Request to play demo with joystick in emulator

[russell-s-harper]

#R48

I’m working on converting a demo to the CX16. I was wondering if anyone with an emulator and joystick can try it out? It’s playable via keyboard, but I suspect it’s better using the joystick.

There is an issue with the hardware VERA FX Line Helper in 16-color mode so recommend playing only with emulator for now. It will work in hardware, just very slow.

It consists of EXPLORE.PRG, EXPLORE.DAT, and AI.DAT with files available on Google Drive https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing. If you’re leery of downloading from online, and you want to build it yourself, the GitHub repo is here https://github.com/Russell-S-Harper/EXPLORE. A sample video is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZxkDRXkPw0. The emulator runs at 6.0 frames/s, while on HW it’s much slower at 4.0 frames/s.

The demo uses these keyboard controls:

- escape: pause, press again to resume
- C: cycle player
- Q: quit
- J: join the game in progress, your vehicle will have a little "cockpit"
- K: join the game, but you’re the preferred target (hard)
- L: join the game, but for you the last level doesn’t restore its health after zeroing other players (very hard)

When you’re playing, these are your keyboard and joystick controls:

- cursor up or joystick back: climb
- cursor down or joystick forward: dive
- cursor right or joystick right: turn right
- cursor left or joystick left: turn left
- space or joystick button: fire missile

I’m working on an attract sequence with instructions, but for now you can probably figure out the rules on your own!

NPCs, missiles, and geometric shapes (a.k.a. walls) that are orange are below the "focus", and those that are blue are above.

The main revision is adding a very basic "AI" for the NPCs. The existing AI.DAT on the Google Drive is a final generation iteration meaning several runs to output winning settings. If you want to run your own, delete or rename the existing AI.DAT file and it will create a new one as the NPCs compete among themselves. Recommend letting it run until you see a few numbers displayed (actually frames to complete each round) so that the NPCs are slightly refined. If a human player joins, it doesn’t update AI.DAT yet (still trying to figure out how to detect atypical behavior!).

Thank you,

Russell