VIChaos

[Vic Porter]

VIChaos is a port of the Spectrum game for VIC-20.
Requires 16k memory expansion.

VIChaos is a turn based wizard battle strategy game for 0-8 players.
The original version by Julian Gollop was released on Spectrum in 1985.
This port is based on the GBA port sources (chaos-0.82). Thanks quirky!

The source code is included in the download.

[orion70]

Hey, thanks for having completed this! Will definitely try it.

[Mayhem]

Next thing to do, if possible, user defined graphics!

[mrr19121970]

Next thing to do, if possible, user defined graphics!

This was my thought... but after asking why PITFALL conversion needed more than the ATARI 4k, I was cautious as not to offend.

[Mike]

Next thing to do, if possible, user defined graphics!

This was my thought... but after asking why PITFALL conversion needed more than the ATARI 4k, I was cautious as not to offend.

Then you must have read something wrong into my reply at that time.

My general assumption is, that there are no dumb questions, only dumb answers.

When I answered your question, I was sure for myself that you did not know enough about the technical differences between Atari 2600 and VIC-20 to come to a sensible judgement why the VIC chip requires a lot more program code to effectively emulate what the TIA can do out-of-the-box. Put the other way round, the TIA does likewise have a hard time to implement something just barely reminiscent of a (bitmapped) frame buffer, something the VIC-I easily can do.

In short: as soon as the video chip doesn't support some type of graphics directly, you'll need to throw at least some code at it - provided the display effect can be reproduced in some kind by the video hardware *at all*. In case of VIC Pitfall, that was quite some more code.

...

That being said, there's absolutely no reason why VIChaos couldn't sport user defined characters, unless VIC Porter wanted to keep the standard character set for purely 'aesthetic' reasons (i.e. keep it Rogue-like with letters). However, the original on the ZX Spectrum actually employs user defined graphics, so asking for UDGs on the VIC-20 sounds reasonable.

And we can savely assume VIC Porter *knows* how to do UDGs with bigger RAM expansions: witness the title screen and the lengths he went to even employ a specialised converter (with checks for colour clashes!) to produce a 'sparse' bitmap from a *.xpm file.

[Vic Porter]

That being said, there's absolutely no reason why VIChaos couldn't sport user defined characters, unless VIC Porter wanted to keep the standard character set for purely 'aesthetic' reasons (i.e. keep it Rogue-like with letters).

A little bit of aesthetic reasons, a little bit of inability to pixel one's way out of a wet paper bag. There's even enough RAM left to have UDG without trickery.

There is a bullet point for graphics in the WIP/RC readme TODO section, along with a notice of contributions being welcome. So far into my career I've received no help besides testing (which, make no mistake, I'm grateful for). But the source is there, feel free to make a deluxe version. Just be sure to improve the sounds too.

By the way, please do not mix my nick with my occupation.

(Disassembling the next game...)

[Kweepa]

Hi, thanks for your work on these ports!
This is not a request (or demand!) for you to make any changes... just some thoughts.
The game is pretty hard to read with ASCII art.
I think the easiest way to improve the look would be to modify the playfield from 15x10 (150 squares) to 12x12 (144 squares) (the code *seems* customizable that way...) and then use the original 16x16 sprites on a 24x25 screen.
http://chaosremakes.wikia.com/wiki/File ... _sheet.png
Looks like there are about 250 16x16 sprites (excluding the font) which is about 8k of data.
I imagine this would require 32k.
(Edited to reflect more accurate sprite count!)

[Vic Porter]

I think the easiest way to improve the look would be to modify the playfield from 15x10 (150 squares) to 12x12 (144 squares) (the code *seems* customizable that way...) and then use the original 16x16 sprites on a 24x25 screen.

I wanted to keep the gameplay reasonably close to the original (well, the GBA port anyway). Resizing the playfield does not seem like a bad idea.

16x16 sprites would need 24k or 32k. 8x8 sprites is possible with minimal changes in code; I think there's more than 4k free RAM for the taking. Not sure if 8x8 graphics would help much if ASCII is proving troublesome.

In any case, I'm done with this one. I hope someone enjoys it.

[Kweepa]

Here are some 8x8s...

chaos.png (1.14 KiB) Viewed 7284 times

(Updated with what I think is the rest of the sprites...)

[Ola H]

Now that's good use of 8x8 pixels!

[orion70]

Like

[merman]

Awesome

[Vic Porter]

Well, I'll be damned. That is some fine pixeling! Now someone do decent sfx.

[Neo-Rio]

Well, I'll be damned. That is some fine pixeling! Now someone do decent sfx.

Still need to teach us VIC noobies how to use your sound editor.
I managed to code some sound in BASIC in my port of Telengard, but your sound editor is something else.
I have the vic-20 reference manual here, so any way to interpret the editor in light of the reference manual would be a nice place to start.

Keep up the good work Vicporter! Can't wait to see the results of what you feel like porting next! You have a lot of good titles to choose from!

[Vic Porter]

Still need to teach us VIC noobies how to use your sound editor.
I managed to code some sound in BASIC in my port of Telengard, but your sound editor is something else.
I have the vic-20 reference manual here, so any way to interpret the editor in light of the reference manual would be a nice place to start.

I'll take a stab at it, but teaching is not my forte. (Contributions welcome...)

The VIC-20 Programmers Reference Guide (PRG) speaks of "speakers" 1 to 4 at addresses 36874..7 ($900A..$900D) and volume setting at address 36878 ($900E). These correspond to the columns marked "CA" etc in the numerical order. Each row corresponds to a frame; 1/50sec on PAL, 1/60sec on NTSC.

The ".." marks represent that no new value is written to the register at that frame. Hexadecimal values get written as is. The "--" marks represent a 0 (corresponding to silencing the "speaker"). The "SS" marks the stop point of the sound.

So playing a single note on a channel/"speaker" x, waiting a while and turning it off looks like:

Code: Select all

Cx
C8
..
..
..
..
--

...where C8 is hex for 200 and Cx is the (non-editable) first line. This is kind of like the first example in PRG which poked 200 to a register and waited a while.

Best advice I have is to check the existing sounds (press shift-X, a, then once loading is done shift-N/M to change the sounds).

Keep up the good work Vicporter! Can't wait to see the results of what you feel like porting next! You have a lot of good titles to choose from!

Thanks. A lot more titles that time permits. Better get back to it...