Subject: RE: [stella] Re: About your tutorial From: KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Date: 12 Apr 2004 18:23:46 -0000 |
> well, I haven't seen the things using this point of > view. Indeed, your explanations are judicious ;-) Yeah, I think he made the same point I made about the same time, but maybe he said it better... There was interesting idea in Paul Slocum's Atari Tips document that he just reposted in response to 2600 Cookbook, which is some specific advice if you are nervous about the "just keep adding code and see if it ever breaks" technique: --- ============================================================== INSURANCE AGAINST TOO MANY VBLANK/OVERSCAN CYCLES Paul Slocum ============================================================== It's difficult to make sure that there is no unusual case where your game logic in VBlank and Overscan will use too many cycles and cause the number of scanlines in a frame to fluctuate. To insure against this problem, pad your VBlank and Overscan with a few STA WSYNCs to add extra cycles during development. Optimize your game so that it runs fine with these in. Then when the game is finished and ready for release, comment out those extra WSYNCs. This is also an easy way to estimate how much time you have left in VBlank and Overscan: keep adding WSYNCs (each line is 76 cycles) until the screen jumps. --- Novices to 2600 programming tend to worry about some of the wrong things; I too thought I was out of cycles, maybe because of a page boundary issue, and spent a lot of time writing tools to track those issues down, when really it only mattered in A. the kernal B. some fine positioning code I had. (and the errors I was seeing were rookie "forgot the # sign" mistakes) And it is not just modern day novices that have an issue with underestimating the time available, I'd guess: there are certain things in various latches, player collision and joysticks, that seem to indicate a suspicion that there wouldn't be time to do basic checks every frame. (That's just speculation on my part, however...and a minor quibble with the AMAZING techincal work the 2600 design represents.) -- KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://kisrael.com So, if happiness isn't being rich, then it's probably not being middle class, which means you're just as likely to find it at rock bottom, which doesn't require all the effort, and hell, I'm already there. --"Staggering Heights" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archives (includes files) at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/archives/ Unsub & more at http://www.biglist.com/lists/stella/
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