New version of New Rally-X for the BBC Micro

[Steve B]

The scramble video you posted there explaining what you did was very interesting. Amazing you got that working as well as you did.

The Rally X is looking great. It's a shame about the juddering on the X scrolling. It would look good to have X and Y scrolling.

[tricky]

The horizontal juddering is on beebem (except my version) and LCDs without pi: RGB 2 hdmi. Every other combination should be silky smooth (to use the technical term). My new R-Type demo will be the same, but I expect beebem to be fixed and enough people to want it even without the lcd users.

[lovebug]

great progress tricky, love the ai logic

i was enjoying this a lot and played many levels

[tricky]

Thanks, I know should get back to

[tricky]

No much progress, but I did just add colliding with enemy cars and rocks, loosing lives and game over, although a new one starts straight away.
The new tunes are placeholder.
I have probably introduce several new bugs!

[fwibbler]

I sense this will be a tough game when the enemy cars don't get stuck in their start positions!

[tricky]

Do you mean on the bonus rounds where they don't move until all your fuel is gone

[fwibbler]

Yep, thats the one!
I've a slightly longer play of it today.
When I crash (as often happens) the track palette changes colour. Shouldn't this only happen with each new level?

I find your version a little easier than the arcade one, which I don't mind as I'm useless at the arcade version.

[tricky]

I think it should only be per level, but as I've only just added crashing, I didn't realise that it was wrong.
As you can see so much more of the maze,I would expect it to be easier, so there will be a bit of balancing to do.

[lovebug]

great fun, I only just realised that the latest version has working smoke

[tricky]

I can't remember if it works properly as it is a bodge of the turn 180 admin for when the enemy run into dead ends.
I'm sure I've seen cars just spinning for fun.
I also can't remember if I fixed the bug where the cars could sometimes drive through it.

[tricky]

I've done a few more little bits.

I still have nearly 3KB free, any suggestions as to what to do with it?

I'm actually thinking of speech (10-15 seconds), possibly with a short sample (less than half a second) instead if there is no speech chip.

; TODO
; pick final list of colour selections and order
; check for nme speed and acceleration over levels
; "game over" message and tune (could use font or just a one off message 1/4KB)
; attract mode (probably 1/3KB)
; better challenge stage summary (probably needs a font 1/2KB)

other possibles
; engine sound - maybe vol = dist to nearest nme
; nme avoiding rock
; nme avoiding nme
; intermission!

Keys: Z X / : RETURN (smoke - short delay) on an emulator : may be mapped to '.

[lovebug]

with a little of the spare ram maybe the option to switch between the current new rally x and the original rally x sound ?

i love the original sound, so smooth

[tricky]

I thought that I preferred the new one, but now I'm not sure.
Maybe I should do both

[tricky]

This should be about it apart from some balancing of the enemy speed and acceleration over levels.
I still have 2KB free including 2 bytes of ZP!

[Cybershark]

I wasn't too familiar with the original game - I did buy the Namco Museum collections for the PS1 back in the day but don't think I spent much time on this one? Just got to say that I think what you've coded here is amazing - plays very smoothly! Perhaps it could be a contender for a future round of the high score challenge?

[tricky]

Thanks, a couple of my games have had an extra sort of high score challenge round as a kind of public beta test which, has been very useful for bug finding
Some of them have also been in the HSC proper.

It really needs some testing to see how well balanced it is.

I think it is essentially finished unless any bugs are found out the balance is way off.

[KarateEd]

Hi Tricky,

I did respond to your email. I think we can do this for 2 weeks as we've yet to choose games for the coming season.

I'll let the gaming boys and girls know.

[tricky]

Thanks Ed, that would be great.
I only know of one but, that I am calling a feature! The enemy card occasionally spin for no reason, but unless it happens too often, I'm going to call it bad driving on their part .
I don't know if there should be a scheduled rebalancing at some point, or just play it as it is and rebalance afterwards.

[tricky]

I promised that I would post my VGM converter and some sample output, so here it is.
The exe.zip has the windows command line exe.
Sorry, wrong code!

The .zp should be included in zero page, the .equb and .asm wherever they fit and the vmg_test.asm is just an example of how to call the other code.
basically silence everything at the start, ldy #tune_offset : jsr snd_start and then each frame or whatever frequency it was captured at jsr snd_update with interrupts disabled.

The code in test.asm and the defines in .zp are auto generated once the best compression scheme for the data has been calculated. This is why they are INCLUDEd in the other file, so that they can be regenerated as more tunes are added.

[tricky]

Updated to use new loader with key remapping and bonus round time cut to 1/4 - this may not be enough for later levels, but I can;t get that far to check!

[GPC]

I must say a huge thank you for this, I love Rally-X and have played it multiple times on my channel ( different versions ).
A good friend pointed this version out to me, with the help of Hrun the cat who appeared with gave it a go.

https://youtu.be/439LslPizGA?si=FvgIQqX-Tdvbccgx

For some reason I could not run this on the MiSTer FPGA, but it played perfectly on BeebEm which was a delight - that is now my go to choice of the BBC.

To sidetrack - I have memories of other people owning a BBC Model B and if I remember, didn't this have a cut out, punch out, area to the left or the right of the keyboard where you could plug something ? Vague memories !

Anyways, thank you Tricksoft - truely loved what you had done here for a game that I absolutely love.

[tricky]

Thank you, I make them mostly because I love them, but I also appreciate a bit of appreciation

I should go back and fix the challenging stage as I don't think it is very challenging

Someone took the beebfpga (by hogley ?) and potted some of all of it to the mister, you would probably have more luck with that. Having said that I started a new beeb emulator the other day and only two of my games don't work correctly, micro rally-x and astro blaster.