Video demo of my Columns clone

[Sivak]

Here 'tis...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A_1Fpef9j4

It's come along nicely now that I have a working sound engine. I need to write some more tunes though.

[never-obsolete]

looks nice. the only thing that bothered me was when you changed tilesets and the screen flashed.

[Sivak]

looks nice. the only thing that bothered me was when you changed tilesets and the screen flashed.

That had to be done to write the tiles to CHR RAM quickly. I turned off the PPU and use the white palette. I didn't wanna write a few at a time.

[Kojote]

looks great, keep up the nice work. i gave it a plug at pdr, maybe it will get some more attention.

[tepples]

looks nice. the only thing that bothered me was when you changed tilesets and the screen flashed.

That had to be done to write the tiles to CHR RAM quickly. I turned off the PPU and use the white palette. I didn't wanna write a few at a time.

For a while, I was working on a tile editor that runs on the NES. When switching between "pages" of ten 16x16 pixel patterns, the editor hides the preview in the nametable, copies 10 tiles at a time (using 10 iterations of a 16-byte unrolled copy loop), and then shows the preview again. I'm using the same technique for double buffering of big (32x48 pixel) sprite animations. I can put a demo of my editor on YouTube if you want.

[Zepper]

Here 'tis...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A_1Fpef9j4

It's come along nicely now that I have a working sound engine. I need to write some more tunes though.

- I noticed you're a good designer. There's a NES pirate (?) collums-style game, but yours look really neat and superb! My congrats and keep up the good work.

[hap]

Nice conversion!

That had to be done to write the tiles to CHR RAM quickly. I turned off the PPU and use the white palette. I didn't wanna write a few at a time.

The white flash bothered me too. How about having 3 blocks tilesets in VRAM? Like this..

address i: tileset 1
address j: tileset 2
address k: tileset 3

* user presses NEXT:
- 1st NMI: current tileset is at address k, update nametable
- 2nd NMI: write PREV tileset to address j
- 3rd NMI: write NEXT tileset to address i
- allow user to press NEXT/PREV again

* user presses NEXT:
- 1st NMI: current tileset is at address i, update nametable
- 2nd NMI: write PREV tileset to address k
- 3rd NMI: write NEXT tileset to address j
- allow user to press NEXT/PREV again

etc

Of course, a smarter solution is to only write 1 tileset, since the PREV tileset is already in VRAM after pressing NEXT, but you get the idea.

[Xkeeper]

Like I said elsewhere, it'd be fun to try this on a real NES, or even an emulator to see how far I could get it before it explodes or becomes impossible

I also think a Tetris-Attack styled combo/chain number popup would be neat to have as an option as an easier way to tell how long of a chain has been made...

Also, yeah, if you're going ot turn off PPU you could always just use the black palette (less intrusive), or even make it into an effect by writing the leftmost tiles to the rightmost tiles in order (2/frame), or backwards for previous ...

[Dwedit]

I don't mind the white palette when switching tilesets. It works, because it's accompanied by a "SHING!" sound effect.

[Celius]

Wow! This is really great Sivak! I'm quite impressed by how much progress you've made in such a short amount of time here on NESdev. This is really professional looking, and also the music/sound engine is good too. If you handed this game to me, I'd think that it was made by a team of developers. I'd also be quite addicted to it =). Good job!

[Jeroen]

I'll definitly wil be buying this if I have the cash.

[LoneKiltedNinja]

Agreed- this looks like a pretty solid title. I don't mind the white flash- it's not as if it's going on in real gameplay- but if you're really picky you could just stuff each tileset in the same location in your CHR bank and use MMC3 or another mapper to just switch the appropriate quarter-bank.

I like the music you've come up with so far. I can generally arrange a tune to take full advantage of the pAPU, but coming up with an original is a bit harder.

Out of curiosity, is that all background, or are the jewels sprites as they come down?

[Sivak]

Out of curiosity, is that all background, or are the jewels sprites as they come down?

The jewels and the "Next jewel" are sprites and get rendered into BG. The points gained (that small, unlabeled box in the middle) are also sprites.

MMC3 isn't really an option for cart form as that'll add a lot more cash to make and it's not worth it. The white flash only lasts for 2 frames and I'm not going to worry about it.

[Dwedit]

I always thought CHR-RAM was more expensive than CHR-ROM.

[tokumaru]

I always thought CHR-RAM was more expensive than CHR-ROM.

Maybe, but the MMC3 chip can't beat discrete logic.