Commander X16

 

That scrolling text is really smooth.

59 minutes ago, Ed Minchau said:

That scrolling text is really smooth.

60fps or nothing! ?

I'm very curious about the transparency effect. It seems to be very cleverly done, especially the colored transparency under the Bitmap sign.

I guess most of the magic happens in the palette design then you OR the background and foreground. Would you mind elaborating on your secret sauce? ?

About audio, yeah, we definitively need some kind of synthesis tracker routine and format.

 

1 hour ago, DrTypo said:

About audio, yeah, we definitively need some kind of synthesis tracker routine and format.

M00dawg is working on that as far as unique CX16 sound goes.

Using Deflemask to make YM2151 tracks is immediately doable, and with some preprocessing, you could strip VGM down to something barebones like IMF which is very low overhead to play back.

7 hours ago, DrTypo said:

I'm very curious about the transparency effect. It seems to be very cleverly done, especially the colored transparency under the Bitmap sign.



I guess most of the magic happens in the palette design then you OR the background and foreground. 

Even simpler, its passive so takes no cpu. The palette offset for the background tiles is set at startup, and the 'pixels' themselves are a tile of solid colour from 1-8. (not zero!) So by only drawing the 'pixels' we get the transparent colour for free. (Set the Vera to step on by 2 bytes per write.)

Below is a grab without the foreground layer which makes it more obvious.

So all you need to do is create a overlay that lines up to the 8x8 tiles.

Thank you for your explanation Yazwho

I've not yet looked into the tile system of VERA. This is going to be the next tutorial in Matt's series I'll look.

ZeroByte:  It's good to see people working on audio solutions. I'll take a closer look at M00dawg's work.

 

I've uploaded the source. You'll need Visual Studio Code, cc65 and obviously the emulator. To build you'll need to edit build.ps1 to set your paths correctly.

There's a C# Visual Studio project that calculates and creates the data tables for the background.

I installed VSCode, edited build.ps1 and built your project successfully! Now I'm considering switching to VSCode for  my projects, it looks pretty nifty.

 

7 hours ago, DrTypo said:

I installed VSCode, edited build.ps1 and built your project successfully! Now I'm considering switching to VSCode for  my projects, it looks pretty nifty.



 

If you install 'ca65 Macro Language Support' you'll get syntax colouring and the like. The extension can add tasks to compile and link, but I prefer to do it all on f5 so I used the ps1 file. (Unless I'm missing something, its my first VSC project as well!)

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tlgkccampbell.code-ca65