SMS Cast by SMS Power! [web]
------------------------------------------- SMS Cast: a Tribute to Loose Logic by Omar Cornut (Bock) E-mail: omar@cornut.fr Web: http://www.smspower.org ------------------------------------------- Developed 03 May 2002 - 14 May 2002 Released 27 May 2002 This SMS demonstration is dedicated to my friend Masato Ozaki for his birthday (27 May 2002). He is one great SMS fan. Masato owns a game shop called "Loose Logic" in Hokkaido (Japan), focusing on retro systems. Thus the name of the shop in the demo. Technical Notes: Just as any piece of code for the SMS, this demo required more work, blood and sweat than you would expect. It's coded in Z80 using WLA-DX as the compiler, and various routines of mine that I already used in other SMS projects. One of the challenge was generic data management: the demo includes 51 different characters. Although the code is actually not 100% generic (ex: the animation system could have been made better), it works well and after having made dedicated tools, I could convert and use game characters with not so much difficulty. It took me about 8 hours to rip, convert and setup all characters, although I must admit that my productivity doubled when I was actually smart enough to know that my own emulator differenciate black of sprites from black of disabled background (Alt-F11). 8 hours may seems enormous, but without my tools it would have taken much more probably. I used Tile Studio to make up the background maps, using an homemade exporter script, then doing two conversions (hex->bin and bin->chunked) on the data. Tile Studio is however extremely buggy on my computer and destroy files very regularly, so I'll probably stop using it in the future. The music being played is a raw, non modified VGM file. The demo includes a simple VGM player for SMS, handling only what was necessary to play the Chaprun tune (Fantasy Zone 2). I had to code a dumb way of rounding non-frame waits to frame waits, since the optimized VGM data contained several of them for long delays. The cast string was originally scrolling from right to left - using H-Interrupts - but this caused many problems during development and was removed. Thought: It is very difficult to code actual good SMS games. Greetings: All SMS Power members and regulars All SMS Fans in the world Hope that you'll enjoy. Omar
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