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New Game for the CoCo/Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 6:20 pm
by pser1
Hello,
back on december 2016, I was told to create a program that should be something between an arcade - adventure game
It had to be short enough to be played to the end in less than an hour ...
The graphics designer sent me some screens and I prepared a demo for that. It was accepted and so it all started.
I got some more screens and a map to link them, and finally a script to tell the story.
I loved the idea because of a lot of things:
- the graphics made by jojo073 are really very, very nice
- It had to have sound while doing other things ... Simon Jonassen 2 voice player was to be used
- We wanted to experiment with sounds, so I added a reduced wav player
- It had to work on a D32, so the text had to be compressed and decompressed on the fly
- Main characters use to walk over the background (forefront), but here it was mandatory that Brody walked behind a few
objects that had to be in front of all
The result was that I engaged the project very eager.
I had it done mid April 2017, so I had to wait a bit so that the graphics designer could give it a deep peek before
publishing it, but you see we are end October and the Tiburon 2017 risked to be Tiburon 2018 or even nothing.
So I have decided to publish it as it was 'presented' to the Retrowiki community on April 2017.
I attach here a zip containing the source code and a virtual VDK that contains all of the files to play.
RUN"VERPANT" will show the different game sequences. Just press 'C' to change to the next one
RUN"T" or RUN"T37C.BIN" will start the game (text in spanish)
RUN"TE" or RUN"T37CX.BIN" will start the game (text in english)

IMPORTANT NOTE:
As sound is IRQ driven, we all should be aware that on Dragon 64, unfortunately, the number of HS is 50 less than expected
and this creates a noticiable distortion on the sound ... unless you do the small surgery I did in mine. So better on a D32
On XRoar we *should* use a D32 emulation because no surgery is possible ;-)

cheers
pere
TiburonV37C (SHARK).zip
(126 KiB) Downloaded 704 times
EDIT 2017/11/14 - CAREFULL! This version runs ONLY on Dragon PAL machines.
To play it on CoCo or Tano machines, download file "SHARKv37G.zip" that you will find near the end of this thread

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 8:33 pm
by sixxie
That's dead impressive! Especially like the ignition sound...

I think I ran out of things to do :)

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 9:35 pm
by pser1
sixxie wrote:That's dead impressive! Especially like the ignition sound...
I think I ran out of things to do :)
Hello Ciaran,
thanks for your kind words.
Can't believe what you say, I am pretty sure you have a lot of ideas you are willing to try out.

Unfortunately I have been much too busy lately due to mother health problems, so I have not been
able to try out you last opus in deep, I mean I have played a bit, one player only ;-)
I need to try Dunjunz with my sons. A multi-player game is to be enjoyed!
It is simply spectacular, seems incredible what you have done!
cheers
pere

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 10:50 pm
by robcfg
Hi Pere,

The game is quite nice!

Great use of the high resolution screen mode, nice graphics and sound.

Despite its flaws, the Dragon is such an underused machine...

Congratulations!

May I ask which is the best way to convert a wav file for use on a Dragon? I'm interested in knowing how did you manage to get such a clear sound.

Keep up the good work!

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Mon Oct 23, 2017 11:52 pm
by Alastair
pser1 wrote: As sound is IRQ driven, we all should be aware that on Dragon 64, unfortunately, the number of HS is 50 less than expected and this creates a noticeable distortion on the sound ... unless you do the small surgery I did in mine.
Time permitting, is there any chance of you creating a wiki page describing this surgery? I'm sure that a number of D64 owners will be interested.

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 2:30 pm
by pser1
robcfg wrote:Hi Pere,
The game is quite nice!
Great use of the high resolution screen mode, nice graphics and sound.
Despite its flaws, the Dragon is such an underused machine...
Congratulations!
May I ask which is the best way to convert a wav file for use on a Dragon? I'm interested in knowing how did you manage to get such a clear sound.
Keep up the good work!
Hi Roberto Carlos,
Pleased you liked the game!
In fact it has been a very interesting 'learning project'. I had never done most of the things neded to create the game.
The waves and player used, were the rsesult of these steps:
1) I searched for two sounds that seemed alright for me (for the cardoor and the engine)
2) Then I reduced then from stereo 22050Hz to simply mono 8K
3) I further reduced them to the part I wanted to use in the game. The result was 11-12k, so too big to have them in memory.
4) I converted them from WAV to BIN just cutting the header (it ends with the word 'data' and 4 bytes that show the length
5) This binary was reduced to the half by using only the 'odd' samples. Result 5.3 - 5.9Kb small enough to be loaded on the fly
6) The player was designed to use 100% of CPU, so it reads a byte (sample) and interpolates with previous one to create the 'even' deleted bytes
It is not perfect because maths never return the deleted value, but it helps smoothing jumps between '2 odd' bytes.
In fact the routine has some time-wasting code to adjust the timings for the read value and the interpolated one.
In the source file you will find the subroutine "repWav" that plays the WAVs
I am attaching here a zip with both sounds in five steps, from full 11k WAV till the binary with Dragon header to be used from disk
cheers
pere
Wav-Shark.zip
(49.81 KiB) Downloaded 539 times

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 2:39 pm
by pser1
Alastair wrote:
pser1 wrote: As sound is IRQ driven, we all should be aware that on Dragon 64, unfortunately, the number of HS is 50 less than expected and this creates a noticeable distortion on the sound ... unless you do the small surgery I did in mine.
Time permitting, is there any chance of you creating a wiki page describing this surgery? I'm sure that a number of D64 owners will be interested.
@robcfg
First of all, I must say that 110% of this patch is due to Stewart Orchard. We both tried to search the differences between D32 and D64
one working fine, the other not and Stew was able not only to find what but to explain what had to be done to 'cure' the flaw.

I will search among my files to get all the info and pictures I have about this hardware patch.
I have never created a page in the wiki.
Could I pack together the info with a text file describing the process and everything I did and then upload it here ... so that
an administrator could create the page?
If it is possible for any user to create one page, I will just need some pointers to start ... we could talk even via PM
Thanks a lot
pere

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 8:43 pm
by sixxie
Ah you misunderstand: I thought I had run out of things to do in your game. I've tried again and revisited places a bit, and now finished it.

Good stuff! Funny how your secretary(?) never tells you anything until you try to leave ;)

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:40 pm
by sorchard
Hi Pere,

Your new game is brilliant! Being able to move behind foreground objects is a really nice touch. Great graphics too: That's a pretty convincing Roy Scheider :)

The D64 IRQ 'fix' is mentioned here: viewtopic.php?p=15719#p15719

Re: New Game for the Dragon: TIBURON (SHARK)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2017 9:46 pm
by pser1
sixxie wrote:Ah you misunderstand: I thought I had run out of things to do in your game. I've tried again and revisited places a bit, and now finished it.
Good stuff! Funny how your secretary(?) never tells you anything until you try to leave ;)
Glad you finished it, so fast! Congrats. This was the idea indeed ...

Sorry, I really misunderstood you :-(
Well, in fact as soon as you enter the Police Station, if you walk to the right just a bit, she begins to speak
But, right if you didn't do that and have moved around, there are chances that you go out near by the bottom
and so you 'pass' by the secretary 'switch' button!
By the way, have you tried to move behind the counter in that screen? This was a hard part to program, to show Brody
partially (not the part behind the counter)

Just a bit late to tell ...
If you play it a few times, I am sure that you would like to bypass the long intro.
Pressing 'B' (on the first text screen) skips it and sets BUFF colour, pressing any other key skips it setting Green colour.

cheers
pere