>BTW, I haven't seen Dragonstomper... can someone fill me in (or maybe
>give me a bin or wav so I can see it myself on a real 'charger?)
In Dragonstomper you control the ball graphics in a scrolling world. The
world is made out of the player graphics. When the ball runs into a location,
some action takes place. All player graphics are locations. What happens is
described in a little text window on the bottom of the screen. It is done
with the six player graphics trick and can display six lines of text.
I think all texts, except for the canging numbers in the status screen, are
just predefined graphics.
Usually the text window displays the four directions and its coresponding
joystick movement. If you press the button, a selection menu is displayed,
that lets you choose to move, to fight, to use something or to check your
status
Dragonstomper is devided into three sections/loads. In each section you need
to get enough strength and things to survive in the next one.
>I'm not sure if I want to do a Supercharger multi-load or if I want to
>stay within a 16k bankswitched framework (partially for testing
>purposes - at least PC Atari runs 16k bankswitched games perfectly.)
PC Atari has quite a lot of little bugs, so you should at least try out the
different parts of your game on a real VCS every now and then.
>There is another possibility in Chris Wilkson's mega-cart design, with
>128k ROM and 16k RAM always available.. and since he designed the
>cart from the ground up, manufacturing and releasing carts would be
>relatively easy (easier than, say, using old 16k bankswitched games
>with new ROMs, like has been done for new 4k games.) He also
The bankswitching hardware and the Superchip RAM are integrated into the ROM.
Therefore you would have to design and build the bankswitching circuit
yourself for a 16k game. Besides that Superchip RAM would use a complete
256 byte page in each bank for every 128 bytes of additional RAM.
>Again, the problem would be how often the game would need to take
>a load. At best, every screen and every battle entrance and exit.. and
>possibly
>at other points such as shopping or talking to townspeople.
If you could put all kernels into maybe 4kb, you could devide the game into
several subquests and load a new one when the subpart has been solved.
That way you would only need that part of the world and graphics in the SC,
that is currently used in the subquest.
Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg
--
Archives updated once/day at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/
Unsubscribing and other info at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/stella.html
