Re: [stella] Confused newbie...

Subject: Re: [stella] Confused newbie...
From: Kevin Lipe <kevin.lipe@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 7 Oct 2004 12:25:08 -0500
Yeah, I read through both of those once but it appears that I may need
to do so again...

And I guess 37 scanlines is probably plenty of time for a pretty
simple game like the one I've got in mind, i just wanted to see how
the "pros" did it. Btw, JoustPong is great :) i havent played it on
real hardware but its excellent in emulation.

Thanks for the help,
Kevin


On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 13:00:41 -0400, Kirk Israel <kirkjerk@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 11:41:54 -0500, Kevin Lipe <kevin.lipe@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Hmm... well upon looking at my code I guess i -was- trying to
> > reposition sprites during the visible part of the frame, which is
> > probably not a good idea, instead of during VBlank. VBlank seems like
> > the way to go :) thanks, because 2600 101 helped me out a lot last
> > night.
> 
> It's good that you're charging ahead and trying things in, but it does
> sound like at some point soon you might want to give 2600 101 and
> Andrew Davies' tutorial lessons a good solid read-through. Also, at
> least skimming if not reading the entire stella programmers guide
> would be a good thing...
> 
> 
> > And... having already looked at skipDraw, where would I put that?
> > somewhere in the visible part, or during VBlank or Overscan as well?
> 
> skipDraw is a very powerful but fairly advanced routine for actually
> drawing the sprite...getting GRP0 or GRP1 filled with the right 8 bits
> for each scanline.  It's popular because it's efficient (and you don't
> have much time, the tv scanbeam is a bit faster than the atari's chips
> in some ways) and also it takes the same amount of time if you're
> drawing the player or not, which more primitive routines don't do.
> 
> > This is a good time to ask this... How do you experienced 2600 coders
> > lay out your code? As in, what do you use VBlank and Overscan and
> > VSync time for typically? This seems like it doesn't matter much now
> > but I'm sure it will as my code becomes more complex.
> 
> Based on my experience, I think most coders start putting all the game
> logic in VBlank. Then, if they think they're running out of time, they
> might start using Overscan, which really isn't much different. But
> VBlank (going out on a limb here) is plenty of time for games of small
> to medium complexity...so many times doing JoustPong I thought "aha!
> I'm finally running out of time in the VBlank!" but it ALWAYS was me
> doing something else stupid.)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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