Project T first WIP

Paragon (1193)

29-11-2021, 19:08

Here is the first WIP of one of my new projects … Turrican for MSX1. At the moment, this is just a proof of concept. I still don't know if I will develop it further, as I still need official permission to do so. I have tried to contact Julian Eggebrecht (actual rights owner) to ask for permission, but so far have been unsuccessful. If someone can put me in contact with him, please do so. This would make me really happy as maybe this project could continue further. And now enjoy the video (set the quality to 720p50) and let me know what you think. Feel free to subscribe to my YouTube channel and page, and leave me a like

https://youtu.be/oHJ9Vpn4VNY

By Grauw

Ascended (10772)

29-11-2021, 19:23

Very cool! I always wanted to play Turrican .

By tfh

Prophet (3347)

29-11-2021, 19:44

That is another impressive piece of work Guiseppe! I really hope you can get permission and that we will get to see a real MSX port of Turrican. One of the best Amiga/C64 games ever....

By jltursan

Prophet (2619)

29-11-2021, 19:47

Keep on the good work with or without permission, the engine could work great with any other Turrican-like game!

I would really love to hear details about the multidirectional scroll if it works with compressed data (much harder to manage than a windowed display over a uncompressed big map)

By Uninteresting

Champion (352)

29-11-2021, 19:51

And, well, if you fail to get the permission, you have an engine you can use to create something new like Gunlord. Or Freedom Planet, which was originally a Sonic the Hedgehog fangame.

By thegeps

Paragon (1193)

29-11-2021, 20:17

Thank you all. The 8way scrolling engine works with 4x4 char tiles.in the beginning I've coded a 2x2 chars tile engine (starting from another project, a fixed screens platformer, that uses such tiles to store the screens of the map). But then, searching for Turrican info, I've discovered that it used 4x4 chars tiles so I've changed my code too. The world 1-1 map is 137x51 tiles (about 7KB)= 548x204 chars

By thegeps

Paragon (1193)

29-11-2021, 20:19

Actual gfx is ripped from C64, and just few modifies

By santiontanon

Paragon (1810)

29-11-2021, 20:54

Oh, very cool!!! I initially assumed it as 8x8 scrolling, but I noticed it looked too smooth, and was wondering about that, now I understand! Very nice!

By thegeps

Paragon (1193)

29-11-2021, 22:01

It IS a 8x8 pixel scrolling. 4x4 chars is each tile dimension: 32x32 pixel. It is a way to store the map without wasting too bytes. Everytime the scrolling has to move in any direction the code check witch tiles are involved, select the right row and/or column from it and put them in a RAM buffer (640 bytes, because 4 rows are reserved for scoreboard) then the buffer is moved to VRAM.
I had to add a delay of 3 vblanks to slow down the scrolling. The numbers in the left bottom that you can se are the row and column offset inside the 4x4 tiles (from -3 to 3) the other gfx char on screen is the low byte of x-offset in the map (when I need to, I compare it with the charset to know its content without using a debugger)

By santiontanon

Paragon (1810)

29-11-2021, 22:24

ah! I see, I see, my bad, haha. I read too fast. Now I understand the last line of your post above about the map dimensions (this happens to me for reading quickly while at work haha). Very cool though! Here's hoping that you get the green light to go ahead! I was also looking at the spectrum versions of Turrican in Youtube now, Turrican 2 is not bad atually, but Turrican 1 leaves a lot to be desired

By thegeps

Paragon (1193)

29-11-2021, 23:52

I agree, I think that seeing the screen update when scrolling isn't nice. I don't know if Spectrum video can be synchronized with vblank but it seems to me that the game was made just to make a profit by exploiting the hype of the c64 version