Weeknight 'Virtual' Dev session #7, Thursday 26th November 2020, 7pm - 10pm

[Arcadian]

As the new games and demo coding sections of the forum are currently very active, we are now hosting weeknight "Dev sessions" on Zoom, that are primarily focused on the development of new games and graphics/music demos for Acorn computers as well as development tools, emulators and debuggers.

They take place the week in-between the 2 x Tuesday night 'general' sessions on the Thursday evening, between 7pm and 10pm.

The sessions are intended for developers to share progress updates and request/offer help and feedback. We hope that these sessions will help motivate and encourage developers to see projects through to completion.

Just to be clear - these sessions are open to everyone: programmers, graphics artists and musicians, even if you've just got an interest/appreciation of - or ideas for - new games and demos, please come along for moral support - there may be opportunities to beta-test new versions of upcoming projects . There really isn't a limit to the number of places available - well, the maximum we can host in a Zoom meeting is 100 but it's unlikely we'll ever get anywhere near that figure!

If there are any issues you'd like help with - or would like to demonstrate something - please leave details in the thread and we'll add them to the lists of items to be covered.

If you are new to Zoom, forum member JudgeBeeb has written a handy guide to getting set up and logged in.

I've already sent invites out to most of the Dev Night regulars, but should anybody else want to attend - or if you haven't received the Zoom logins - please post in this thread and I will send them to you.

Attended:

1. Arcadian (Dave)
2. tricky (Richard)
3. dudleysoft71 (James)
4. MarkDRyan (Mark)
5. controlbreak (Tony)
6. BigEd (Ed)
7. oss003 (Kees)
8. flibble (Peter)
9. 0XC0DE (Kelvin)
10. chrisn (Chris)
11. Tom Williamson
12. picosonic (Jasper)
13. dp11 (Dominic)
14. JIM (James) with son (Lewis)
15. philpem (Phil)
16. sPhilMainwaring (Phil)
17. ChrisSawer (Chris)
18. Leonardo
19. Julie_m (Julie)
20. EdwardianDuck (Jeremy)
21. dp11 (Dominic)
22. picosonic (Jasper)
23. spanners (David)

[Arcadian]

Latest schedule:

7:00pm - 7.15pm: General Chat

7.15pm - 7.45pm: Project Help / OPEN

7.45pm - 8.00pm: New game update (0xC0DE)

8.00pm - 8.15pm: Pacman update (Tricky)

8.15pm - 9.00pm: BCP - Back of Cigarette Packet (julie_m)
* Intro - Big projects vs memory
* BCP
* The beginnings, on the target side
* Host-side tools
* BeebAsm
* Not a BBC project anymore?
* Back to the target
* Memory (reprise)
* A target-side tool
* Putting it all together
* Where it's going next

9.00pm - 9.30pm: Mode 2 Repton/Pacton engine update (JIM)
I am going to discuss the project in general with a few videos of game play.
I will show my 4 way scrolling code, and demo, and discuss how it works.
I will also talk about compressing my mode 2 sprites to save memory with a demo of the code and how it works.
Finally I will demonstrate the level editor - hopefully this will be interesting. It's very quick!
Also, everything is on the BBC Micro or BBC Micro emulator (no pc tools used!).

9.30pm - 9.45pm: OPEN

9.45pm - 10.00pm: Ultimate Nightmare (ControlBreak)

[chrissawer]

Hi. could I have an invite please?

[EdwardianDuck]

Can you put me down as tentative please?

Nothing exciting to share though.

Jeremy

[dudleysoft71]

I can make it this time, I've been busy since the last time so I don't have anything to show though.

[markdryan]

I'll be attending but have nothing new to show or present.

[oss003]

I'll be there too.

Greetings
Kees

[0xC0DE]

I would like to attend and also give a quick update on my current Elk/Beeb game

[Snuggsy187]

Alas, I can't make this one

All have a good session !

[Arcadian]

I would like to attend and also give a quick update on my current Elk/Beeb game

Cool! Are you good for the 9.30pm - 10pm slot?

[Arcadian]

Hi. could I have an invite please?

Can you put me down as tentative please?

Zoom info PM'd to you both.

[0xC0DE]

I would like to attend and also give a quick update on my current Elk/Beeb game

Cool! Are you good for the 9.30pm - 10pm slot?

Is there a shorter slot (max 15m) available at the beginning of the evening?

[Arcadian]

Sure, how about 7.45 - 8.00pm?

[Arcadian]

Alas, I can't make this one

All have a good session !

Ah that's a shame, thanks for all the great updates you've given at the meetings so far - see you at the Thur 10th December sesh hopefully!

[0xC0DE]

Sure, how about 7.45 - 8.00pm?

That's fine, thanks!

[Arcadian]

K, schedule updated - can't wait to hear the latest about the game, the snippets on Twitter are really exciting!

[0xC0DE]

K, schedule updated - can't wait to hear the latest about the game, the snippets on Twitter are really exciting!

[markdryan]

I probably won’t be able to join after all. My laptop’s broken. Apologies for the late notice.

[julie_m]

There's an explanation of the BCP build process at the following link:

https://github.com/JulieMontoya/BCP_des ... ld-Process

[EdwardianDuck]

We touched on the question of how to use sideways RAM from BASIC in the context of a text adventure game. Given that my work in progress game, while not in BASIC, stores most of the text in sideways RAM, it seemed reasonable to throw together a proof of concept.

SSD attached. Boot using a Master or a Model B with bank 4 set to RAM.

The hard work is in done in assembler and in this demo the code is in SWRAM. That isn't ideal for multiple banks, but this is just a hacked up proof of concept. The BASIC code (and apologies for the code here, I don't write in BASIC myself) is fairly minimal.

Code: Select all

10 DIM MC% 32
20 P%=MC%
30 [
40 .desbank EQUB 0
45 .curbank EQUB 0
50 .entry STA desbank
60 LDA &F4
70 STA curbank
80 AND #&80
90 ORA desbank
100 STA &F4
110 STA &FE30
120 JSR &8000
130 LDA curbank
140 STA &F4
150 STA &FE30
160 RTS
170 ]
180 PROCMessage(0,0):PRINT
181 PROCMessage(1,2):PRINT
182 PROCMessage(2,0):PRINT
190 PROCMessage(3,0):PRINT
200 END
500 DEF PROCMessage(msg%,indent%)
510 A%=4:X%=msg%:Y%=indent%:CALL entry
520 ENDPROC

Source code for the SWRAM is in CA65, but I guess that could be ported to BeebAsm easily enough.

Anyone think this might be useful?

Jeremy

PS, it does text wrapping as well.

[julie_m]

Now, that's kind of handy!

It did set me thinking briefly about a complete adventure creation system, starting out in BASIC and gradually moving over to assembler until most of it is just PROCs and FNs calling machine code routines that implement drop-in replacements for the original BASIC .....

[Arcadian]

The video for julie_m's BCP Masterclass is now online ... thanks Julie!

http://abug.org.uk/index.php/2020/11/26/bcp

Covers:

• Intro - Big projects vs memory
• BCP
• The beginnings, on the target side
• Host-side tools
• BeebAsm
• Not a BBC project anymore?
• Back to the target
• Memory (reprise)
• A target-side tool
• Putting it all together
• Where it's going next

Stardot BCP thread:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17620