It's been a while that I posted here. Been busy converting #Larry to #EasyFlash #C64 cartridge format. That took a whole lot of time and effort to learn new tricks, but I finally have the hang of it. Here's an experimental bit of the intro sequence I'm making for the game now that I have a full megabyte of ROM to work with. The speed difference really is astounding compared to even the fastest disk loader. I'm still going with disk for savegames, though. EasyFlash emulation isn't perfect on all platforms so I'll treat the cart as 100% ROM only. I wrote a few CLI tools to help me prep .CRT builds. Cartman for CRT building: https://code.area536.com/Public/cartman and Kla2kick for bitmap to ASM processing: https://code.area536.com/Public/kla2kick Both are very rough around the edges but they work. They're BSD-licensed so have at them if you like!
BvdW
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UNIX and cloud professional by day. Writes 6502 Assembly as a form of therapy.
Very little progress on #C64 Larry. Refactoring into a cartridge format, which is a 100% non-functional change but a big task for me. Should eliminate slow loading though. Also: creating a CI/CD-proof build tool for cartridge images first, so I'm off into the weeds for a bit.
Question for #Commodore64 coders. Can the VIC II be coaxed into "seeing" part of a cartridge ROM directly? Like: would banking the VIC II to $C000 allow rendering a bitmap from the cartridge ROM nearly instantaneously?
Want to run #Larry for #C64 right from your browser? You can, even though it's 1980's style slow. The screen will turn blank for a *long* time while this loads so be very patient. The currently running build of the game is incredibly glitchy, buggy and incomplete. I'm working on fixing that and will update it later. For now: check it out! https://www.area536.com/larry/
Small details bring life to a scene. I don't have the luxury of full EGA software sprites, but still.. I like my version of the broken hotel sign better. Now let's see if we can get some dialogue going in there. #C64 #gamedev #retrogaming
This looks minor, but it's actually a pretty big step. The scene itself has its own logic separate from the main game. This means there's a place to do small trickery like this to improve the visuals and Larry can play hide 'n seek outside Lefty's. #C64 #gamedev #retrogaming
@smokku I had a bit of a brainfart last night. Seems to fix the crashing. I just loaded and loaded and loaded the game in VICE (30 plus times) and it didn't crash one single time. Would you be so kind to test again a few times if things are also better on your system? The links are still the same, I just put new files there.
@smokku aww.. nasty. It's the bug I can't seem to find. Seems to occur less when emulating an NTSC machine. Thank you very much for your efforts. Knowing that the real machine also has this at least rules out emulator issues for now. I'm going to sift through my IRQ handling code again.. something timing sensitive seems off so I suspect the raster interrupt handling.
Anyone testing my current #C64 Larry should know that it's hardly functional at all. I'm mainly looking for compatibility feedback for hardware combinations. Get it at https://area536.com/lsl.d64 or https://area536.com/lsl.d81. Email feedback to [email protected] if a toot won't fit.
@smokku Thank you very much! There's a D64 and a D81 available depending on your equipment. Download from https://www.area536.com/lsl.d64 or https://www.area536.com/lsl.d81 respectively. If you could start it a dozen or so times, there shouldn't be any crashes.