After first chatting on this blog a couple of years ago, Perry Dyball has been back in touch with me to announce he’s resurrected an old programming project of his: “Super Air Raid” for the Camputers Lynx!
Perry tweets:
I’m looking forward to receiving my copy…
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Since I released the PI version of Jynx, I‘ve been chatting to Russell, moderator on the Raspberry PI forum, who posts as ukscone. Hey – did I pronounce “scone” right?
Russell has given me permission to link to his website which contains Lynx-related resources. This includes the User Manual!
Here’s the link, be sure to check it out:
http://www.russelldavis.org/CamputersLynx/
Thanks Russell!
Jonathan.
Well, it was over-due! Jynx meets the Penguin…
After no releases of Jynx for a while, I am now able to release version 1.0.9.
Today, I am making the Raspberry PI 2 (Raspbian) edition available! Get it from my Drop Box…
I have only targetted the Raspberry PI 2 at the moment. I cannot confirm it will work on the ARMv6 Raspberry PIs yet.
This will be followed in due course by version 1.0.9 for Microsoft Windows X86 32 and 64-bit, and 1.0.9 for Linux Mint 17.1, Elementary OS Freya, and will likely work on other “based on Ubuntu” editions of Linux. I will update this post when I am releasing those.
Jonathan
Recently I was contacted by Martin Judd, who wrote the computer game PANIK for the Lynx back in the 1980s. Cutting a long story short – the two of us have managed to rescue the game from some faulty TAP file images that were knocking around the internet.
Panik by Martin Judd
DOWNLOAD THE TAP FILE: PANIK.TAP
INSTRUCTIONS: Martin’s instructions for the game
Jonathan.
I am releasing a preview of my “Deflektor” clone for the Lynx 48/96.
I have not had chance to do any work on this in the past couple of weeks or so, because I have been on other projects.
Since I’m not sure when I’m going to be back on this, I am releasing a work in progress state snapshot of the game, that you can load into my Jynx emulator, click here to get it from my drop box.
Save the file to your computer, and load it into Jynx with: File > Load state snapshot…
Controls:
Also I wanted to say “thank you” to everyone who takes the time to stop by and read my blog! People are visiting from Russia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, USA, and loads of places in Europe!
Thanks!
Jonathan.
This game writing business has taken a little more time that I had hoped! I lost time last weekend, after I decided to adjust my approach to the ray tracing.
Originally, I did a ray tracing search at the resolution of the board squares. This returned a list of square centre positions, so I could draw the ray. This is what I showed in previous screenshots.
This suffered subtle problems when the ray went off-screen, because the search terminated before the path stepped off-screen, so the user could not see where the ray ended up, it would just end at the final mirror!
Also, to make the screen repaint handling easier, I decided I wanted to XOR plot the ray. This meant writing a line-drawing routine. I initially started a Bresenham algorithm, but abandoned this when I realised that rolling the search and line-drawing into one would be a great idea.
Here’s what it looks like now:
The ray tracing search MkII is now high-resolution, and steps in units of 2 pixels, in the direction of travel. At each step we XOR plot the point on screen. When we intersect the centre-piece of a mirror, we re-direct the ray. Similarly, intersecting the centre of other objects allows their specific actions to take place. The ray tracing terminated when:
This is currently wrapped in a Lynx BASIC program that calls two assembly language modules, and I have a playable demo!
Not everything is done yet – there are other objects I have yet to implement.
This then needs wrapping with a title screen, scoring, energy loss, and so forth.
… And I need some levels defining!
Jonathan
Some interaction is added, but the screen isn’t re-painting properly, so the above is just a hint at what will come…
I’ve got the ray path working, after fixing about 4 bugs in various routines. Z80 is a bit more difficult than my ARM and X86 assembler experience.
I have, however, realised an error in my design: The double-sided mirrors have only 8 discrete angles. I need to increase this to 16, in order to be able to reflect the rays along the “22.5” degree paths!
I will need to draw 8 more mirror sprites (argh) and alter the enumeration encodings for the board pieces to accomodate the extra mirrors.
Code changes ahoy!
Jonathan.
Nice milestone moment: A simple first level set up. This will do for testing the ray path finder…
Further to my previous post…
This shows all the sprites I have defined at the moment:
Might just alter the “wall” sprite image before I go live with this, not too happy with that one.
