Been quite a while since my last post. There are a combination of reasons, but primarily it's that work has gone from 1 to 100 and kids' soccer season is in full swing. And I also have to admit that I'm just a little bit over Xevious now.
However, I have still been working on the next Beta release when I can. The particular issues that remain include sound, and artifacts that only appear on real hardware; so working on either isn't possible during lunchtime at my desk. That hasn't helped matters either.
I had a theory on the artifacts (aka "sparklies") but that hasn't panned out. I've decided - for now at least - that I can live with them. Nothing that a crappy composite picture won't mask anyway! Maybe sometime down the track when working on other projects I may get another insight?
The sound isn't proving to be going well either. I re-allocated some of the sounds to make use of ADPCM-B on the cartridge-based systems, and CDDA on the NGCD. This allows me to mix the Solvalou background 'tune' and the Andor Genesis sound. It was also supposed to simplify some of the logic that calculates when to stop certain sounds.
However it seems to run amok fairly frequently now, sometimes playing sounds when they shouldn't and sometimes muting sound altogether. I'm yet to actually confirm, but I'm fairly certain it's to do with the 68K writing sound commands faster than the Z80 can process them. Of course the arcade code just writes sound commands whenever it needs to, and I have no control over that. It won't be trivial to solve...
These issues aside, the Beta is all-but-ready for release. A few minor enhancements/fixes that jotd has discovered during the Amiga port, and I'm well and truly ready to wrap it all up.
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| NaggyNaggerson created this awesome 'flyer' for the Neo Geo version of Xevious |
On other news, I've been working a little on Donkey Kong, mainly during lunchtimes at work when I can't work on Xevious for reasons outlined above. I've eliminated all the old macros that didn't really work the way I want them to now, and it's only a little broken! In the process I replaced all the branch and jump opcodes with the gnu pseudo opcodes that automatically calculate the optimum instruction. Next step is to replace all the video/sprite calls with osd_XXXX functions.
Finally, I've been tweaking the Xevious makefile and project directory structure to accommodate the new sound and ultimately produce a .CHD rather than a .ISO to accommodate the audio tracks. That was a learning exercise in itself. Of course that will need to be carried over to DK as well.
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