#Apple #LiquidGlass #iPadOS #WorldSightDay2025

This month on the Byte High No Limit blog, Liquid Glass and iPadOS 26.

And a reminder that it's not too late to sponsor my abseil for World Sight Day 2025:

sightsaversie.enthuse.com/pf/andrew-owen

andrewowen.net/blog/ipados-...

#WorldSightDay2025 #SightsaversIreland #Ocuco #AbseilCrokePark

sightsaversie.enthuse.com/pf/andrew-owen

On Thursday October 9, I'll be abseiling 150 feet (45.72 meters) from the roof of Croke Park to raise funds for Sightsavers Ireland supporting World Sight Day.

I think I've got all the tests figured out now. This should provide full coverage for all the game logic and features.

Yes, the color resolution is impossible for a ZX Spectrum. Originally, I was porting U4 to T/S2068 derivative (which had 8×1 attributes). In 2011 JoeFish showed it could be done in software across 16 columns with BuzzSaw+. I went two better and did it across 18. But, ZXodus I was just a tile engine.

Line of sight occlusion is done. I'm grateful for this info (buff.ly/4hvJgfI). But ended up with a 137 byte lookup table in fast RAM, ray casting from the center out. I used bit twiddling to swap buffers and mark the end of rays. It's a reasonable compromise between appearance, size and speed.

As much as I want to put off doing combat, my QA has asked me to prioritize it. So I've created this strange looking combat map that has all the possible terrain types that you might encounter. You'll get a default party of cleric, fighter, mage and thief to test the various combat styles.

Done:

World map test (overhead or zoomed).
Town map test (17 towns).
Encounter map test (17 maps).
Font test (256 characters).
Tile test (512 tiles) with animations.
Audio test (11 tunes & 28 sfx).
Create game package (tape).
Watch the moon phases from the game menu.

To do:
Zoomed town maps

Reading a 32×32 chunk of the world map into the buffer is done. It's possible to view the whole world now, but it's quite slow because it's refreshing the entire buffer every time you move (1024 bytes). Next up is to scroll the buffer and fetch only the missing 32 bytes, which will be 32× faster.

No bad data in the encounter maps. To save memory, the tile screen is also technically an encounter.

The mini-map uses pure color and 8x4 attributes. This means if one of a pair of even/odd tiles is bright, they both will be. But the maps look better that way than if I reduced them to 8 colors. Also, the test-driven development is really paying off as two of the compressed town maps were corrupted.

In a large project, it helps to have well documented code. I'm using ASM Doc, a Perl script by Bogdan Drozdowski inspired by Java Doc. I only had to change one line of code to get it to work with modern Perl. All the visuals changes are done purely with CSS.

It's now possible to view all 512 tiles in the devkit. Half are used in the 2D view and the other half in the 3D view. The next task is to add the animation code. Sprite animation is done by swapping, or cycling through tiles. This will be confined to animations that modify the tile definitions.

The software driven screen mode is added with the timing fixed for the +2B model. The raster chasing code is about 6K in length. I should fix the code so the display mode works in the monitor as well as in runtime. But I'm tempted to do the title animation first.

I realize I should really post a video of this. But, I got the music working in the devkit. But to do that, I had to get the interrupt manager working (there aren't enough t-states in a frame to do everything every frame). The biggest hassle was keeping track of which ROM is paged in. Next up: S.E.

The devkit can now build the game package. That's all the I/O done. Time to start building tests for the assets.

I now have the basic I/O working on the game engine. I can:
* Print text to the screen.
* Read keyboard input into a buffer.
* Load from and save to tape.

Three of the main menu options are now functional:
* FONT TEST
* CREATE GAME PACKAGE (saves the game to tape)
* EXIT (back to the game)

This year, I resumed work on my 8-bit cRPG engine. Now that I'm stitching it all together, I'm not sure the dialogue tree for 256 NPCs is going to fit into 16K of RAM. I guess I'll have to prioritize the ones that are most important to the plot in the sample game I'm developing to go with it.

#zxspectrum #retro #emulation #videogames
So I might have had a thing or several to do with a certain retro computer called “The Spectrum”. presse.plaion.com/RELIVE-THE-M...

#blog #livres #français #liens

J'ai mis à jour mon site web. Dans la mesure du possible, les liens vers les livres renvoient tous à l'édition française.

andrewowen.net/fr/