Playing Cards

Hawk

Hi All,
My BASIC Engine NG hardware hasn't even arrived yet, and already I'm trying to program in the Linux emulator.

I thought I'd start with something simple, something that I've been wanting to program in BASIC for a few years now but never quite found the right environment that I enjoyed programming in.

Anyway, I want to program a card game. Speed shouldn't be an issue, neither should responsiveness. However, it seems as though the graphics engine is all setup for platformers and action games, but not so much for cards.

I want the game to look good...that's important to me, but I can't see how I can easily move around the large bitmaps that the cards will be. Sprites are limited to 32x32, but I could join a few together to make a card, but how do I map the cards to the background? I understand that I could use tiles, but then I would have to define my cards as chunks of tiles. I'd really like each card to have a pointer to it's own bitmap.

Am I thinking about this wrong?

Any pointers from more experienced members of the group?

Cheers,
Mike

davegardnerisme

You could just use LOAD PCX and then keep track of where in memory the sprite ends up (via RET(0), RET(1)) and then use BLIT to copy to the screen memory? Depends on what you want to do with the sprites (eg animation?)

Using BG tiles though also seems reasonable and wouldn’t be too hard really.

Hawk

So I got back to experimenting with this task to display playing card bitmaps. I’m happy to say that I’ve had some success. I was using the host version and could load the portion of a PCX image directly from SD card fast enough and display it where I wanted on the display. I didn’t realise that it would be so easy. It just took a bit of experimentation to work out where the cards were in the bitmap.
My adventure continues.

painintheworld

I look forward to seeing your card game!

There are some resized public domain/free for personal use/similar playing cards, chips, and die images in a shared Google Drive folder of mine here, if it will help...and if it doesn't there are other assets for the BASIC Engine that might come in handy - [https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/10DggcYqozVR_Sd_LN7d2A3pPJLP5kzbf?usp=sharing](https://)

Hawk

I have been using some lo res free card images that I found online. Thanks for sharing the resources you have found.
The game that I’m going to develop is based on one that was published in BASIC in the late 1970s.
I hope to change it so that it can be computer vs computer, computer vs human, or human vs human.
I have yet to run the image manipulation program on real hardware, so I don’t know what sort of performance to expect.

painintheworld

I bought a generic deck of cards a couple of months back with the intention of having my own high resolution scans. If it would help you out, I will scan them in a day or three and post them up on Google Drive for you. Will help however I am able.

Hawk

painintheworld Do stress too much, lets see how far I get. If I do it right, swapping to a different deck of cards should be just changing the size of the cards and the offsets...and the locations on the table. I've got enough to work with.