Are you having (or, if you answer this after today, "Did you have") a fun Christmas day?
I was depressed all day, but all in all I have to say it wasn't half bad. Let's see what today brings.

What is love?
I forgot

What is your net worth?
Probably more than, say, Paulguy but I have no concrete idea.

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
I'm not the pheasant plucker, I'm the pheasant plucker's son and I'm only plucking pheasants 'til the pheasant pluckers come.

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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Do you think I should buy New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Pokemon Emerald, or Super Mario Bros: The Movie?
Mo' like deja moo.

<Kawa> Not the movie, I can tell you that

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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What kind of game do you want to make, and how does the ASM programming fit in?

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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And what CPU would that be?

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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I'm starting to get some ideas here. Why specifically the SNES?

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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Butt out Paulguy. I haven't offered to code anything and I wasn't planning to. I'm just trying to help in some way I can.

Besides, I can barely even read SNES ASM.

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Those are pretty good reasons on first glance, except for the palette thing.

The Super Gameboy, Color Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and DS all use the exact same color format. The only difference is the amount of palette entries.

Still, the other two are perfectly good reasons. Got any more?

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I have a classic DS Phat with a firmware hack. DS Lite is too small and feels... I dunno, waxy. DSi? Never even considered it.

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<GreyMaria> I walked around the Lake so many goddamn times that my sex drive was brutally murdered
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No it isn't. On any system, there's several levels of speed.

ASM is at the very top, but if it's badly written it drops a level or two.
C is right below it. Given a proper compiler, it is so fast that only very intensive parts might require some inline ASM work. C++ is often one (or one half) level below that, but only because of extra OO overhead. Using a C++ compiler, yet writing plain C with it could even help create faster ASM output.

Somewhere at the bottom are interpreted languages, not counting any game script interpreter you might use.

Now, the SNES might not be the fastest horse in the stable but I think, if you write good C code, it'll work fine.


And now, some life experience: I write C on the Gameboy Advance. One of the first things I learned is to use native-width integers for stuff like parameters and globals, and only use other types in structs and stuff. This because having a byte or halfword parameter or return value would require extra ASM code to make sure it is a byte or halfword. With native ints, that code can be left out, making the resultant ASM smaller and faster.

These days, most if not all games are written in C (or C++) with preciously little ASM work. Most I've seen that's consistently done in ASM is stuff like sound mixing.

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Posted by DahrkDaiz

---

You have to love for it to be any good.

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No matter what language you write in.

I won't code in COBOL for anything less than five hundred though

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Well, I have some GBA C code to draw stuff like a tilemap. It's quite close to the SNES, format-wise, as far as I can remember so if you want I can give you some sample code. I also have a simple tile-based print function that could theoretically work on any system with tilemaps.

Sprites I'm not too certain about, so I'd rather not give (possible) C code for that until I've studied the ASM side of it myself.

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What do you mean, "it doesn't work"?

Anyway, here's some sample code. It's just from the top of my head and unfit for consumption, but it's the basics.

//Just imagine this is more, about one screenfull. //The ones are wall pieces, two, three and four are //shadow variations and five is floor. Can you visualize the data? const u16 someMapData[] = { 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, ... 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, ... 1, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, ... 1, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, ... 1, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, ... 1, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, ... ... }; void LoadTestMap() { //Again, top of my head. memcpy(someMapData, BG0, sizeof(someMapData)); }

Assuming you have, through similar methods, loaded the graphics tiles into their proper memory area, you should get whatever you visualized on screen. This all assumes you have a header file to describe whatever "BG0" is supposed to be -- in this case, a pointer to the VRAM area where the bottom background layer is stored.

Also note that I used "const u16" instead of just "int" -- for one, such data should be defined constant so it doesn't take up extra RAM, and for two it really should match the type of the target.

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Did you get anything nice for christmas?
A hundred bucks. I have it in my pocket right now.

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What would your opinion on Reality Television shows be?
It would be the same as it always has been: Reality TV shows aren't that real, in my opinion.

Hypothetical situation
Kill the bannable n00bs. That oughta keep food stocks up for a while.

Ofcourse, you could also seriously consider various ways to escape, assuming the one giving the hypothetical situation is not a dick. Preferably, you do so before food runs out. But this is the faster answer.

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Heh, that beadie sprite looks about as cute as most of those I've seen.

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Hey, nobody's perfect, and by extension nothing we make is perfect. Ofcourse CPUs have flaws! When they fixed the floating point division bug in the early Pentiums, it was still flawed in other ways.

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I hereby propose cutting off .Net stack traces to the last relevant line. For SWR's error, that would be

System.Collections.Generic.KeyNotFoundException: The given key was not present in the dictionary. at System.ThrowHelper.ThrowKeyNotFoundException() at System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2.get_Item(TKey key) at Daiz.NES.Reuben.ProjectView.MoveLevelTo_Clicked(Object sender, EventArgs e)

The rest is irrelevant. Daisy would know that "MoveLevelTo" is a ToolStripItem.

I propose this because I've seen a lot of very deep error logs and nearly always could stop reading before the fifth line. Sure, to laymen in the audience it makes you look cool, but seriously people!

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Reserving dedicated space for all 128 sprites is just plain wrong from the start.

How animation is usually done (mind the present tense) depends on the game, really, but the GBA Metroid games for example were very heavy on object cluster-based animation, wherein each part of the larger sprite (arms, head, body, legs) were a single hardware sprite. Going by the many spritesheets I've seen, Castlevania games, at the very least since Rondo of Blood on the PCE, have used the same system.

Super Mario Bros 1 had a simple 2x3 mapping going that could fit most objects. Specialcase code handled those objects that seemed to be 2x2 or less, which was actually only a collission matter. Bowser was simply two of those stuck together in turn. Note that because it had no bankswitching, every single 8x8 tile in the whole game was loaded once on startup.

River City Ransom EX, with its fairly extensive character editor, had most if not all different eyes, hair pieces and color sets all at the same time. The only thing that changes about a given character is the pose, and some of those overruled the hair and eyes.


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DKC and Earthworm Jim were works of art, VRAM management-wise. I suggest you keep those far out of your mind.

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That could work.

One method that I've seen is to have clusters of graphics about 1/4th of the total available, and each level specifies which of those clusters is to be loaded. This has the following tricks:
1) Level headers specify one cluster less than total, because the player will always be there.
2) Certain sets of enemies can be used together in a given level.
3) These chunks contain all the parts for the enemies they allow.
4) Large enemies may take up an entire chunk.

Also note that, depending on the player's state, you can upload another chunk for it. For example, you start Super Mario Bros 3 as regular, small Mario. The top chunk, which contains Mario's tiles, only has (most of?) small Mario's tiles, but no big. When you grab a Super Mushroom, that chunk is replaced with one that has (most of?) Super Mario's tiles. Depending on your actions, another chunk may be uploaded if all the tiles for a given form/costume don't fit in a single chunk.

A variant is used by the original Sonic the Hedgehog on the Genesis/Mega Drive, where each kind of "actor" had a hardcoded spot in VRAM that it'd try to put its graphics. Sonic himself, having a lot of animation frames, only loaded a small part of his total into his hardcoded part of VRAM, switching in other parts where needed, as Mario does in the above example. So the original Sonic wasn't "chunked" per se, but there were still certain "impossible" enemy combinations.

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