[stella] Ship Version 1.501

[<kurt.woloch@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you all for your input on my last "un-numbered" Ship version.

Tennessee Carmel-Vellieux wrote:

>This is pretty neat... The music actually sound like music (which is pretty
>rare on the 2600 :) Still one thing that itches : when I try to modify your
>code, it seems your kernel takes so much cycles that I can't even uncomment
>(!) the LDA playfield0,Y and the STA PF0 (8 cycles in all if I'm correct)
>without having some shifting in the graphics :( I also thought about adding
>clouds, but since you don't load PF0 in the kernel, they would be pretty
ugly,
>and when I coded them, they sank with the ship :) Anyways, I did a little
>something if you want to change it : makes the shadow a little more
>believable.

I added something like this... but a bit better.
It's true that you can't uncomment the mentioned lines in the last
version. That was exactly the reason why I commented them... :-P

And now from Glenn Saunders:

>It's highly unusual for a game this preliminary to have had so much
>attention lavished on the music, however.  Usually this is the last thing
>a programmer thinks about.  Jim Nitchals did program mostly sound-related
>stuff, so I hope you go back and make the music the best it can be if this
>is a tribute.

I hope it is better now, but maybe it still can be improved.

And finally, from Piero Cavina:

>I did it, I couln't resist :-)
>Here's SHIP 1.5, the whole kernel has been reworked, now it works drawing
>the ship in groups of 4 scanlines, plus from 1 to 3 final scalines.. well,
>you must look at the code to understand this, as the result isn't very
>different. The water surface is also "moving"...
>Kurt, let me know.. it was a very quick job, because there's a lot of
>soccer on TV now :-))

Are you really so interested in watching us (Austria) play soccer
against Chile?

>P.S: to everybody working on a project: please use filenames ending with
>version numbers when you post binaries or sources.

OK, this is yet another version of my ship demo, and, yes it's got a
version number.
No big improvements, but fed by the input I got today:
1. Better sounding music (for Glenn, and of course for Jim)
2. Piero's new kernal with water surface flashing routine
3. Gradually fading shadow of the ship
4. Improved colors - I didn't read the 2600 documentation carefully. I
learned now that the lum values range from 0 to E, leaving out Bit 0,
not 0 to 7 leaving out Bit 3.

You can read the full credits in the source code.

With love (and still many things to learn and improve)

Kurt Woloch

Attachment: SHIP1501.ASM
Description: Binary data

Attachment: SHIP1501.BIN
Description: Binary data