New game: Alchemist64

[dakk]

Hi everybody, I decided to port (rewrite) a python game I made a long time ago. I started by writing a commodore64 version using CC65, then I tried to port it to CX16; it works but there're some issues I need to fix before uploading to the software library.

In the C64 version I'm using a custom charset, where every character tile has two defined color; to complete the graphics, I exploited the global two bgcolors (so 4 total colors per character, two defined for every tile and two global); I'm not sure if I can do the same thing with the VERA, still trying to figure out.

Source code and precompiled binary for both c64 and cx16 are available here: https://github.com/dakk/alchemist64

 

[AndyMt]

Every tile set can have 2,4,16 or 256 colors - and you can have 2 different tile sets, each of them on it's own layer. So this should be easy to achieve.

I did use this for my Brixx game where the bricks etc are a 16 color tile set on layer 0 and the text for highscore etc is the standard character set on layer 1.

[Ed Minchau]

The VERA board has 128kb of VRAM. That's a lot of room for storing tile sets and tile maps. Pretty much all of that is available for tiles, sprites, tile maps etc except the addresses above 1F9C0; that's where special registers, the palette,  and sprite attribute tables go.

There's enough VRAM that you can easily have two tile maps per layer, so you can show one map while you make changes to the other, and then switch. This makes for very smooth animation.