Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

A place to discuss everything Dragon related that doesn't fall into the other categories.
sorchard
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Location: Norwich UK

Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by sorchard »

Hi Pere,

You've done a great job on the conversion. (As usual!) The game plays pretty well. Have you completed it? I keep getting stuck and I'm not sure if the inventory needs to be used in a specific sequence.

The PM3 screen shot looks really good too. One thing to be careful of is red text on a blue background. (Or vice-versa) It can be very difficult to read on a real composite monitor or TV.
Stew
oss003
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by oss003 »

Hi Pere,

In screen 4 is a broken ladder (left picture).
You have to pick up the ladder object in screen 9 (middle picture).
Use the ladder object in screen 4 and the ladder is repaired (right picture).
If you are not using Adventuremode, the ladder is broken again if you leave and re-enter screen 4.
With Adventuremode, the ladder is still repaired if you leave and re-enter screen 4.
The ladder is repaired with 4 PUTBLOCK commands.
In Adventuremode, the screen number, y-pos, x-pos and block number of a PUTBLOCK command, given in the EVENT code, are stored in a list.
When a screen is drawn, this list is checked and blocks with this screen number are also drawn on the screen.
You need this because you have to climb the ladder several times.
There are more of these constructions in the game.

I use flags for conditional assembly. This is done to keep the code as small as possible.
  • m = add code for Menu/Inventory
    p = add code for Particles
    s = add code for Scrollytext
    i = invert game
    d = digging mode
    a = adventure mode
These flags are set in the command line to assemble the game.
The object is to set them in the AGD compiler so that the flags are set automatically when certain commands are used but that's not working yet.
For now I have to set them in the command line, eg. BUILD FOGGY m a

Greetings
Kees
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pser1
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Joined: Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:32 pm
Location: Barcelona (SPAIN)

Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by pser1 »

Hi Kees,
that's very tricky!
Alright, once understood I find it easy to add to the engine.
Hopefully this will be the last one for the FOGGY, despite we are still testing the colour capability
for block-objects-sprites on PMode3
Thanks a lot
pere
pser1
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by pser1 »

Back again ...
I am uploading here a new FOGGY version so that you can enjoy it along the weekend
I have been searching for a flaw that blocks Foggy when stepping out down a ladder, from time to time, not guaranteed to happen!
If you experience that situation,moving laterally or even jumping solves the problem.
I have found a bit of code I had added while converting, that is not present in the z80 version, so I have commented
it out, compiled and tested it.
This time I have used two XRoar emulations, one for a previous version and one for the new one ...
I have played till the end of the game in both, I have used the lives cheat to have some 50!
In the old version I have had the ladder problem twice but none on the new version but this doesn't ensure it has been corrected.
If you have the time to try it, let me know the issues you could find ... thanks in advance!
For players that require more than the 3 std lives, these are the POKES to be done for both CoCo and Dragon computers
- FOGCO06D.BIN - POKE&H264B,nn
- FOGBW06D.BIN - POKE&H25C7,nn
If you want to see the wonderful entry screen designed by John Blythe (Foggy's Quest author), I'd recommend you to use the
virtual disk instead of the binaries
Each disk has two basic programs: LPM3.BAS and LPM4.BAS that will launch the graphic mode indicated in their name.
Of course, in this case we lose the chance to cheat and change the number of lives
cheers
pere
FOGGY06.zip
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robcfg
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by robcfg »

Excellent job!

I find the game quite difficult, but looks very nice and the loading screen is beautiful indeed.

Keep up the good work!
pser1
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by pser1 »

robcfg wrote:Excellent job!
I find the game quite difficult, but looks very nice and the loading screen is beautiful indeed.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Roberto Carlos,
I found it terribly difficult at the beginning and it went even worse when speed became variable ...
But I have made so many tests that I have ended learning every trick. Of course I saw a YouTube walkthrough
to know what had to be done and right now I can get to the end screen starting with just the three normal lives
If you load the binary on XRoar you can enter the POKE to give you 99 lives for instance ...
I have seen that due to my messages reorganization, the number of Lives is printed too soon and the second
digit is then overprinted by the right vertical bar. No problem because once you lose one, both digits are well depicted
I have already corrected this flaw in the source but I think that it doesn't require a new release ...
enjoy!
cheers
pere
sorchard
Posts: 530
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Location: Norwich UK

Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by sorchard »

Hi Pere,

I've enjoyed playing this, so many thanks for all your hard work and congratulations on a job well done!

I think the difficulty level is about right to give a sense of achievement on winning. It took me something like 15 attempts before I completed it. I had two lives left so those two extra lives were essential!

I didn't find any bugs. There's one screen where you can't see where you're going, but I think that might be by design as it doesn't take long to learn the path. There is another screen where you enter from the right and if the monster is travelling towards you then it is very hard to get past. I kept walking off and back on the screen until the monster was travelling away from me and then it was easy to get past. The monster start direction seemed to be random.

Again, a great conversion! :D
Stew
pser1
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by pser1 »

sorchard wrote:Hi Pere,
I've enjoyed playing this, so many thanks for all your hard work and congratulations on a job well done!
I think the difficulty level is about right to give a sense of achievement on winning. It took me something like 15 attempts before I completed it. I had two lives left so those two extra lives were essential!
I didn't find any bugs. There's one screen where you can't see where you're going, but I think that might be by design as it doesn't take long to learn the path. There is another screen where you enter from the right and if the monster is travelling towards you then it is very hard to get past. I kept walking off and back on the screen until the monster was travelling away from me and then it was easy to get past. The monster start direction seemed to be random.
Again, a great conversion! :D
Hi Stew,
thanks a lot for your kind words!
Yes, in fact this is not a complicated game, but has a few points where you can lose lives ...
The screen you describe is really one that you must walk through trying to find the paths to the pick axe.
Concerning the monster that comes against you, the trick is going back, wait for a while and enter again.
First times I went back and re-entered immediately. The monster kept going against me ... always, damn it!
And there is no way to jump it. I have done this coming from the other side (the ladder)
Well, the effort of converting the engine has given us a side-effect result ... a new game for our collection.
Right now I am working on the engine routines that deal with laser, explosions and the like. There is still about 15-20% of the engine
to convert, so I need to work with games that use the non converted functions.
cheers
pere
pser1
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by pser1 »

Hello,
almost six months have elapsed since I converted the first AGD-engine routine to 6809 code. I began end of June, beginning of July.
Now all the ZX-Spectrum code has been converted except for the routines that work for the AY-sound chip. So, time to close the project!
With the help of Kees van Oss we began the tedious test period. Once solved the bugs/flaws we found out, we decided to add a few new
features that are being added today to the std AGD.
So now we can use normal sprites 16x16 and bigger ones 16x24. The sprites move two pixels at a time, this means that there are four
'frames' at offsets 0,2,4,6 pixels from the left to make a whole sequence. By now, AGD solves that creating four blocks of data for every sprite
(inside the compiler) and the final ASM program contains these four frames, so using 128 bytes instead of just 32 for each normal sprite.
There is a very clever developpment that, using four tables 256 bytes each, that contains the preshifted data values, is able to draw
the four frames reading only the base one.
This implies a bit of extra code and the tables themselves, but as many games use a lot of sprites, the overall result is really interesting.
That way some games that didn't fit in the lower 32K, now do! One step further and these four tables have been sent to higher RAM,
so freeing 1024 extra bytes that allow for any AGD game to run on the CoCo-Dragon.
And furthermore the code has some compile flags that help reduce to the minimum the size of the binary file, by hiding the not needed parts.
*** I will just remember that the AGD games *require* machines with 64K RAM (mandatory) ***

Well, the engine was the first part to be created. It contains the functions offered to the game designer who can call them from the
script program that creates the AGD program on the ZX-Spectrum.
Then with Kees, we modified a compiler that reads the script file and outputs an ASM file that contains 6809 code and the data for the game.
This compiler is a C program that we can run under Windows and is compiled under MinGW.
The suite is completed with another important tool, the converter that again is a C program that reads a Spectrum snapshot
of an AGD game and is able to extract the script with data to be compiled later.

With the converter, compiler and engine we could convert some 150 games or more.
To make things easier for us, I created a bunch of bat files that allow us to test scripts on a CoCo or Dragon emulation,
build the disks (DSK and VDK) and even create a folder with all the related intermediate files for each game.
To do so we are using tools from other people, for instance (listed alphabetically)
- ASM6809 from Ciaran Anscomb (Sixxie)
- DragonDos from Rolf Michelsen
- ImgTool from MAME/MESS
- XRoar from Ciaran Anscomb (Sixxie)

AGD stands for Arcade Game Designer and was created by Jonathan Cauldwell in 2008

What do we expect from this?
Well, the icing on the cake would be that WinAGD gives support to 6847 color features. I mean it should allow us to work in PMode4 or PMode3.
This is a very important point for anyone that wishes to make a PMode3 version of any game we will be releasing and most important,
we will be able to create NEW games from scratch!

cheers
pere

Ps You can learn more about the AGD project here
https://jonathan-cauldwell.itch.io/arcade-game-designer
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek ... id=0020176
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luis46coco
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Re: Anyone interested in converting AGD to the Dragon/CoCo?

Post by luis46coco »

Congratilations Pere
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