Hi,

Anyone know if the VSCREEN engine can work without the masking sprites used to hide the border?
Maybe could be used with 8 sprites on row?

Yes it can, just a very small update to the source code would take care of it. It would also make sense to use characters for some moving items...

thx, Magooo.

Recently, ( see sp manbow2 ) it was proved that a limited horizontal scroll is possible also on screen 5 at the following conditions:
-draw a part of the screen on a hidden page after using r18 to fine-scroll horizontally.
-do not draw unchanging tiles between frames.

I've done some experiment and the horizontal scroll could reach 65 fps at 60hz on a 28*20 char area in sc5.

It's possible to modify the vscreen engine and make it working in screen5 ?

Everything is always possible but I think writing a new engine screen 5 based (like the one of Total Parody) would make more sense... VScreen is very much based on the idea of a tile based screen mode. A V9990 port would be much easier than a Screen 5 port...

@Magoo: v9990 is a to high spec hardware. my wish is to do a v9938 implementation, but taking this in account it's not an easy task.

Maybe the engine could be also sw-tile based, by blitting the chars stored in vram. (My test program does this)

Of course, v9958 / and especially v9990 make the programmers life easy, but restrict the number of msx'es where could run...

@Magoo: do you think is possible to adapt ( o rewrite ) VScreen using screen 5?

Writing a new sc5 engine is possible of course, but I would not be interested in doing such thing myself. You would be very limited regarding how fast you can scroll, perhaps one or two pixel at a time. Not exactly ideal when you want to make a fast action game...

Maggoo: what's the status and plan of VSCREEN anyway?

Last version is still 1.0. I made a few changes to the code to be able to compile on the PC using a cross assembler and have a few ideas for improvements but right now, I barely have the time to even turn on my MSX.