Engine BASIC Interrupts/Triggers?

painintheworld

Good evening, everyone! So, I was playing about doing some proof of concept stuff on some Star Raiders type game ideas I've been thinking about.

Has anyone written anything in Engine BASIC that acts like or is the analog of an interrupt? Something like the inbuilt ON PAD and similar. I didn't come up with anything very good whilst banging out some code this evening and settled on setting flags for the time being.

Hawk

painintheworld sorry, but I hadn't even considered that until you mentioned it. But now you have mentioned it I realise that it is the foundation of nearly all the old actions games. Things had to be timed to the refresh rate of the display.
I imagine that to achieve what you want, you'll need some sort of polling loop that checks for controller responses at the desired response timing.

painintheworld

Hawk I think you're right. I am certain the raw horsepower is there to do it that way...but it will complicate things for me. I reckon it may be a good way for me to learn more about game design 🙂

Engine BASIC has builtin facilities to do what I'm looking with game controllers via ON PAD; a more generic version is what I'm looking for. I printed out the manual sometime back and need to sit down and go over it. I need to go over the included shmup demo, too. MMBASIC on the CMM2 has generic interrupts, so it may pay me to do some testing there with that, check out how Mauro did some things, and come back and look at this with a fresh set of eyes.

Hawk

painintheworld A bit off topic, but I really should put my CMM2 together. I went to the trouble of buying most of the expensive parts, just didn't get around to the fiddly specific parts. I should have bought the kit. I didn't have the money to throw at things like that back then.

painintheworld

Hawk Just did a quick little test that matherp had posted way back. It is just a quick test to see how it performed relative to the CMM 1. The BASIC Engine does a little over 4x better than the CMM2 on the same simple test.

I paid for a CMM1 and CMM2 in the summer of 2020 from a person who shall be unnamed here...and I never got the parts. He just disappeared; as in deleting various accounts, etc. I would've never imagined. One of these days when I'm in the desert Southwest of America, I will look him up.

Fwiw, I like Atto better than the editor on the CMM2.

Hawk

painintheworld Nice feedback. Sorry to hear about your unscrupulous seller. They are everywhere unfortunately. Sometimes it may be no fault of their own, think about it that way...it's better for you.
Regarding the CMM2, can you run the program from the editor?
I have been using Atto to develop on the BE NG, and I find that I am continually editting, saving, loading, and running and then starting again when I realise that I've made yet another foolish error!
It would be nice if Atto could remain in memory and just get pushed to one side to run the program and then brought back with a command or keystroke.
Anyway, I will persist with Atto, and keep working on a Cheatsheet for the newbies. I found the commands in the source code, but I'm testing them all as well.
What I did find interesting is that if I load a program without line numbers created in Atto and then save it from BE NG, I get all the loverly formatting, but it retains the line numbers. I then have to manually go in and remove all the line numbers again.
Wow...we are really off topic now. Better mention interrupts...my first computer was an Atari 400, and they had great video interrupts. I guess you still need interrupts like those to stop tearing in games and animations.

painintheworld

Sorry for the delay in responding! I've been tending to my mother after her heart surgery.

On the CMM2, I think it is F2 that needs to be pressed to RUN the program from the editor. It isn't very much different from Atto. I know neither platform has robust file handling (as it should be, given the target, in my opinion!), but my preference between the two editors is definitely Atto.

Andddd, my first home computer that I owned was also an Atari 400. I've still got it, too 🙂 My first home computer experience was the first TI99/4 in 1979 (before the 4A came out). Our little, very rural school received a grant for some computer equipment. One piece of that equipment was an acoustic coupled modem! We got to dial in to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. For a poor kid from way back in the Appalachian Mountains it amazing!