Commodore + SNES

Sometimes it is hard to connect dots! I bought a Commodore monitor month ago to have it for my C-128 ... never got it to actually work. Only now I realized that I have a composite video cable for my SNES and tried it out ... WOW it works :-) Snes-mouse is there just for curiousity ... maybe you did not know it exists ?-)

A glass of whiskey

It's probably been too long time since I spent evening hacking and drinking 'Famous Grouse' ... (don't think I don't know better whiskeys, I just like to have them cheap). I have left 'libenkine' for awhile and gone back on GL (but on my minimac this time :-). I think I'll spend some time thinking how to make a simple landscape attractive ... flatshading should be enough for everyone, right? Well ... I'm having textures there, I've made a simple API to update textures which seems to be fast enough for small purposes but now it's bugging .... urgh .. I guess it's time to goto sleep!

libenkine

yesterday I spent my evening hacking on hedgehopper game (https://garage.maemo.org/projects/hedgehopper/) and (as was originally planned) started to separate game-engine as a library called 'libenkine'. libenkine will contain tilemap and spriteclasses + engineclass to handle these (and other stuff) but also primitive drawing + surface manipulation, so it can also serve as a simple graphics API. the ultimate goal is to make game development a simple task, basically just building a tilemap level with editor and producing a textfile which describes what sprites it will contain. yep, I know there must be dozen game api's done on top of SDL and propably it sounds crazy to implement another one ... but when checking out the existing ones I find them complex to use. one big goal for libenkine is to provide a minimalistic api to have a game running + lots of additional tweaking functions to modify behaviour of sprites but only if one wants to do so. I will test libenkine on 770 and try to have it working for GP2X aswell.

rescue set

Just wanted to note that if you experience problems with 770 , don't worry! Rescue Set is on it's way! :-)

*winter games*

Long time no sea ... I thought to post some photos here to show that I'm still alive and kicking! It's winter finally .... that photo has been taken weeks ago though :) Here's a more fresh one :



Walking in the ice of baltic sea ...

gp2x

Yesterday I visited my friend Subjik who is a lucky owner of a gp2x handheld console. Very nice machine for handheld-gaming ... 320x240 is quite enough and the controller is very good. What is the coolest thing for me is that this is actually the first handheld which you can use to play commodore-64 games without pain. The controller feels almost like analog joystick, SID emulation rocks and Frodo emulator menu is nicely designed. In fact I liked the controller more than the one in PSP. Only thing missing is wlan for network gaming :-/

playing roles part ][

Our journey continued, my elven fighter/thief 'Ermil' managed to raise a level after some successful bashing of a very evil man :) We took a visit to a Duergar lair and managed to escape before getting slaughtered! Also played quite much of 'Donkey Kong Country 3', which is one of the best platformers ever ... especially if you have played DKC2 it will make you laugh and enjoy!

more colors

OK ... I have to admit that this is just too much fun. I also added a poor man's blurring-effect but it does not look nice enough yet ...

growing trees

I like Darwinia a lot. That's a game you *have* to try if you haven't done it yet! I could not resist to start making own procedural graphics stuff :) The web is full of nice tutorials and explanations how this is done. Recommended to read : new science. Very big fat book but contains useful algorithms and nice pictures.

<3 OpenGL

Listening to Boards of Canada and playing around with OpenGL ... Mirror-effect is done by simply copying the whole framebuffer as a texture (glCopyTexImage2D) and blitting one quad with a slight drop of blue in it. Flares are nice, I think I'll write some kind of intro/demo when I have more ideas :-) BTW Texture used in cube is from one of my favourite anime movies .. Laputa : Castle in the sky.

sauna

Visited Porvoo in the weekend. Very nice city! Apparently cats over there like sauna quite much :-)

xrandr -o 2

Wanted to note here that screenrotation is possible with 770 hardware (without speed or memory loss). Let's hope to see this candy soon in MAEMO releases :-) Thanks to Mallum for telling me howto fix mouse coord rotation!

tileset/tilemap editor

I just realized that I have to finish the mapeditor before going any further with my platform-game ... making a good editor is a bit boring but it will surely have profit on level design and better gameplay ... just wanted to note that platform-project is *not* dead :-) Going to sleep ..

770 as a controller

This morning I bought new Edge magazine and noticed there's a picture of 770 but it has a analog stick on it :-) Pretty nice mockup, it was designed as a controller for Nintendo Revolution console.

Check out the '770 controller' picture here :
http://img75.imageshack.us/my.php?image=revcontroller5rm.jpg

And rest of the mockups :
http://www.4colorrebellion.com/revolution-controller-mockups

Actually 770 could be nice gamecontroller for some x86 strategy game, a controller with a screen, this is what Gameboy Advance can be used for some Gamecube games.

platforms

Here are some screenshots of platform game I've been working on. Graphics are taken from a nice c64 animation site http://www.abc64.de/ since I've got no graphics skills myself. Big space below is caused by blogger layout, I don't know why.

Oops, did I say that?

OK, now that I've been playing 'Dungeon Siege II' a bit more I can review a bit more. The rpg-feeling is starting to fade away and the game reveals it's true nature, which is Diablo2-style hack'nslash orgy. The environments, characters and the plot is very nice ... but still ... you end up smashing thousands of monsters which happen to stand right in your way. Magic spell effects are really nice but lacking voice variations. When you kill 1000 monsters with same spell making the same voice it really starts to annoy you :-/

Learning to fly

Rotating starfield, rotating cubes and ship ... points, lines and a quad - simple is beautiful :)

Those of you who like old videogame/demo music, put these to your 770 favourites :

http://kohina.com/
http://scenemusic.net/
http://www.slayradio.org/home.php

Turrican!

Mmm? What's that? Hatari - atari emulator running Turrican II on 770? Yes, that's what it is :-) Runs fine but yeah ... controls are a bit sucky... you cannot really play it since it's fast paced especially on later levels. (hatari was ported to 770 by my workmate Eero)

Turrican II has been my favourite shootemup for a long time. It has very cool weapons and graphics. Especially I liked the amiga version (haha this could be actually a nice opportunity to start new flamewar between amiga and atari again ...), all true Turrican fans should also remember that there's a new one, T3 released 28 August 2004 for Commodore 64 by Smash Designs ... http://noname.c64.org/csdb/release/?id=14321

3D

Yesterday I experimented a bit with TinyGL (software implementation of 'most important' opengl commands) and Nokia 770. I modified TinyGL to open window in fullscreen mode. Wireframe objects were running fast and I am planning to make a 'asteroids' clone using this, lighting and shading produced problems ... framerate goes down like cows tail, I'm not sure yet is it the floating point calculation or blitting speed in general but I will investigate it. Patch will be submitted here when I have something nice done :-)

Stoned!

A word of advice : if you ever happen to meet a greater abyssal basilisk, do not look in to his eyes ... it will turn you to stone. We had some great adventuring during the weekend and my thief/ranger character raised one level! :-)