I was pleasantly surprised to see Maggoo mention Day of the Tentacle in another thread. This was one of the first games that made me think 'you see? some people know how to create nice games for PC'.

After seeing the Uncle in Brazil demo, I was quite convinced that a game like Day of the Tentacle should be possible on an MSX2 with HD (or CF) as well. Using the right compression, some clever thinking and uhm... hmm.. PCM? Muziekmodule? to play the samples might get some impressive results. I would appreciate a port of the game, but a similar game would be nice as well ^_^ I think it's never been done before on the MSX indeed.

However, I'm wondering what the trouble is in development, apart from the massive ammount of GFX needed.

That's one of the game type that would be the easiest to program actually, even in Basic/Nestor Basic / Xbasic (if I remember well, Uncle in Brazil was 100% in basic). Speed is really not the issue for that type of game. Quality of the graphics / storyline is another matter...

Well, you could try porting the SCUMMVM Engine to MSX-DOS perhaps .... it is open source and then we would also get games like MONKEY ISLAND and SAM & MAX to the MSX finally

DOTG & MI rule!

Anyway, wouldn't the msx2 VDP cook when copying all those gfx? I suppose you do want compariible sized characters moving around?

When porting SCUMM, I think the requirements will rise to turboR with GFX9000 and Moonsound ^_^

But.... if you use the right (to VRAM) compression, you can get far with an MSX2 as well. You will need to load small ammounts of data a lot, but... if you have a close look at DOTT only 1/3 of the screen is used for animations. That gives quite some extra space.

And then there's also the issue of storing all the gfx.. since there are a lot of!

I think it would be the best, not to store 'complete' scenes, but small elements out of which you can build a scene. But not in the RPG/platform style.. gfx should be like handdrawn, but if you have a big blue sky without clouds, you don't need to store that complete sky..

When you have CD-ROM or CompactFlash... you don't need to worry about storage that much anymore. The days of 2DD floppy disks are over

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And then there's also the issue of storing all the gfx.. since there are a lot of!

Just using some compression will get you far on a 64K machine already. Going to 256K should be more than enough for the program, graphics and (moonsound) music.

Anyway, I don't like this genre of games, so don't expect me to make it

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When you have CD-ROM or CompactFlash... you don't need to worry about storage that much anymore. The days of 2DD floppy disks are over

wel, I wish that was true... But I and a lot of other users still use 2DD's...
If only I had the moeny to buy an IDE-interface and a cheap HDD

Well.. I think a CF interface is a lot cheaper and easier. No external power supplies, cheap memory cards... what more do you want?

also I think a game on CF can highly increase Sunrise sales ^_^

I once tried to draw some GFX for such kind of game... Screen5 really can't help you here... I did some in screen 8 for some demo that was never released. It was green tentacle's room (with the stereo ... Looked pretty good (though it was never finished). But drawing an entire game like this seems like suicide to me... Thatz LOADS off work!

I think on MSX you're game would look more like Monkey Island 1 than DOTT or Sam&Max.

Well, I have an idea here:

Draw them on PC, in your favourite app. Then reduce colors to the appropriate palette, in Photoshop, using 'pattern' (no diffuse/noise!). The result is a realistic picture. The filesize of that picture will be large I suppose, since (because of the raster) there are a lot of unique pixels. It would be a nice trick then to break that picture in pieces, containing the pixels from "x:0..n step 2" and from "x:1..n step 2" (when we use 2 pictures, get the idea?) now you have pictures without raster-pixels, which should be small when packed runlength. When building up the pictures again you can use the raster effect again by mixing the 2 pixtures together.

I already did lots of tests with downgrading fullcolor 24bit pictues to a custom screen 7 palette (512x212x16), the result looks very cool.. near photorealistic.. and definitly not bad for just 16 colors. The typical msx monitor blurs those rasters away anyway (well, at least mine does)

comprende?? or is this all chinese?

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The filesize of that picture will be large I suppose, since (because of the raster) there are a lot of unique pixels.

Not at all! Even if you use a byte-based RLE algorithm there is only minor overhead at the edges of surfaces. An LZ algorithm cares even less about these things. So there is no need to split the picture like you suggested.

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I already did lots of tests with downgrading fullcolor 24bit pictues to a custom screen 7 palette (512x212x16), the result looks very cool.. near photorealistic.. and definitly not bad for just 16 colors. The typical msx monitor blurs those rasters away anyway (well, at least mine does)

Indeed. Ofcourse you will have to take into account the 'fixed' colors you need to draw your mouse pointer and maybe some other icons? For status or item bars on the top or bottom of the screen you can just use a palette split, so no problems there.

Are there then any problem at all using screen 7? if not, then that's a prefered screen imo..
True, you don't have 256 colors like in screen 8, but when using rasters, you can fake 16x16=256 colors, and even go beyond the current color depth, since rgb 0,0,7 AND rgb 0,0,6 will look like rgb 0,0,6.5 then..

gfx9000/turboR is no real option if you want to reach as many ppl as possible..

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gfx9000/turboR is no real option if you want to reach as many ppl as possible..

IMO that's such a bad excuse. Because if you really want to reach as many ppl as possible, you should program for MSX1 exclusively.

OTOH, if you make good games for e.g. Gfx9000, you encourage people to buy it!

Better yet, if you limit yourself to 64K non-mapped memory, you could even make a MSX1 + Gfx9000 compatible game! The loss of Main RAM is nothing compared the gain of 384K VRAM.

While I have no objections to using Screen 7 and I see no obstacles programming-wise, I do believe developers should not shy away from creating Gfx9000 games. There are hundreds of users already and with the current low price it's a great time to develop Gfx9000 games.