Okay, I know I said I would be visiting more frequently, but we've have one more time with my brother in law's health problems. My sister and I have been playing physical therapist for months. He has been on the mend from a bout of sepsis, that had him millimeters from death. In any case, I thought I would be back more often at my last post...but it has taken this much longer to get him from the wheelchair...to a walker...then a cane....and now just his feet 🙂 My stint as a physical therapist has come to an end, so more time for hobbies!
I have been playing a little here and there, starting stuff, getting part of the way, starting something else, etc. Kind of learning some stuff about game design that I didn't know before - and still a long ways to go 🙂 Forever ago I designed assets for a Star Raiders type game (the Atari 8 bit version), that I really want to get back to. That game is probably still my favorite game of all time. Just an amazing feat in an 8K ROM. I've designed assets and quite a bit of code of an Arkanoid type game. I've made a few test programs for different parts of the game, and need to weld them together and get the game put out here one day. The wife and I made some assets for a Bejeweled-ish type game and layed out some of the logic, but still have more learning to do. She also helped me make some graphical assets for Columns/Tetris type game, but screen layout and graphics tiles/sprites are as far as it has gotten.
@davegardnerisme Is adding the extra sprites something that a neophyte, such as me, could do, or do you have something ready to burn to a microSD card? Some more sprites would be great for something I was playing with! I was going back and forth with the idea or reloading a sprite image to reuse the sprite or using different frames of a sprite. The former would be wayyyy better.
@Gadgetjack Thank you for posting the code, I will play about with that some!
Semi-related to having more sprites available: have any of you guys used BLIT, somehow non-destructively, as sort of a jumbo sprite? I'd reckon the LT is fast enough that on something that is only about 128x72 (a particular space ship the wife designed) that I could read the background data around the asset to be moved into an array(s) (just a few pixels on all four sides, depending on the movement increment), move the asset, then write the background date back to the appropriate pixels.
My biggest stumbling block is sound. As bad as I am with the other stuff, it is an order of magnitude worse for me dealing with sound. I do have a bunch of really good public domain MOD files for background music, so that is no problem...unless I try it on the LT, in which case an error is thrown.
One last question I have pertains specifically to BASIC Engine LT. No matter what capture device I try, it doesn't capture what is happen in Engine BASIC, only the underlying Linux test stuff. Hints and tips greatly appreciated!
Also, if there is a Discord server or Facebook group where BASIC Engine stuff is discussed, please let me know! I really dig the old school forums, prefer it even, but getting direct notifications would make me interact much more frequently.
