggy to warp to a room that wasn't defined. It is styled after the "Chris Houlihan room" from Link to the Past, and as such contains 45 gems, and stepping into the exit box should randomly warp you to one of the 64 rooms.

Room #: Error room
Name: IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY

[Anonymous No.5666810]

>>5666589
>sevenleaf tripfag
absolutely not.

[Anonymous No.5666834]

I'm going to redo my room (https://boards.4channel.org/vr/thread/5651248#p5657450)) with tiles reused from existing rooms. The balls that make up the leaves and clouds are taken from room 35, the tree trunks are taken from room 60 (and I also adjusted the pattern so that it loops properly, perhaps the original tile and the black version in room 52 could be updated with it), the lava was taken from room 37, the solid blocks that make up the sky and sun were taken from room 58, and I've drawn two tiles unique for this room, if at all possible to add. It's okay to recolor existing tiles, right? In due time I'll create level 46 to tie into 38.

Room #: 45
Name: Oh Deary Me

[Anonymous No.5666846]

>>5666834
A picture of the assets I've made, the first 6 are all reused from other rooms, tile 3 is the one I adjusted from room 60, so maybe adjust the pattern on that tile as well.

[Anonymous No.5666849]

>>5666834
A picture of the assets I've made. The first 6 are all reused from other rooms while the last two are unique for this room, tile 3 is the one I adjusted from room 60. Maybe adjust the pattern on that tile as well.

[Anonymous No.5666954]

This can be level 2 or 3, it's wip, but I'll leave the exit in the same place in case someone wants to start on the level to the right of it.

[Anonymous No.5666959]

>>5666954
Shit, forgot to add, the tiles can be reused from #2, not sure if I got them identical since I can't see that small.

[Anonymous No.5667384]

>>5666954
I think that pit in the center either needs to be shortened or put some spikes at the bottom, otherwise it appears inescapable.

[Anonymous No.5667485]

>>5666567
Nobody cares about weebshit though.

[Anonymous No.5667493]

>>5666170
Z80 also had built-in RAM refresh, unfortunately it was only 7 bits so it became useless when 64kx1 DRAMs became available. Oh well, the thing was released in 1976. Might as well complain about the Atari 2600 only supporting 4k of cartridge ROM.

Also FWIW Steve Wozniak knew the expansion slots on the Apple II would be important even though when it first came out, there was nothing to put in them. But he knew people would come up with stuff in the future and glad he did because Jobs thought they needed at most two slots.

[Anonymous No.5667509]

Posted in the earlier thread by mistake, I started making a level...

[Anonymous No.5667519]

And here is a room that will hopefully connect my attempt for room 45 with room 38. These tiles are reused from rooms 45 (white, green circle, purple tree trunk), room 54 (red bricks, purple lines, leaves), and room 38 (red ladder) as an attempt to mix assets together. The gray and blue thing is a random thing I drew as I couldn't figure out how to transition from the clouds to the Japanese building on the side.

Room #: 46
Name: Split Personality

[Anonymous No.5667528]

>>5667509
That looks cool as fuck, but it also eats up a shitton of tiles. It's ultimately the project runner's decision but I don't know if that's gonna fly,

[Anonymous No.5667623]

>>5667528
If you're complaining about wasting tiles, the custom font in the OP pic is more wasteful. Use the ROM font like the original shitty games did.

[Anonymous No.5667708]

>>5667509
>>5667519
Tiles that you can walk through should just be black on the attribute side rather than their sprite.
>>5667623
The statue room actually does use the ROM font. The pictures in the room list are what the original creator posted, so they don't always line up the in game version.

Also, I'm going to be away without internet starting Tuesday and lasting a little less than a week, so naturally I won't be able to add rooms in that time. I'll try to get all the rooms in tomorrow, but it'll be radio silence for some time after.

[Anonymous No.5667713]

>>5667708
I'll try to keep this bumped while you're gone

[Anonymous No.5667731]

>>5667713
Appreciate it. There'll be lots of cool stuff for me to browse through when I get back. You guys should have time to collaborate on making the remaining rooms good.
>>5666405
Interesting point. The thread theme is derived from ZX Spectrum hardware and software, so you could count it as a retro discussion. There's been a lot of Z80 v 6502 debating. And you'll never know what kinds of people are working on this due to the whole anonymity concept.

[Anonymous No.5667736]

>>5667708
Understood, I'll try to revise it a bit.

[Anonymous No.5667749]

>>5667708
>Tiles that you can walk through should just be black on the attribute side rather than their sprite.

So basically like this? Your tool leaves the tiles behind, I think it would be more effective if it could create an image that just has the collision and not the actual assets.

[Anonymous No.5667756]

>>5666623
I dunno, does Mario odyssey run a speccy?

[Anonymous No.5667772]

>>5666114
Me, I find the 6502's smaller instruction set easier to memorize. I have a hard time programming Z80 code without having a reference table of the instruction set handy.

[Anonymous No.5667773]

>>5664832
You shouldn't try to just replicate how the x86 code there works. You'll have to completely redo everything to run properly and efficiently on a 6502.

[Anonymous No.5667774]

Okay, this should be better

[Anonymous No.5667779]

I think Z80 coders back in the day had an easier time transitioning to the x86 and 680x0 since the instruction set had more similarities.

[Anonymous No.5667785]

>>5667772
Wasn't that why they settled on the 6502 in the Famicom? Nintendo thought programmers could learn the instruction set quickly and easily.

[Anonymous No.5667791]

Since we're on the topic of old programming formats, I feel like the SNES required the mindset of an "8 bit" programmer like a 6502 or Z80 while the Genesis, thanks to the 68K, was more "modern". Kinda hard to phrase what I mean, but basically it feels like the 65816 was just a 6502 with a higher clock speed while the 68K was an evolution.

[Anonymous No.5667795]

>>5667779
>>5666193
The 6502 started out as a cost-reduced 6800 clone, so its instruction set is closer to Motorola's style than Intel's. And yes, the 68000 was a fantastic chip and very powerful and easy to use. Only complaint I have is that not all instructions work with all registers.

[Anonymous No.5667803]

>>5667791
As already noted, the 16-bit sequels to the Z80 and 6502 were dog poop. No consumer level machines used a Z8000 and nothing ever used the 65816 except the Apple IIgs and SNES.

[Anonymous No.5667809]

>>5667803
Didn't the US military use Z8000s in missiles or something?

[Anonymous No.5667814]

>>5667785
Everything Nintendo did was done out of one factor; cost. They wanted to sell a system that they could make a profit from 100 dollars, and a modded 6502 with removed decimal function was the cheapest they could get. Rumor has it that the removed decimal function was to convince MOS that their CPU was entirely different, thus didn't need to pay them royalties; they done something similar with the Wii discs being "not-DVDs". That being said, it feels like the Famicom was the most well rounded console Nintendo ever designed and wasn't hamstrung by a major oversight.

[Anonymous No.5667818]

>>5667814
>Rumor has it that the removed decimal function was to convince MOS that their CPU was entirely different, thus didn't need to pay them royalties

It was. All they did was cut one trace to disable the decimal mode (judged unnecessary for games) so they didn't have to pay Commodore Semiconductor Group royalties.

[Anonymous No.5667824]

>>5667809
IDK but the Tomahawk cruise missile had 68000s in it. So yeah, they were using toaster Macs to bomb Saddam Hussein. :^)

[Anonymous No.5667829]

>>5667818
Apparently the Pachi-Com programmer thought the decimal function would've been useful.

>Why did they take out the 6502's decimal mode [from the NES architecture]? It's a decimal computer... Did they mess up the mask cutting or something?

In what way could decimal mode be useful for games? Could this allow you to "cheat" and store larger numbers, like "1000" is stored as "1.000"?

[Anonymous No.5667830]

>>5667785
>>5667814
I suppose it was an asset to American and Euro devs making NES games because there were tons of experienced 6502 coders around from the Apple II and C64.

[Anonymous No.5667831]

Ricoh had at the time a very crack group of chip designers who were good at reverse-engineering and coming up with designs on short notice. The PPU was also largely an enhancement of the TMS9918 with more sprites, colors, vertical resolution, and smooth scrolling.

[Anonymous No.5667834]

>>5667830
You'd have a point, if NES documentation was actually useful to non-Japanese. There was a scan of the official docs that was poorly translated from Japanese, and even functions were mislabeled. I believe there were programmer magazines in Japan that featured 6502 code, for the VIC-20 hobbyists, but besides the NES I'm not sure what Japanese hardware used it, be it arcade or otherwise. Early Japanese video games were developed by software engineers rather than programmers, such as Ikegami Tsushinki and most notably TOSE, who were the engineering branch of Toa Seiko.

[Anonymous No.5667839]

>>5667830
I felt most of the US (or actually leaf in many cases)-developed NES games were rather poor. The Euro stuff (Ocean, Rare, etc) was better, but that may have been an artifact of the strong demoscener culture they had there, so you had a lot of ace 6502/C64 coders.

[Anonymous No.5667845]

>>5667772
The complete official Z80 instruction set is 138 instructions, but counting variations of them the total runs up to 700. Also since the Z80 was backwards compatible with the 8080, it meant a lot of software never got updated to actually use it. For example, the industry standard CP/M 2.2 was entirely 8080 code and only the late and somewhat troublesome CP/M 3.0 actually made use of Z80-specific features.

[Anonymous No.5667856]

6502 was better for race-the-beam architectures or stuff like the Apple II's ultra-bare metal floppy controller. Z80s were good for doing boring stuff like accounting work and writing documents on machines with green monochrome text, but an Apple II with Appleworks could do that anyway.

[Anonymous No.5667858]

>>5666341
Is 13 taken? cause i want it

[Anonymous No.5667862]

>>5666170
6809 has some fantastic addressing modes, but man, will they cost you in terms of clock cycles.

>>5667795
The 68000's instruction set doesn't owe anything to any 8-bit microprocessors, it was modeled on the PDP-11. As early as 1976 it was already realized that microprocessors that could address 64k of memory max were too limiting.

[Anonymous No.5667874]

>>5667862
It's slow, no doubt about it. Some of those addressing modes like program counter relative and index register X with auto-increment could easily take 12-14 clock cycles. The 6502's instruction set was rather spartan, but nothing uses more than at most 8 cycles and plenty of instructions only use 2-5.

Should add--the 6809 was the first microprocessor that allowed 100% relocatable, reentrant code.

[Anonymous No.5667885]

>>5667485
>>5667493
>>5667772
>>5667773
You are replying in a wrong thread.

[Anonymous No.5667909]

>>5667885
Might as well talk about something because Zniggybro is taking a couple days off so we won't get any updates for a while.

[Anonymous No.5667914]

I redid room #40, cutting the unique tiles from 7 to 4. The level layout is unchanged, and I don't think anyone else reused the existing tiles in thsi room.

[Anonymous No.5667918]

>>5666623
By what logic, you fag? Oddyssey has a different style from the rest of the series AND is an explicitly new entry in the mario series.

[Anonymous No.5667920]

>>5667914
Woah that's fuckin' pretty now. It's like that mirror room from FF4.

[Anonymous No.5667945]

>>5667914

Made a last second revision to make the bottom tiles a bit cleaner. Should also be slightly easier to compress.

>>5667920

Thanks, I ripped it off from Mega Man 5.

[Anonymous No.5667961]

>>5667814
By the time the Famicom was designed, I'd think there was no significant price difference in bulk purchased 6502s or Z80s.

[Anonymous No.5667967]

>>5667961
Especially since there were no Japanese second sources for the 6502 while Sharp and NEC were Z80 second sources, plus various bootleg Taiwanese ones.

[Anonymous No.5667976]

>>5666341
I update also room #60 to free up some tiles

[Anonymous No.5667979]

>>5667818
>>5667814
In fact Nintendo did want to use the Z80 originally and it would have made it much easier to do arcade ports. They had a close working relationship with Ricoh, who weren't doing very good business at the time and consequently had a lot of unused production capacity. So Ricoh readily jumped on the prospect of producing the Famicom chipset which could bring a huge boost to their lagging sales.

Ricoh were also a licensed 6502 second source but they didn't have a Z80 license. The reason for disabling decimal mode on the 2A01 was because they were only licensed to produce 6502s for the Japanese market and Nintendo were hoping from day one to market the Famicom internationally, so they had to take out decimal mode in order to be able to sell them overseas and avoid a patent infringement case.

[Anonymous No.5667996]

That also applied to the SNES. Yamauchi intended for it to not only have a 10Mhz 68000 but also be backward-compatible with the Famicom. Project leader Masayuki Uemura wasn't able to meet the latter requirement, so it got dropped, but removing Famicom compatibility actually didn't make a huge difference in the cost of the SNES, it was mostly the S-PPU which had advanced features like rotation and scaling, also at Yamauchi's insistence because Nintendo were very late in releasing a 16-bit console and he was determined that it had to be better than the competition. But the S-PPU and S-SMP's cost was such that they had to downgrade from a 68000 to a 65816, which also had the advantage of making it easier for programmers to make the transition from the Famicom.

[Anonymous No.5668000]

>>5666334
This is the best thing /vr/ has probably ever tried to do

[Anonymous No.5668016]

>>5667791
The 65816 was really a roided-out 8-bit microprocessor. It has 16-bit registers (really combined 8-bit ones) but even then the chip can still only access 64k of RAM at once, alleviated by having on-chip bank switching (for up to 16MB total RAM).

[Anonymous No.5668018]

>>5667791
The 65816 was really a roided-out 8-bit microprocessor. It has 16-bit registers (really combined 8-bit ones) but even then the chip can still only access 64k of RAM at once, alleviated by having on-chip bank switching (for up to 16MB total RAM).

You compare that to the 68000 and its totally flat 24-bit address space and 32-bit registers.

[Anonymous No.5668085]

>>5667996
I recall a lot of people not liking the fact that the SNES didn't retain NES compatibility while the Genesis could run SMS games through the Power Base and the SMS could run SG-1000 games (not that that mattered to anyone outside Japan).

[Anonymous No.5668106]

>>5668085
In the early 90s, the video game industry was still very young, in fact less than 20 years old and a lot of parents didn't entirely like or trust this whole video game thing. The evening news was full of talking heads proclaiming that vidya and heavy metal music were a Satanic plot to turn your children into serial killer sexual degenerates. That was one reason why NOA were so obsessive about maintaining a clean, scrupulous, and family-friendly image. A lot of people were upset that they couldn't use their expensive NES games on their SNES, but from a technological POV there wasn't really a choice.

Sega's retention of backward compatibility with their older systems was nice, but then again the pre-Genesis consoles weren't that successful so they could have gone without it and a lot of people wouldn't miss anything. The NES however was absolutely huge and had a massive game library so you can see why people felt ripped off that the SNES couldn't use its games.

[Anonymous No.5668113]

>>5667858
Not sure if the purple spikes need to have been marked red on collision.

Room #: 13
Name: Hell's Hell

[Anonymous No.5668115]

>>5668085
I agree. The Genesis was able to play SMS games so what was Nintendo's excuse?

[Anonymous No.5668116]

Plus remember that PS1 compatibility was a huge PS2 selling point and one reason it buried the competition.

[Anonymous No.5668117]

>>5668113
Red spiders are supposed to go like side to side by like 4 tiles.

[Anonymous No.5668125]

>>5668113
goddammit im misaligned by a tile

[Anonymous No.5668126]

>>5668115
The excuse as I understand was cost mainly because the SNES's chipset was state of the art for the early 90s and expensive to manufacture. The Genesis didn't use as advanced technology as the SNES and much of the design was shared with Sega's System 16 arcade boards so that also contributed to lowered costs through scale of economics.

[Anonymous No.5668141]

When news of the SNES hit, it was like the atom bomb for me. My reaction was "If there's something Nintendo that's so cool, they couldn't put it on the NES, they had to make a whole seperate game system for it, it must be amazing! Why are we even discussing this, buy it now, you fool!!!"

[Anonymous No.5668143]

>>5668141
Didn't you ever hear of the Amiga or Atari ST?

[Anonymous No.5668148]

>>5668143
1. I'm not a Yuropoor and 2. We had a 286 PC. It cost more than the GDP of some countries and it was used strictly for typing documents and if my 11 year old self had suggested it be replaced with anything gaming-related, I would have been put up for adoption. Besides, what does a dumb kid know? I thought it was the be-all-and-end-all of vidya.

[Anonymous No.5668157]

The Power Base cost extra, it wasn't a standard, built-in Genesis feature, but it did at least let you run all or almost all SMS games (F-16 Fighting Falcon doesn't work as it uses the original 16-color TMS9918 video mode and there's the occasional game that needs an actual SMS controller).

[Anonymous No.5668164]

>>5668113
heres a redo

[Anonymous No.5668165]

A couple of points.

1. The 65816 would have been able to execute 6502 code so in theory NES games would work provided they didn't use undocumented opcodes as those didn't work on CMOS 65xx cores (though only a tiny number of NES games actually did).
2. The NES had the unique feature of having the video bus brought out to the cartridge slot, which no other console does. The SNES went back to using a conventional one-bus cartridge slot so this would have also needed to be retained. Since Sega consoles all used a one-bus cartridge slot, it was much easier to implement backward compatibility.

So the main issue was the NES's two bus cartridge slot and it would have been unreasonably expensive to add this feature to the SNES.

[Anonymous No.5668224]

As I said in the last thread, Metroid fits a quite huge game world into 128k by recycling assets. The NES has 42k memory space between the RAM and ROM so the Spectrum has 6k more of memory to work with and Z80 code needs less space than 6502 code. Also we won't have scrolling or music in Zniggy because it's not technically feasible so space is saved there as well.

[Anonymous No.5668285]

>>5668224
Spectrum 128 could do a Metroid port and fit the entire thing in memory. Also it has a real sound chip so music would be possible.

[Anonymous No.5668298]

>>5668285
Yeah but it would be a reaalllly loooongggg cassette load so you'd still want to load it in pieces, although once the whole thing is in memory you don't need to do it again.

[Anonymous No.5668312]

>>5668018
>The 65816 was really a roided-out 8-bit microprocessor. It has 16-bit registers (really combined 8-bit ones) but even then the chip can still only access 64k of RAM at once, alleviated by having on-chip bank switching
Actually the 65816 is more like the x86's segmented memory. You have separate banks for the data and code which are 64k each. The stack and zero page always go in the first 64k of memory.

It's a rather stupid setup but just like the 8086 it was done to retain backwards compatibility with an 8-bit CPU while Motorola didn't bother retaining 6800 compatibility on the 68000 at all.

[Anonymous No.5668325]

You know, for a project that was supposed to be "as shit as possible on purpose", there's been some surprisingly legit great stuff made so far. All the anons who contributed great design ideas, the dude who learned Z80 programming just to make an engine, some seriously gorgeous maps despite the 8 tiles/2 colors limit...
Any of you guys feel like working on another quick collaborative homebrew project when this is done? Maybe we could switch to a slightly more powerful and easy to program machine next, like a C64 or NES. Plus the better specs would really let contributing anons flex their artistic and musical muscles a bit more.

[Anonymous No.5668330]

>>5668325
>the dude who learned Z80 programming just to make an engine
He already knew 6502 so he wasn't entirely starting from a blank slate.
>Maybe we could switch to a slightly more powerful and easy to program machine next, like a C64 or NES. Plus the better specs would really let contributing anons flex their artistic and musical muscles a bit more.
The NES isn't an especially easy machine to program if you've actually tried it plus you have to decide which of the 40 or something different mappers you want to use.

[Anonymous No.5668335]

>>5668330
>The NES isn't an especially easy machine to program if you've actually tried it plus you have to decide which of the 40 or something different mappers you want to use.
You can use NROM which is the simplest but having only a single char/sprite set is really limiting.

[Anonymous No.5668346]

>>5668330
I see your point. I don't have a lot of experience with the NES, only did a few test programs for fun so I didn't know how much harder it would be to make a real game on it rather than on a ZX spectrum.
What kind of machine do you think could strike a nice balance between better specs and easy of programming?

[Anonymous No.5668348]

>>5668346
Amiga

[Anonymous No.5668349]

>>5667834
Why documentation was in such poor state? Did Nintendo thought about western developers this low or did they not had resources for propper translitiration?

[Anonymous No.5668351]

>>5668348
Really? I never tried it, but I had a pal who was pretty into it and he told me it was a pain in the ass to program sometimes, especially the graphics side of things.

[Anonymous No.5668357]

Biggest bitch about the NES is that you can only alter video memory during the retrace so you have to count clock cycles very carefully. Also didn't I remember hearing that you have to update the PPU registers each frame or they'll fade?

[Anonymous No.5668365]

>>5668335
Next to that probably the simplest option is CNROM which is single PRG bank but lets you switch in different graphics sets.

[Anonymous No.5668371]

>>5668365
Actually lots of CNROM games include the level data in the CHR ROM and just blank the screen while they're reading it. For example the Japanese DQ1 does this while the US version switched to MMC1 and has the level data in the PRG ROM instead.

[Anonymous No.5668390]

>>5666405
There is always that one dense motherfucker in each thread

[Anonymous No.5668391]

>>5666602
>not calling to goatsy

[Anonymous No.5668396]

>>5668335
Most homebrew games are NROM but yeah, only 256 tiles and 64 sprites (keeping in mind that most objects will require multiple sprites) is not a whole lot.

[Anonymous No.5668407]

>>5668346
>What kind of machine do you think could strike a nice balance between better specs and easy of programming?
Probably C64.

[Anonymous No.5668412]

>>5668351
The planar graphics are kind of a bitch and like the Spectrum there's no actual text/character mode.

[Anonymous No.5668514]

>>5668126
That also likely explains the high failure rate on early SNESes. The chipset was pushing early 90s manufacturing technology so it took a while for them to iron out the fabrication process.

[Anonymous No.5668546]

Update for room #1, I removed my new floor tile and reused the one in rooms #25/#60. I also fixed the windows and hoops (didn't realize the two-color limit before), removed the problematic hoop/ball at the far left, and introduced a horizontal enemy to make things a little more interesting. Also, just want to point this out to >>5666954 since the window tiles there will need to be changed as well.

[Anonymous No.5668578]

What is the status of this game now? Is the programming completed?

[Anonymous No.5668590]

>>5668578
It seems like most of the engine is finished and everyone is trying to design rooms while ensuring the game can fit in 48k.

[Anonymous No.5668595]

>>5667756
Goldeneye 007 on 64 has an emulator

[Anonymous No.5668604]

>>5666954
I'd like to claim level 3 also, have an idea to blend this better into the game. Will do some more work tonight.

[Anonymous No.5668609]

I mean, granted, having millions of nearly identical rooms you can never find your way through or beat is a hallmark of Spectrum game design.

[Anonymous No.5668624]

>>5668590
I think it would be a good idea to rewrite it using metatiles if there are problems with size. And also it looks like there is a separate collision map? That seems wasteful too

[Anonymous No.5668627]

>>5668346
>What kind of machine do you think could strike a nice balance between better specs and easy of programming?
Easiest machine that still feels like a classic 2D system is banned on /vr/: the Gameboy Advance.

[Anonymous No.5668631]

>>5668624
https://megacatstudios.com/blogs/press/metatiles

See here. NES games usually always used metatiles.

[Anonymous No.5668636]

>>5668627
The gameboy or even gamebot color is a very nice step up. It also uses mostly the same cpu. I think out of all the retro machines those have the most tools for them. Other than that the CoCo 3 has a very beefy 8bit cpu, and then you have the c64 of course.

[Anonymous No.5668640]

>>5668631
I know that, I have code for metatiles for the zx spectrum if it is needed. They currently use 9 bytes each.
tile, tile, tile, tile
attribute, attribute, attribute, attribute,
collision type

[Anonymous No.5668650]

>>5668636
GB and GBC use cut-down Z80 clones. GBA is ARM, so you can easily program it in C.

[Anonymous No.5668665]

>>5668650
But keep in mind you trade in superior sound, tilebased backgrounds and sprites

[Anonymous No.5668674]

>>5668665
GBA has SNES-style tile+sprite modes, and the original GB sound (usable from GBA mode).

[Anonymous No.5668715]

>>5668650
The Gameboy's CPU is more like an 8080 than a Z80. The Z80-specific instructions (eg. LDIR) other than the bit manipulation ones are missing. It uses memory rather than port I/O so there's no IN or OUT instructions and the IX and IY registers and their associated instructions are missing, although they're slow as molasses anyway so it's not a huge loss.

[Anonymous No.5668750]

>>5668674
the gba is not retro though so its off limits come on

[Anonymous No.5668752]

>>5668743
That was really worth bumping a thread for.

[Anonymous No.5668794]

>>5666341
make 43 a death trap or riot

[Anonymous No.5668820]

What is the story for Zniggy?

[Anonymous No.5668839]

>>5668820
Its a zniggy situation

[Anonymous No.5668841]

>>5668820
The Zniglord stole his bike

[Anonymous No.5668865]

>>5668346
genesis because of sgdk

[Anonymous No.5668870]

>>5668865
>geneshit
master system

[Anonymous No.5669112]

>>5667623
I am not the original creator of the room, I just made the mockup with changed text to show you could still fit "NOW SHOVE OFF WANKER". I chose the Pickford bros font from nfgs font tool to make the text easier to insert.

[Anonymous No.5669115]

>>5666397
Just a note to the programmer, those two tiles in the bottom left corner can be changed to whatever the neighboring screen is. I was merely anticipating that those purple ones would be used over multiple rooms.

[Anonymous No.5669436]

>>5668325
next time let's make a game for Dos or Amiga or anything that doesn't require wizard-tier computer knowledge to write code and resources for

[Anonymous No.5669456]

Made some graph paper of sorts, a simple little tool which may help some of you lay down those tiles.

[Anonymous No.5669836]

Since there's a lot of tile reuse between levels, are there any background tiles that are especially needed? Floors, walls, foliage, water, sky, etc.

[Anonymous No.5670250]

>>5667708
Hey man I know you're busy packing for your trip, but if you could squeeze in some time recompile the map one last time before you go, that'd be great.

[Anonymous No.5670257]

>>5669436
I wouldn't exactly call the Spectrum "wizard tier." There's not exactly a lot to the hardware. I'd think a system with custom chips like the Amiga would fit that description more.

[Anonymous No.5670329]

>>5669436
How would that be any fun? Spend an hour in a game maker if you just want to see it made. The point of this was to make a stupid picture come true. In the process a bunch of people learned a bunch of shit they never would have otherwise. This is one of the most productive threads /vr/ has ever seen. inb4 that's not saying much.

[Anonymous No.5670368]

>>5670329
I used to make a sprite comic back in the day, and making maps for this thing has been taking me back to that time which I didn't even realize I was feeling nostalgic for.

[Anonymous No.5670450]

Whew, got as much in as I could. For those of you who edited your levels afterward, I was going to do a final pass of recompiling all the rooms, and probably won't add the new version in until then.
>>5667774
I still need a room number for this one
>>5666954
This one is missing attributes
>>5666523
>>5666426
This map doesn't line up with 34, so it'll have to be changed slightly. Also would appreciate it in proper format.
>>5667749
The tool was made by a different anon. Still my fault, I should've been more specific on the actual format.
>>5668578
There's still work to be done with reworking the movement. Also, depending on available space and how lazy I am, there may be a need to write different compression for the rooms.
>>5668624
The collision map is stored as part of the tile. Each tile is 10 bytes: 8 for the sprite, 1 for the color, 1 for tile-specific info. The tiles actually take up relatively little space (256 tiles is 2.56 kb), the 256 tile limit is actually to reduce the size of each room.

[Anonymous No.5670453]

>>5670450
Here's all the tiles currently in game.

[Anonymous No.5670468]

For reference, Montezuma's Revenge has 99 rooms but there's maybe 20 unique tiles total.

[Anonymous No.5670474]

Montezuma's Revenge has 99 rooms in a 16k game but there's maybe 20 unique tiles total. This had a Spectrum port, it was retitled "Panama Joe".

[Anonymous No.5670510]

>>5670257
In an age where almost everything is written in C++, C#, has lua, xml, and python extensions, even a simple assembly project is wizardry to the average amateur game dev.

[Anonymous No.5670537]

>>5670450

Thanks for taking the time to do all of this, anon.

[Anonymous No.5670542]

Asm isn't that hard to actually do, it's more that compiled languages make it easier to add and subtract program sections and also visualize algorithms a bit better.

[Anonymous No.5670558]

>>5670510
The ironic part is that writing a modern game engine is significantly more difficult. I think most people are just spooked by the concept of assembly. Given how expansive the x86 instruction set is, I wouldn't blame them for having the misconception.

[Anonymous No.5670603]

>>5670558
>The ironic part is that writing a modern game engine is significantly more difficult

An 8-bit game engine is going to be a couple of kb at most. That's about as big as a few pages of text.

[Anonymous No.5670636]

>>5670368
>sprite comic
>back in the day
That made even my millennial spawn cringe. But we do what we can do for the betterment of huzersonkind amirite.

[Anonymous No.5670676]

>>5670453
There are quite a few clone tiles there, do tiles with different palettes count as one, or multiple tiles? The green balls are repeated and one of them was formatted wrong, and the white one is a recolor. The yellow/green pattern is the same as the black/purple one, and the black/yellow ones could be modified to look like the existing ones. The red/white lava is a recolored rock texture, and there are a few solid tiles that are repeated. There are more but these are the ones I've personally reused, and the ones I could notice first.

[Anonymous No.5670717]

On average the code portion of a game is about one quarter of the total size and the rest is just sound, graphics, and level data.

>>5670474
>16k game
Likely about 4k of that is code.

[Anonymous No.5670727]

>>5670676
The reason for this is either the tiles have different colour or attributes. There's a few reason for counting them as different, the main being simplicity. Also, the sprites themselves are only 8 bytes, so reusing them saves very little.
The bigger issue is when tiles are repeated due to being misaligned or different by 1 pixel.

[Anonymous No.5670735]

>>5668224
>>5670474
>>5670717
Pitfall had 255 rooms in 4kb which is probably the best if we're comparing rooms/byte

[Anonymous No.5670738]

Time for a ZniggED update! I added some stuff to the editor to make OP and everyone else's job a bit easier:
https://anonfile.com/c2SaG4vand/ZniggED_zip
>added dark palette, middle click a tile to use it
>added the "death" green collision
>collision maps now only exports collisions tiles, leaves the rest blank
>added some more info to the about box

[Anonymous No.5670805]

>>5670727

>The bigger issue is when tiles are repeated due to being misaligned or different by 1 pixel.

Just from looking at the tileset I can tell it's mostly my fault. Sorry about that, shouldn't be an issue going forward now that ZniggED is feature complete.

[Anonymous No.5670817]

>>5670735
They're procedurally generated though.

[Anonymous No.5670842]

>>5670817
True. In the end, code is just data. The stuff posted earlier takes advantage of repetition all the same, just with more leeway. That's what makes Zniggy! comparatively large as it's a lot more freeform

[Anonymous No.5670852]

>>5670805
>now that ZniggED is feature complete.
I wouldn't call it "feature complete" yet. I'm trying to work out a way to import the tileset so you can re-use existing tiles easily.
Ideally, I'd like to make it so you'd be able to create the whole picture, gems and enemies and all, directly from the editor. Although to be honest, the game will probably be finished by the time I'm done implementing all that anyway.

[Anonymous No.5670853]

>>5670727
Oh wait, so you're saying that, for example, a ball that you can stand on versus a ball that kills you need to be two separate entities? I'm sure something like the NES could allow you to reuse a tile with different colors and properties, is the Spectrum REALLY that limited?

[Anonymous No.5670860]

>>5670636
The sprite comic boom was a full 15 years ago now, my /vr/other. They're practically retro themselves.

[Anonymous No.5670863]

>>5670853
This is a restriction of my engine that could change, the spectrum doesn't even know what a tile is (although colors are split into 8x8 areas). I'll be a little more specific as to why I went with this:
1. It's easier. Since tiles are just stored in a big list, it's easier to grab the sprite data right out of the list instead of referencing some area of memory containing the actual sprite.
2. It's faster to just lookup the sprite directly. I could get around this by storing all the active sprites into their own buffer, but I'm not sure how much space would be saved overall since the code to do that would take up some space.
3. It's easier for my map conversion tool to count it as a different sprite, otherwise I would have to go through the trouble of storing the sprites somewhere else and use a reference in the list instead.
4. If I were to have references to sprites instead of the sprite directly, then it would take up 512 bytes for all 256 tiles. If I only used references for tiles that are repeated, then I couldn't assume that each tile is 8 bytes, ruining the way the sprite lookup works by misaligning everything,

It's just not worth it. Even if 1/4 of the tiles were repeated, that's only around 400 bytes that are lost. That's 1/100th of our tape, which could be better saved elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.5670867]

>>5670863
Interesting. I remember something about the game running out of free tile spaces, and I imagine saving the 'slots' rather than the 'data' is more important, if that makes sense. That's where my concern came from.

[Anonymous No.5670884]

>>5670867
The whole slot thing is also a part of the engine. It's actually rather simple: if we only have up to 256 tiles, that means that I can reference tiles using only a single byte. There are some ways I could get around it, but if my math is correct it should be about all we're able to fit anyways.

[Anonymous No.5670905]

The Spectrum doesn't have hard-coded tiles, true, but 256 is a good number tsince it's the # of tiles the C64 and NES can use.

[Anonymous No.5671061]

>>5670860
An they have been and always will be cringe, my /vr/creepykidwhosbackpackneedstobecheckedagain

[Anonymous No.5671167]

>>5670863
There is also 3 red bricks with seemingly same atributes.

[Anonymous No.5671272]

Timex-Sinclair 2068, which is a (sort of) US model ZX Spectrum. It has a significantly enhanced OS ROM set and an AY-3-8912 sound chip like the Spectrum 128 later used (but the register mapping is different), as well as some new video modes in addition to the the basic 256x192 graphics.

While the underlying hardware is the same as the Spectrum barring the enhanced features, the OS ROM is not which means anything that calls OS functions (which is pretty much everything since the OS ROM is analogous to the BIOS in a PC) won't work. Also there's a good chance that a lot of Spectrum games would have issues running on NTSC.

[Anonymous No.5671283]

>>5670738
Based, thanks ZniggEDer

[Anonymous No.5671346]

>>5671061
t. guy who loved 8-bit Theatre and Bob & George.

[Anonymous No.5671386]

>>5671272
It came out in 83 after the low end computer market in North America was in full meltdown mode and even with all the enhancements, it still only had 48k RAM which was a bit too small by that point in time.

[Anonymous No.5671390]

>>5671386
I guess relying on cassette storage was also an issue since by late 83 the price of disk drives in the US had come down significantly.

[Anonymous No.5671547]

>>5666623
We get it, you're jealous you didn't come up with this idea

[Anonymous No.5671556]

>>5671272
Spectrum games are less reliant on IRQ/raster tricks than C64 ones but you can still have problems due to the vertical blank on NTSC being around 4000 cycles as opposed to the 7000 on PAL.

[Anonymous No.5671732]

So if I understand this right, the Zx spectrum has a total of 16 colors in its palette, 8 being "light" and 8 being "dark", and you cannot mix and match from light and dark. Additionally, the ZX can display every color in its palette at once, in any color combination, provided that they stick with light and dark palettes for each tile. This seems less lenient, but overall less impressive, than the Famicom which needs palettes to be defined first and then assigned to 16*16 metatiles versus 8*8 tiles.

[Anonymous No.5671891]

>>5671732
It's kind of weird.

In some (even most) ways, it's an absolutely pitiful system. And then boom, even its earliest version has 8 times as much memory as the NES.

[Anonymous No.5671908]

>>5671891
>8 times as much memory as the NES
NES has 2KiB work ram and about 2.28KiB video ram, and it ran code from rom cartridges so no ram needed there. Smallest ZX Spectrum had 16KiB shared for everything, including code.

[Anonymous No.5671920]

>>5671891
That's not weird at all when you consider that it was a computer, not a game console. RAM was really expensive back then, and computers needed as much of it as they could get. If you were building a budget-minded computer, you wanted to dedicate as much of your component budget as you could to RAM, even if it meant skimping in other areas like graphics. Since consoles didn't need so much RAM, they could afford to use custom graphics ASICs and so forth.

[Anonymous No.5672026]

>>5671920
8bit computers were sold to parents as machines for serious work (and used mostly for games by their children). You can fit plenty of game state into 2K ram, but it's not much use for wordprocessing or spreadsheets.

[Anonymous No.5672214]

>>5671908
>Smallest ZX Spectrum had 16KiB shared for everything, including code.
Uh huh. The smallest NES games were 24k (16k PRG+8k CHR) and adding in the work RAM, that was 26k total space.

[Anonymous No.5672228]

>>5671908
>Smallest ZX Spectrum had 16KiB shared for everything, including code.
The smallest NES games were 24k (16k PRG+8k CHR) and adding in the work RAM, that was 26k of space while a base model Spectrum would have about 11k memory once you subtracted the video.

However a full 48k Spectrum would exceed the 42k total memory space in the NES.

[Anonymous No.5672234]

>>5672228
>However a full 48k Spectrum would exceed the 42k total memory space in the NES.
A couple kb are taken for the video though, right? So in that case you really have just about the same memory since the video buffer is 6k.

[Anonymous No.5672290]

>>5668650
You can write GB games in C too with GBDK... but my GB game stalled because the compiler is a bit fucky.
I spent ages wondering why things that were perfectly okay C were fucking up, apparently array accesses are just bugged.

>>5670329
Both of those machines are still fun.
some of the most fun I've had programming was when I started making yet another OPL3 tracker and digging through the docs for how to access the hardware and shit

...and then I got bored once the sound routine was done and I had to do saving and song patterns and the lot.
I should really go finish it, it's reasonably complete apart from not having a file or song format.

[Anonymous No.5672297]

>>5672290
>array access is bugged
That seems like a pretty big fucking deal wtf

[Anonymous No.5672416]

>>5672297
It really is.
I just pulled up the code I had, I did shit like map+(x+y*WIDTH))[0] to get it working, because apparently the compiler treats it differently than just map[x+y*width]. I literally just started doing whatever until it worked to come up with that.
I was pretty well on the way to finishing the game, I just stopped wanting to put up with compiler bugs and wondering if the issue was actually my fault or not.
2D arrays were explicitly listed as not working IIRC, so the obvious map[x][y] was out.

I should probably port the game to a different machine like the Genesis or Saturn, systems I know which have properly working C compilers. It really wouldn't be that hard.
Saturn would be absolutely overkill for a game I wrote for the B/W GB, but I'm more familiar with using it and Jo-Engine, whereas I haven't used SGDK for the Genesis.

[Anonymous No.5672506]

>>5666334
Ok, Hopefully I got the format correct. Screen 3, named "Triforce". Has a "hidden" path to get a gem. Everything but the yellow stuff is reused to save space. Will work on room 4 soon.

[Anonymous No.5672731]

>>5672416
wow, I'm reading through this code and I officially retract any suggestion to use GBDK for any purpose
holy shit

the context here is that the code goes on to do a bunch of array accesses with ii instead of val
so the code works properly with using a local variable as an array index but not a function argument

[Anonymous No.5673261]

>>5672290
Gameboy has a 4Mhz CPU. Compiled languages would only be suitable if it's an RPG or something else without a lot of action going on.

[Anonymous No.5673375]

>>5672731

[Anonymous No.5673856]

>>5672731
If we're gonna do gameboy dev, would a tool like GBStudio be better?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcGMT2uZBUY

Thought it seems like it can only make Zelda-ish games, perhaps Zniggy's foray onto consoles would be a Zelda-like?

[Anonymous No.5673860]

>>5673856
Gameboy games would have mostly been coded in assembly language. Although since it's a stripped down Z80 derivative, you won't have the block copy instructions and other niceties on the Spectrum.

[Anonymous No.5674279]

>>5672506
That gem single-spaced between the two spikes is pure evil.

[Anonymous No.5674354]

>>5673860
again, more than made up for by having proper tile based graphics and sprites

[Anonymous No.5674396]

>>5673261
People keep spouting this shit like morons.
Fuck, there's a BASIC compiler for the 2600 that people have used to create actual games.

The overhead of a high-level language isn't nearly that high.
A lot of actual old-school games were written with inefficient asm, leading to low performance, as the developers (whether they were in a hurry or whether they were bad) got hung up on things that would be a lot easier to write in C and a lot easier for the compiler to optimize.

Your C won't be nearly as nice and clean as what you'd write normally write on PC (avoid locals, avoid full-size ints, avoid passing function parameters if you can, try to avoid multiplication, especially multiplication between two variables since constant * variable can be optimized a bit), but it won't be that slow.

Like, on the GB, in worst case A, you can halve your framerate and get an absolute assload of CPU time to waste as you wish. Like, an assload of CPU time. Or hell, switch between updating certain things every other frame, which is a technique a lot of real GB games did.

In worst case B, you can write for the GBC, which runs the CPU at double speed (and has more RAM).

[Anonymous No.5674401]

>>5672506
>old triforce meme

I like you.

[Anonymous No.5675203]

>>5674396
>Fuck, there's a BASIC compiler for the 2600 that people have used to create actual games.
Didn't that Atari 2600 BASIC give you about 40 bytes total for your program?
>The overhead of a high-level language isn't nearly that high.
Compiled languages weren't rare on Z80 machines at least (6502 didn't lend itself well to them) but they wouldn't have been used for arcade action due to its speed requirement.

[Anonymous No.5675208]

>>5674396
>A lot of actual old-school games were written with inefficient asm, leading to low performance, as the developers (whether they were in a hurry or whether they were bad) got hung up on things that would be a lot easier to write in C and a lot easier for the compiler to optimize.

You do realize that compilers in the 8/16-bit era were pretty bad compared to moderl ones.

[Anonymous No.5675324]

>>5674396
>A lot of actual old-school games were written with inefficient asm, leading to low performance

Maybe not a game but here's a commented disassembly of Apple II BASIC which notes bugs and routines that could have been done a bit more efficiently.

http://www.txbobsc.com/scsc/scdocumentor/

[Anonymous No.5675349]

>>5675208
>You do realize that compilers in the 8/16-bit era were pretty bad compared to moderl ones.
They were, but SDCC isn't exactly a modern-level compiler. It's no Clang or GCC, it does oldschool-style peephole optimizations.

>>5675203
Space is damn tight, yeah. 26 permanent variables (a-z, renameable), 6 scratchpad variables (temp1-temp6).
208 bits of RAM, which is probably the right way to look at it -- you really don't want to use whole bytes for anything if you don't have to.
The provided kernel has a lot of features and keeps the programmer from having to actually race the beam beyond remembering to drive the screen each frame, but it chews through 1k ROM and the vast majority of your RAM.

A lot of batari basic games do things like align all enemies (if they have more than one on screen at a time) to the same origin x/y position and use a bitmask to keep track of which ones are still alive.
...actually, a lot of actual 2600 games do that, because 128 bytes is still fuck all.

[Anonymous No.5675372]

>>5675324
Microsoft's 6502 BASIC core had a lot of sloppily coded stuff in it. Then again, they wrote it in 1976 when the 6502 had just recently come out and they couldn't have known how huge the chip would end up getting--there were a lot of microprocessors in those days many of which weren't so successful.

[Anonymous No.5675381]

>>5675324
Microsoft's 6502 BASIC core had a lot of sloppily coded stuff in it. Then again, they wrote it in 1976 when the 6502 had just recently come out and they couldn't have known how huge the chip would end up getting--there were a lot of microprocessors in those days (pretty much every semiconductor company tried one) many of which weren't so successful. As far as they knew, the 6502 was just another microprocessor that might disappear in a year to six months so they weren't going to put too much effort into optimizing BASIC.

[Anonymous No.5675384]

PC compatibles on the other hand always made extensive use of HLLs from day one even though two of the most famous application programs (Lotus 123 and Wordperfect) were written in x86 assembly language.

[Anonymous No.5675417]

The NES is also very skimpy at 2k of WRAM which led to situations like unfair enemy spawns.

[Anonymous No.5675442]

>>5672228
Also forgetting that the NES can flip sprites so you don't need as many sprite patterns in memory.

[Anonymous No.5675448]

>>5675442
NES Zniggy when?

[Anonymous No.5675451]

>>5675448
It wouldn't be too difficult since you have hardware sprites/scrolling/actual sound chip. Then again, a single CHR table would be pretty limiting which is why you wouldn't want to limit yourself to NROM.

[Anonymous No.5675504]

Like someone else said, assembly language isn't really that hard to code in, it's more that compiled languages make it easier to add and subtract code sections which improves program maintenance.

[Anonymous No.5675541]

>>5674396
>A lot of actual old-school games were written with inefficient asm, leading to low performance, as the developers (whether they were in a hurry or whether they were bad)

>>5673603
Like in here. With 8-bit machines especially memory is so limited that you need to pull out all the stops and do things like self-modifying code, avoiding using whole bytes for values <255, and even using opcodes for constant values.

[Anonymous No.5675548]

>>5675541
>and do things like self-modifying code
Not as viable on a console because the code is in ROM rather than RAM.

[Anonymous No.5675589]

>>5666334
looks awfully terrible, gj at being uni rejects /g/

[Anonymous No.5675592]

On Z80 IIRC the reset vector is at $0 while it's at $FFFF on 6502s.

[Anonymous No.5675596]

>>5675592
Correct. On Z80 machines you always have to have a ROM at $0 and at $FFFF on 6502 machines. Notably, the SG-1000 doesn't have a BIOS and the cartridge ROM has to contain the reset vector so it maps between $0-$7FFF, while the Colecovision does have a BIOS and so the cartridge ROM there is at $8000-$FFFF.

6502 machines also require RAM at the bottom of memory for the zero page. On the Atari 2600 $0-$7F is RAM and there's no memory for the stack, so you can't use PHA, PLA, etc. NES has 2k RAM from $0 to $7FF so it does have a usable stack space.

[Anonymous No.5675602]

And speaking of 16-bit CPUs, the 68000 had the reset vector at the top of memory, didn't it?

[Anonymous No.5675605]

>Download ZniggED
>Windows recognises it as a dangerous program
>only option is to delete it

Fucking windows. You wouldn't store malware, right Anon? Why did it give me that warning when it's basically the same as shit games I download? I've been downloading things for years and I've never encountered this shit. Why? Maybe I could run as an administrator but it's still off putting.

[Anonymous No.5675612]

>>5675602
I looked at a Mega Drive memory map and it says the top of CPU address space has the WRAM so IDK.

[Anonymous No.5675615]

>>5670450
27 and 19 are begging for some kind of clouds into heaven theme.

[Anonymous No.5675619]

>>5675602
At power on, the stack pointer is loaded with the 32-bit value at $0 and the PC with the 32-bit value at $4, and program execution begins at that address.

[Anonymous No.5675783]

>>5675605
Don't worry anon, it's safe, it's very safe.
It comes from the program I used to make it. I've seen this happen before with other stuff I made, and apparently it's a common thing. Basically you need to buy some sort of certificate for it to not trigger antiviruses, which require some 300+ dollars plus a lawyer, so fuck that noise.
Source: https://community.clickteam.com/threads/102482-How-to-prevent-fusion-games-to-be-detected-as-virus

[Anonymous No.5676074]

>>5675592
>>5675596
>$FFFF
kek Is that where it is on the Commodore 0.25?

[Anonymous No.5676108]

>>5676074
Reset vector on 6502 machines is $FFFE-$FFFF. You can test it on anything with a 6502--an Apple II, Atari 8-bit, C64, BBC Micro, etc.

POKE 12000,76:POKE 12001,254:POKE 12002,255

CALL 12000 (Apple II)
A=USR(12000) (Atari)
SYS 12000 (C64)
DIM W% 4:W%=12000:PRINT ?W%=76:W%=12001:PRINT ?W%=254:W%=12002:PRINT ?W%=255:CALL 12000 (BBC)

This just places a JMP $FFFE into an arbitrary location and executes it which will warm reset the computer.

[Anonymous No.5676123]

>>5676074
Reset vector on 6502 machines is $FFFE-$FFFF. You can test it on anything with a 6502--an Apple II, Atari 8-bit, C64, BBC Micro, etc.

POKE 12000,76:POKE 12001,254:POKE 12002,255

DIM W% 4:W%=12000:PRINT ?W%=76:W%=12001:PRINT ?W%=254:W%=12002:PRINT ?W%=255 (BBC)

CALL 12000 (Apple II, BBC)
A=USR(12000) (Atari)
SYS 12000 (C64)

This just places a JMP $FFFE into an arbitrary location and executes it which will warm reset the computer.

[Anonymous No.5676128]

The BASIC on the BBC has a really retarded and non-intuitive way of PEEKing and POKING stuff btw.

[Anonymous No.5677296]

>>5675384
Hey, remember how some C compilers made all stack variables static by default? That shit was wild.

[Anonymous No.5677306]

>>5675605
It's safe. It's just Clickteam's method of making sure game devs pay them a bunch of money if they intend to sell their games.

[Anonymous No.5677897]

>>5676123
>Reset vector on 6502 machines is not $FFFF
Thanks for confirming that sport

[Anonymous No.5678181]

>>5676123
I can't believe someone actually wasted time typing a serious reply to that underage assembly language LARPer troll.

[Anonymous No.5678431]

>>5678181
I can't believe how butthurt you actually are that after crying about muh assembly language LARPer since your first summer here it turns out that literally everyone on /vr/ except for you knows assembly.

[Anonymous No.5678925]

>>5670450
>I still need a room number for this one
I'm redoing it with some of the tiles that are shared in the game to make it fit better. I'm not sure on the room number, I would assume others could suggest a one, this way, I could make it fit with the surrounding rooms better.

[Anonymous No.5678940]

>>5678431
I know some z80 due to zniggy, but i dont know 6502, and I am shit at z80.

[Anonymous No.5678953]

I think the next console should be C64, Nes or GB.
Personally, Im up for making a zniggy rpg, a pseudo 3D first person dungeon crawler / blobber.
I imagine you have a party of 4 znigs, 4 classes, and you have turn based random encounter wizardry style, with maybe minor puzzles like trick walls, levers, and say the password.
Any one want to join, if I get the base code up and Rynning?

[Anonymous No.5678956]

>>5678953
Another z80 game could work too, though it will be very slow unless we have a tiny first person view

[Anonymous No.5678959]

>>5678956
Zx speccy game I mean.

[Anonymous No.5678971]

>>5678953
C64 and Gameboy are easy to code for, NES is a bit of a PITA and you'd also have to decide what mapper to use.

[Anonymous No.5678981]

>>5672506
Shit, I just realized something. This is supposed to be room 2 so it lines up with room 1. 3 was what I wanted to reserve instead of 4. I'm really sorry, got messed up.

[Anonymous No.5678989]

>>5678971
Gameboy resolution is maybe too small for a dungeon crawler tho

[Anonymous No.5678996]

For NES, I'll just run down the basic common mapper configurations for reference purposes:

NROM: No mapper. Just a single PRG and CHR bank, so 40k max.
CNROM: PRG bank is fixed, CHR bank can be swapped.
UNROM: Upper PRG bank and CHR can be swapped, lower PRG bank is fixed.
AOROM: Entire PRG bank can be swapped, CHR is fixed.
MMC1: Upper and lower PRG banks can be swapped separately as is the CHR. Optional 8k RAM, usually for save games.
MMC3: PRG bank can be swapped in 8k chunks, CHR in 1k chunks. Optional 8k RAM, usually for save games. Includes an IRQ timer for split screen scrolling.

A lot of games have a CHR RAM chip instead of the ROM and have the graphics data in the PRG, it's copied into the CHR RAM. Usually done for animated tiles.

Without MMC3, the only way to get an IRQ is when sprite 0 is scanned, so split screen scrolling requires the sacrifice of that sprite.

[Anonymous No.5679026]

I guess it depends on what you want to do exactly. Some games only have one engine while others have more than one. If you're doing a fixed engine game as Zniggy is, you could probably get away with CNROM or UNROM. Also on most CNROM games, the level data is in the CHR ROM and the game reads it by swapping the data in and blanking the screen.

So Zniggy is fixed engine and we'll probably just need to switch a graphics table or two, hence we're certainly not going to need MMC3 or anything like that (besides, it's a major headache to work with).

[Anonymous No.5679042]

As for C64, should be easy. There's more memory than the Spectrum has plus hardware sprites+scrolling+actual sound chip.

[Anonymous No.5679053]

>>5679042
Also an actually viable storage system.

[Anonymous No.5679151]

>>5679042
C64 is hell to program

[Anonymous No.5679153]

>>5679151
Compared to like every other 8-bit system it's pretty cake. Try coding for an Amstrad.

[Anonymous No.5679441]

>>5679153
Speccy is easier, i tried both

[Anonymous No.5679570]

From this Zniggy project I don't consider the Spectrum nearly as easy to code a game on as systems with hardware sprites and scrolling.

[Anonymous No.5679674]

>>5678989
There's like 8 wizardry games on GB though

[Anonymous No.5679702]

>>5679674
so use the c64, coco, or even dos then

[Anonymous No.5679706]

>>5679702
Apple II was the Mecca for ancient grognard CRPGs.

[Anonymous No.5679749]

>>5679706
is it easy to program?

[Anonymous No.5679830]

>>5679749
It's just like the Spectrum--you have a dumb frame buffer for graphics and a software-driven speaker you need the entire CPU to operate.

[Anonymous No.5679845]

>>5679830
framebuffer? for fucks sake why isnt it character based

[Anonymous No.5679851]

>>5679845
It has a text mode unlike the Spectrum, but the characters aren't redefinable.

[Anonymous No.5679868]

>>5679851
>arent redefinable
surely they are stored in a ROM you can replace? A text mode is nice for roguelikes though

[Anonymous No.5679872]

In HGR mode on the Apple II (resolution of 280x192), every seven bits represents a block of three pixels (so each byte of the video buffer but the MSB is ignored).

1101010 ($6A)

Bits 0-6 are paired and each represents one pixel. If 11, then the pixel is white. 00 is black, 10 is green and 01 is purple. If you turn bit 7 on, then you get blue and orange instead of green and purple. Thus the above example would display three blue pixels. However the other wrinkle is that the pixels are displayed on screen in the reverse order of how they're arranged in memory.

1111000 (white, blue, black)

This bit pattern would actually be displayed as black, blue, white.

[Anonymous No.5679873]

>>5679868
Of course. It's a regular old ROM and I'm sure there probably existed aftermarket ones for adding extra math or currency symbols (they existed for the Commodore PET anyway).

[Anonymous No.5679902]

>>5679873
hmmm
i suppose a dungeon crawler can work well in char mode if you can redefine the graphics. the NES did fine

[Anonymous No.5680447]

>>5678940
I know. The projecting makes it all the more comical.

[Anonymous No.5680493]

Screen 9. Should be 100% tile reuse! Also, I'm banking on Zniggy being able to stay on a ladder with only half his body in order for that one gem to work.

[Anonymous No.5681017]

>>5679902
Stupid question, but why would you need programmable characters when it has a perfectly usable bitmap mode that 90% of games used?

[Anonymous No.5681019]

>>5681017
because its faster and saves memory

[Anonymous No.5681048]

>>5679872
>However the other wrinkle is that the pixels are displayed on screen in the reverse order of how they're arranged in memory.
This was so Wozniak could use one less chip btw.

[Anonymous No.5681052]

There's also the 40x40x16 lo res mode.

[Anonymous No.5681291]

>>5678996
Most NES games have separate banks for the code/music/level data etc and these are swapped in as needed. For example, LOZ is 128k and the banks are set up as follows:

>Bank 0 (game engine) (fixed and sits at $C000-$FFFF while the other banks are swapped in and out of $8000-$BFFF)
>Bank 1 (overworld music)
>Bank 2 (overworld level data)
>Bank 3 (overworld CHR data)
>Bank 4 (dungeon CHR data)
>Bank 5 (dungeon music)
>Bank 6 (sfx)
>Bank 7 (title screen music/gfx data)

[Anonymous No.5681393]

Zniggy is a thing?

[Anonymous No.5681405]

>>5681291
LOZ was originally an FDS game though?

[Anonymous No.5681409]

>>5681393
Not quite yet, but that's the goal!

[Anonymous No.5681424]

>>5681405
It was. What about?

[Anonymous No.5681426]

>>5681424
The FDS has a RAM adapter the game loads into and you can't insta-bank stuff. I wonder how LOZ was organized on the FDS version?

[Anonymous No.5681447]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-aYJyHgCy0

I actually don't know other than that it (obviously) pauses to load when you switch between the dungeons and overworld.

[Anonymous No.5681462]

If LOZ is anything like Metroid, the sound engine is simply duplicated in every bank since on FDS you can't swap in the sound data on the fly.

[Anonymous No.5681595]

>>5678996
>A lot of games have a CHR RAM chip instead of the ROM and have the graphics data in the PRG, it's copied into the CHR RAM. Usually done for animated tiles.

What these games typically do is have a loop that inverts the tile patterns or something to animate them.

[Anonymous No.5681935]

Wait so now we're talking about doing Zniggy on the NES or something?

[Anonymous No.5681943]

>>5681935
From a technical POV it's not necessarily more difficult than the Spectrum, but you do have to pay more attention to some things like clock cycles or else you won't get anything on screen at all.

[Anonymous No.5681950]

>>5681943
Something about char sets and mappers?

[Anonymous No.5681959]

I guess Zniggy is supposed to be a single load game with one tile set so in theory maybe NROM is possible. That would certainly be the easiest anyway.

[Anonymous No.5681965]

>>5681426
>insta-bank
You could do it in Japan. They had mobile banking >9000 years ago. It wasn't quite as fast as zooma-bank though.

[Anonymous No.5681974]

>>5681959
Most homebrew games are NROM despite how limiting it is. The vast majority of commercially released NROM games were in the first 2-1/2 years of the Famicom. Sqoon was released in mid-86, it was probably one of the last.

[Anonymous No.5681987]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKblyFtIfoI

Field Combat. This is a real early one and looks like Galaga meets Commando.

[Anonymous No.5681995]

>>5681987
Right on cue the comment section is full of Third Worlders talking about playing this on multicarts.

[Anonymous No.5682014]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogvy9OdkJ8

This is another early one. Wrestling game. Looks fun; it could have been made an international release.

[Anonymous No.5682025]

>>5682014
>Toei TV
This was probably based on some anime that nobody outside of Japan had ever heard of.

[Anonymous No.5682030]

>>5682025
Kinnikuman had some rubber figurines released stateside as M.U.S.C.L.E, and the sequel series got dubbed as Ultimate Muscle. This probably could have worked.

[Anonymous No.5682052]

>>5681995
Yeah any vid of NROM games has that because they were distributed all over the place on bootleg carts so the entire Third World played those things.

[Anonymous No.5682112]

>>5682014
When I bought a twin famicom on yahoo auction the guy threw in that as a free test cart (wasn't part of the auction listing). I guess it's the Japanese equivalent of a common as dirt sports game.
It kinda matches the color of the system.

[Anonymous No.5682405]

>>5678996
MMC3 really makes NES programming a breeze, but those games are a bitch to make dumps of and it was also kinda expensive so only AAA titles got it while the lesser stuff/shovelware stuck to the less advanced mappers.

[Anonymous No.5684281]

>>5672731
see
>>5673375

That reeks of a pointer problem elsewhere in the code. val's position in memory is getting overwritten somewhere after the ii=val; line.

[Anonymous No.5685878]

Speaking of NES game formats, are there any limitations as to what you can do with the game using NROM? I know NROM games can scroll horizontally (Hogan's Alley, SMB) and vertically (Wrecking Crew, Gyrodyne), some even scroll in both directions (Adventure Island, Bungeling Bay) and Wild Gunman uses DPCM playback. But I don't think there are many NROM games that have four way scrolling and DPCM playback in addition to having a split scrolling BG like SMB. Is the mapper just not that advanced for all these tricks, or was it mostly the fact these were early releases, and developers weren't quite there with their knowledge?

[Anonymous No.5686074]

>>5684281
That sounds really sensible, except val isn't getting munged.
Now that I'm looking at it again, I'm pretty sure it's probably the same issue that made map+(x+y*WIDTH))[0] different than map[x+y*width], and using that temporary variable "fixes" it. I should muck about and look at the disassembly, it's 2am right now.

[Anonymous No.5686624]

>>5685878
It was most likely a combination of those games being early and limited ROM space since the game engine+music+level data has to fit in 32k and you can't have separate banks for everything.

Remember though that most mappers don't really add additional functionality to the hardware beyond banking unless you get into MMC3 and up.

[Anonymous No.5686629]

Programmer anon should be getting his internet back soon. We need to get back on the wagon and make more maps, bois!

[Anonymous No.5686935]

>>5686624
Kung Fu has a lot of DPCM samples and is also a split scrolling NROM game, though you can see the concessions NROM made with the narrow graphic variation and limited music. Whoever ported the game, I think it was Nintendo themselves, had the idea of making Thomas into a background object as opposed to sprite, likely to combat flicker.

[Anonymous No.5686978]

>>5686629
I really need to redraw this. His backleg looks retarded.

[Anonymous No.5687013]

Why the fuck are we talking about nes mappers? Shit is off topic

[Anonymous No.5687027]

>>5687013
Zniggy anon is offline for a while so no updates. Sorry if the thread got derailed a bit.

[Anonymous No.5687032]

>>5686935
Irem ported it. It was their game after all.

[Anonymous No.5687106]

got a temporary laptop so i'll be able to finally contribute, woo. can i make several levels or is it just one per anon?

[Anonymous No.5687120]

>>5687106
The guy running it said up to 3 per person should be fine

[Anonymous No.5687201]

>>5686978
Nah, you nailed it anon. Ziggy looks like a bro

[Anonymous No.5687203]

>>5687201
Zniggy I mean

[Anonymous No.5687217]

>>5686935
>>5687013
As an aside, Mr Kung Fu the recent zx Kung fu master remake looks surprisingly good

[Anonymous No.5687235]

>>5687217
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7qQO43SDN0

The original is ok but the (Spectrum 128) music isn't even correct, it's some OG donut steal tune.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtkWw7ZAXdA

C64 version is better and much closer to the NES, but still needs some more refinement particularly the cutscene with the girl tied to a chair is missing. This also needs a remaster, although the in-game samples probably wouldn't be viable because SID samples take 50% of the CPU.

[Anonymous No.5687246]

>>5687235
According to Gamebase64, Kung Fu is 39k in size. The C64 definitely has enough memory to fit in the missing stuff, especially when the NES was a 40k NROM game.

[Anonymous No.5687351]

>>5687106
>>5687120
Just remember the limitations set in this post >>5651380
And that we're also limited on total unique titles, so try to reuse at least some.

[Anonymous No.5688234]

I'm back, thanks for being patient and keeping the thread active and all that.
>>5672506
>>5678981
Good shit, only small problem with the format was the gems were in the tilemap and the spikes weren't.
>>5680493
Make sure the spikes are all green, or else they count as different tiles. Besides that, this level compressed incredibly well and reused a lot of tiles I thought wouldn't be used, so it's basically perfect from a technical standpoint.
>>5687106
>>5687120
There's nothing stopping from someone making as many levels as they want given that this is all anonymous. Although you can kinda tell who made what based on the level design.

[Anonymous No.5688280]

>>5688234
Welcome back! The map coming together is fun to watch.

[Anonymous No.5688319]

>>5688234
Maker of screen 9 here. The idea is that's the ruins of a statue which you can technically stand on but shouldn't because you'd be stuck down there, with only death as your way out, but I can retouch the collage if necessary.

[Anonymous No.5688380]

So what else could we port Zniggy to?

>Apple II
>C64
>Atari 8-bit
>Amstrad
>TRS-80 CoCo
>NES
>Gameboy
>Master System

Note that the game is 48k so the target platform has to at least match that capability (NES and Master System have less but they use bank switching to get around it).

[Anonymous No.5688391]

>>5688380
I admit I'm not familiar with the Master System.

[Anonymous No.5688404]

>>5688391
Master System has 32k ROM space like the NES, but it has 8k RAM instead of 2k. Video is handled like NES games with CHR RAM in that you have the graphics data in the main ROM and copy it over to video RAM. It has 16k VRAM but most of that will be taken up by your tile/sprite data. Master System games also come in fewer ROM sizes--in fact just five (32k, 64k, 128k, 256k, and 512k).

The Master System can't flip sprites in hardware so you have to waste additional memory with sprite patterns for each direction something is facing in. Conversely it does let you flip tiles in hardware.

[Anonymous No.5688408]

>>5688234
hey i'm the goatse guy from early on the thread. can it be room 11 instead?

[Anonymous No.5688421]

Nice thing about the NES was that the separate CHR ROM meant you didn't have to waste space in the main ROM with graphics data (unless the game used CHR RAM) or require a slow copy routine to load the graphics data into video memory. It's immediately there at power on and different graphics sets can be switched in instantaneously and even in mid-frame.

[Anonymous No.5688574]

>>5688408
It'll work there, I'll get it in tomorrow

[Anonymous No.5688821]

>>5688380
>we
lol
Most of those would be easy. Some easier than others. I've already played around with the basics on the 2600 and it would even be feasible on that to some degree.
It means nothing that the game is 48k on one platform. Systems with massively superior audio hardware, such as PC speaker, will accomplish the same thing in less space. Something like the NES will do all that "impossible" graphics shit in a few lines of code. And don't worry your little head about it having less "k capability" or whatever you imagine the problem is. The "we" who would actually do any porting won't have a problem.

[Anonymous No.5688884]

>>5688404
So it seems like the SMS was designed to be a step up to the NES, but in typical Sega fashion, they fucked it up. Let's suppose the SMS was in fact popular enough to warrant serious third party support. How would iconic NES songs sound like with it's literal colecovision sound chip? How would Contra sound? Mega Man? Duck Tales?

[Anonymous No.5688889]

What is the Zniggy! endgame? Should it end with a boss? Is there a magical mcguffins to collect?

[Anonymous No.5688924]

>>5688889
Gameplay should just abruptly stop, and switch to a long series of text-only screens explaining why evolution and gravity aren't real.

[Anonymous No.5688992]

>>5688889
killscreen. Anything else would be retarded.

[Anonymous No.5689049]

>>5688889
just freeze when you collect the last gem

[Anonymous No.5689276]

>>5688821
>PC speaker
>superior audio hardware
...

[Anonymous No.5689285]

>>5688889
End screen where it just says "Congratulations, you won. Press Enter to play again."

[Anonymous No.5689298]

>>5689049
Can be done in two bytes.

DI
HALT

There you go. :^)

[Anonymous No.5689335]

>>5688821
>>5688380
First off, having a samefag conversation with yourself is rude and second, who is this empirical "we" you speak of?

[Anonymous No.5689338]

>>5689335
I think I am just going begin Zniggy development on the Gameboy.
Do you still want it to be a platformer, or will a topdown game be fine?

[Anonymous No.5689375]

I vote for NES myself.

[Anonymous No.5689392]

>>5689375
yeah but then we gotta sit and debate what mapper to use

[Anonymous No.5689393]

>>5688889
Someone on the first thread suggested making you beat the game twice for the true ending so i guess that

[Anonymous No.5689402]

>>5689392
Just use NROM or at most CNROM.

[Anonymous No.5689490]

Minimum ROM size on the Gameboy was 32k but I'm fairly sure that Tetris was the only game that small.

[Anonymous No.5689491]

>>5689276
>18+ board
>(You)
PC speaker sound has superior audio hardware compares to the spectrum. Look it up kid.

>>5689335
>all that schizo
wew lad

[Anonymous No.5689493]

*sips tea*

[Anonymous No.5689637]

>>5688380
>>5689338
Why are we porting Zniggy? Wasn't the whole point of it being this ironically bad, British home computer game? How does that even fit on any other system than the ZX?

I also think we should focus our efforts on finishing the first game instead of all this talk about NES mappers and 6502 vs. z80.

[Anonymous No.5689646]

>>5689637
This guy's wise.

[Anonymous No.5689668]

>>5689049
If the game is going to use an error room like the Chris Houlihan one, which has 45 gems, should the game freeze once you collect the "total" amount of gems, even if you haven't collected every one from all of the regular rooms?

[Anonymous No.5689715]

>>5689637
When we get the game finished of course. Then we can worry about ports.

[Anonymous No.5689731]

>>5688404
>Video is handled like NES games with CHR RAM in that you have the graphics data in the main ROM and copy it over to video RAM
Actually that's all consoles. The NES's design is totally unique and nothing else works that way.

[Anonymous No.5689750]

>>5689668
I think the error room should come after a kill screen. You think the game is over, acts glitch, then pops you into error room. Ends with game freezing (or something else) upon collecting the last gem.

[Anonymous No.5689764]

>>5689637
We aren't. One dumb fuck suggested it as a way to show of how little he knew about any system ever made. The goof who keeps going on about it needs a mapper.

[Anonymous No.5689774]

>>5689764
>The goof who keeps going on about it needs a mapper
The game as we're designing it is meant to be single load so it may not. But then the NES is pretty different from the Spectrum and you can't follow the same programming model.

[Anonymous No.5689778]

>>5689764
>One dumb fuck suggested it as a way to show of how little he knew about any system ever made

This guy? >>5688821

[Anonymous No.5689795]

>>5689778
No, >>5689402

[Anonymous No.5689929]

you can literally use C for the gameboy.

[Anonymous No.5689949]

>>5689929
In any case,
I made graphics for Zniggy in the first thread which haven't been used, so let me post them. A few of these are obviously stolen from metroid. Theres some weapons and other stuff.

[Anonymous No.5689952]

>>5689949
and a version not for ants (3x)

[Anonymous No.5689956]

>>5689952
example use

[Anonymous No.5690074]

>>5689764
Lay off the allergy meds, dude.

[Anonymous No.5690086]

>>5689637
Didn't the Dizzy games get on the NES?

[Anonymous No.5690123]

Welcome back OP!
Here's a new map: number 30, The snake nest. It should help bridge together the cave and flying snakes section nicely!

[Anonymous No.5690310]

>>5690086
Yeah why?

[Anonymous No.5690319]

>>5689929
Sure, you can use C for a Hello World program but good luck trying to get an actual game with animation going on a 3Mhz CPU.

[Anonymous No.5690350]

The NES version of Spy vs Spy was NROM so no reason Zniggy isn't doable that way.

[Anonymous No.5690358]

>>5690350
Fair enough but like someone else said let's worry about getting the game on the Spectrum done first.

[Anonymous No.5690427]

>>5690123
Can you add a ladder that lines up with room 38 below?

[Anonymous No.5690462]

OK, after playtesting I did some slight improvements to a couple Zniggy! rooms I previously made

First Room 6 Zap To The Exreme! just one change to a gem placement

[Anonymous No.5690470]

>>5690462
whooops room 6 is titled Motorway Traffic

anyway, room 36: Zap To The Extreme, lots of changes. I improved the shitty cloud enemy, so the room 26 cloud enemy should also be changed to reflect that

[Anonymous No.5690575]

>>5690427
Sure no problem

[Anonymous No.5690580]

>>5690575
I feel like it would be funny to put a cache of like 4 gems on the right edge of the screen, which is only accessible by coming in from the neighboring screen.

[Anonymous No.5690590]

>>5690580
Funny, I thought about taking screen 31 just to have some sort of gimmick like that, where you have to go to the side and into this screen to get past a wall or something
I can put in some jewels. How many tiles can Zniggy drop from before dying again?

[Anonymous No.5690679]

>>5689778
This guy >>5689778

[Anonymous No.5690705]

>>5690590
I don't think I'll have Zniggy die from falling too far since that wouldn't work with some existing designs such as room 62

[Anonymous No.5691153]

>>5690350
Spy vs Spy is kinda weird. The original game's theme song was slower, while the NES sounds like it's running in a speed akin to a PAL game running at NTSC speed. Thing is, "Spy" was developed by Americans, and ported by the Japanese, both of whom are NTSC regions. I wonder why they sped the music up. Japanese developed ports of western computer games are weird, ranging from acceptable to mangled; I think "Spy" was probably the best of the bunch. I think NES Zniggy should look like it was ported by the Japanese, when we get that far.

[Anonymous No.5691319]

>>5690705
That would make the game at least 30% less shitty

[Anonymous No.5691845]

>>5691153
There were a couple additional animations in the NES version the computer ones didn't have but the computer ones offer a menu at the start of the game with several options for gameplay setup.

[Anonymous No.5693667]

up the zniggy

[Anonymous No.5693743]

hey anons, I'd like to make some Spectrum inspired box art for Zniggy, but I need some inspiration and direction. Like, what is Zniggy suppose to be? What should the setting/ themes be? What's a good ZX Spectrum box design template to follow? I'm from Leaf land. We never had the ZX Spectrum here, but I know what this machine is.

[Anonymous No.5693763]

>>5693743

Looking through the art assets... If I were to take this, flesh it out, and render it in a quasi-realistic style reminiscent of other Spectrum box art, would this be a good starting pint?

[Anonymous No.5693768]

>>5693743

Looking through the art assets... If I were to take this, flesh it out, and render it in a quasi-realistic style reminiscent of other Spectrum box art, would this be a good starting point?

[Anonymous No.5693770]

>>5693768
If you remade this using authentic 80s typesetting garbage, I'd buy a dozen boxes and give them to all my friends

[Anonymous No.5693805]

>>5693770
>If you remade this using authentic 80s typesetting garbage

I'm looking for some inspiration from other ZX Spectrum box art. I'll experiment and see what I can come up with. I don't want to go with that generic 1980's trendy look that we have been seeing for the last few years. I want to make this look more authentic. I guess it would have to look like a cassette tape case. Maybe even something a little reminiscent of pic related? I don't quite know yet. But I will post my results.

[Anonymous No.5693815]

>>5693768
>quasi-realistic style
Yeah, just realistic enough that it looks kinda gross, and slap a big 'SPECTRUM 48K' stripe across the top

[Anonymous No.5693819]

>>5693805
not Spectrum specifically but this is a good example of Britcore box art

[Anonymous No.5693820]

>>5693815
>Yeah, just realistic enough that it looks kinda gross, and slap a big 'SPECTRUM 48K' stripe across the top

I hear on on the "kinda gross" suggestion. That is definitely a direction to go in.

[Anonymous No.5693828]

>>5693819
>not Spectrum specifically but this is a good example of Britcore box art

That's a good example.

[Anonymous No.5693834]

>>5693819
Goddamn, is that oil on canvas?

[Anonymous No.5693845]

>>5693820

So, just to be clear. The character on the left is the working sprite for Zniggy? What is the sprite on the right suppose to be? A prototype?

[Anonymous No.5693851]

>>5693845
left is Zniggy, right was indeed a prototype

pic related was the first depiction of Zniggy

[Anonymous No.5693856]

>>5693851
>>>5693845 (You)
>left is Zniggy, right was indeed a prototype
>pic related was the first depiction of Zniggy

Ok, thanks anon.

[Anonymous No.5693921]

>>5693845

Don't get too hung up about his appearance.

>In an attempt to give the CPC a recognisable mascot, a number of games by Amstrad's in-house software publisher Amsoft have been tagged with the Roland name. However, as the games had not been designed around the Roland character and only had the branding added later, the character design varies immensely, from a spiky-haired blonde teenager (Roland Goes Digging) to a white cube with legs (Roland Goes Square Bashing) or a mutant flea (Roland in the Caves). The only two games with similar gameplay and main character design are Roland in Time and its sequel Roland in Space.

[Anonymous No.5694456]

>>5693768
Original "artist" here. Feel free to take any liberties you want with it to fill up space or make it generally more interesting. I shat that out in about 15 minutes.

[Anonymous No.5695831]

Anyone can make a Zniggy! level!
and ZniggED makes it easy!:
https://anonfile.com/c2SaG4vand/ZniggED_zip

here's Room 57: Spanners in the Works
enemy modeled after the bottle enemies in Room 54

[Anonymous No.5695879]

>>5695831
whoops needed some slight cleanup

[Anonymous No.5697418]

OI M8 HERE COMES ZNIGGY

[Anonymous No.5698823]

Room 11: Bungle in the Jungle

[Anonymous No.5699548]

I've retweaked screen 9 to cut down on tile use, and also added a gem.

[Anonymous No.5699648]

>>5698823
Sorry man 11s taken

[Anonymous No.5699946]

>>5693921
>to a white cube with legs (Roland Goes Square Bashing)
I thought this was a joke at first, but I looked it up and it's real.

[Anonymous No.5699969]

>>5699946
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTPO5KvuOw

Amstrad games are slow as fuck. A 16k graphics page was too much for an 8-bit CPU to handle.

[Anonymous No.5699979]

>>5699648
link to where 11 is? It's not taken in >>5688234 or any post after

[Anonymous No.5699983]

>>5699946
>>5699969
The game is only 8k. How advanced did you expect it to be?

[Anonymous No.5699996]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YSNqUGihp4

[Anonymous No.5700003]

>>5699969
This could use an Atari 2600 port.

[Anonymous No.5700007]

>>5700003
>>5699983
>8k
Fair enough. Might end up closer to 10k since 6502 code takes more space than Z80 code.

[Anonymous No.5700520]

>>5699979
>>5688408
>>5688574
Mapanon hasn't put it in yet but it's taken

[Anonymous No.5700764]

>>5700520
ok.

>>5698823
THIS IS MAP 31 Bungle in the Jungle

[Anonymous No.5700784]

>>5700764
Well that doesn't work for 31 either, because it doesn't connect at all with 30. >>5690575

[Anonymous No.5700796]

>>5700784
what a Bungle this is turning out to be

>>5698823
THIS IS ROOM 15: Bungle in the Jungle

[Anonymous No.5700830]

Sorry I took so long, I'll try to be more consistent
>>5690575
>>5695879
>>5698823
Good stuff
>>5700520
I still need room 11 in the right format

[Anonymous No.5700865]

>>5700830
thanks for your work so far!

[Anonymous No.5700923]

>>5700830
I believe I have an idea for 7 now that I see the screens adjacent to it, so I'd like to claim it and make that my project for tomorrow.

[Anonymous No.5700998]

>>5700830
How do you get the tiles from other rooms to add onto yours? I want to make some rooms but don't want to overdo it with new tiles without connecting my rooms to ones already made?

What's the limit anyway?

[Anonymous No.5701035]

>>5700998
>How do you get the tiles from other rooms to add onto yours?
I looked at the pictures and drew copies of the tiles myself

[Anonymous No.5701089]

>>5700998
I grabbed the original files from the past threads and just copied the tiles while working in paint. You'll have to go to warosu now since both of the previous threads are nixed from 4chan.

[Anonymous No.5701131]

>>5700830

Can you replace Room 40 with >>5667914 ? The collision and enemy layout should be the same.

[Anonymous No.5701148]

>>5666334

best video of all time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTIj0eEc5TE&t=5s

[Anonymous No.5701685]

>>5701148
What the fuck you have to go back

[Anonymous No.5701774]

>>5701148
Okay, this is epic

[Anonymous No.5703571]

press up to jump

[Anonymous No.5703581]

Active /vr/ sunday rescue bump.

[Anonymous No.5703641]

>>5703581
I believe we're hitting the two-week bump limit now

[Anonymous No.5703653]

[Anonymous No.5703719]

>>5700830
recieveranon here, sorry i havent done it. will be in the needed format either tomorrow or tuesday

[Anonymous No.5704597]

>>5703641
nooo
OP release your game with all the maps
post a link

[Anonymous No.5705089]

So long, thread 3 '_'7
>>5703597