Horizontal Parallax Bitplane Scrolling Demonstration

[calimero]

^ yes indeed, many interesting project regarding ST scrolling is going on here on forum... thanx!

[EvilFranky]

Looking really good Joe.

[Ragstaff]

Looks great, just ran in Hataroid on my phone but will put it on a real St soon!

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Running great on real STE here. Thanks for the sneak peek, looking good!

[I_am_I]

Ran it on my STE and my stock Falcon, works a treat. Great stuff!

[Ragstaff]

I want to make it joystick controlled so that you can run left/right and jump, and then I'll use up the rest of the (512K) memory with more scenic objects.
I've no idea about sound. If anyone wants to volunteer a simple tune and tell me how to play it I could add that, memory willing.

Very impressive considering the 512k bit. Apparently the developers originally did a version that was 1MB only which used the same art as the Amiga version and ran a lot smoother, but the publishers wanted a 512k version so that hog-tied it a bit. Source

[joefish]

Yes, I've seen that before - he was mainly talking about the underground section though, and as I said, I think that's actually pretty impressive. I just think the artwork could have been better with a more considered choice of colour. Above ground, he still talks of the trees as sprites.

Maybe they considered bitplanes for the trees, but figured that dedicating so many colours to scenery wouldn't leave anything for sprites. My trick - of avoiding one background colour to spare four for sprites - obviously helps now, but without a time-travelling-hint-dropping device can't do much about it. And if I had access to one of those, then the 128K ZX Spectrum would probably have had a Timex-style multicolour mode too...

[Eero Tamminen]

tested it only now. Looking good, and I see it's also added to demozoo: http://demozoo.org/productions/156249/

[joefish]

Ooh, sweet. I should really get around to making it go the other way too. Been letting things slip for a little bit recently.

I could also link my Speccy stuff on that site...

[joefish]

Just gonna post this link here for safekeeping as I lost it and just re-discovered it. It was a project to remake Shadow of the Beast and has plenty of links to ripped graphics from the Amiga:

http://amigamuseum.emu-france.info/Fich ... emake.html

[joefish]

Actually, those rips have been rescaled or something; there are far more different colours than in the actual sprites.
These rips from the EU Megadrive version are very similar to the Amiga, though one or two colours have been added and the palettes altered.
http://www.spriters-resource.com/genesi ... eet/36844/
http://www.spriters-resource.com/genesi ... eet/42074/

The Japanese ones are what I found before. They've all been heavily recoloured, and they're a bit odder for it:
http://www.spriters-resource.com/genesi ... eet/41905/

Also, some notes on mine compared to the Amiga - mine is the full 320 pixels wide, whereas the playing area on the Amiga is only 288 pixels wide.
The place I've grabbed the sprites from also had twice as many frames of animation for the player - the Amiga version only has six frames for the run and looks jerkier.

But I'll cut mine down to the same number of frames as the Amiga and mirror them too, to run both ways. I've also found the proper bat on that sprite sheet above. Not sure yet whether to pre-shift him or shift him when drawn - probably the latter. Since on mine he has to be masked into all four bitplanes I can use more than just the 3 colours of the Amiga sprite too. I'm also going to try chopping the scenery into smaller blocks (down from 128x173 to 128x22 pixels) so I can try and fit more backgrounds into memory in one load.

I think I'll keep the screen 320 pixels wide, but I have just done some cunning meddling with the mountains to make them repeat after just 240 pixels, to cut down on what I store pre-shifted. Though I'm willing to bet no-one would have noticed if I hadn't mentioned it!

[Ragstaff]

Cool, looking forward to seeing it in action

[joefish]

Posting here the handful of sprites I've ripped from the Amiga version of Shadow of the Beast: