Notices by Colin McMillen (colin_mcmillen@piaille.fr)

#appleII people, would anyone be able to dump the ROM of their MouseCard? We're having doubts about the existing one in MAME. (https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/13598)

#RetroComputing

"I'm just debugging, officer"

#RetroComputing

Previously, but I forgot to post, I have, as you've seen from the previous video, implemented a interstitial screen between levels, showing your score and the next level.
It required completing my font, and a little bit of code: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/4f227989ad474025d5a041ca61556b6cd665354d

By the way, @circfruit, the game is now keyboard-controllable.
Not only that, but it can also run without a MouseCard installed!

I have prepared, very laboriously, a start screen. (Yes I did place every letter one by one haha). I'll install it in the game later because my eyes are tired.

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #PixelArt

The start screen, integrated. Also just committed a reorganisation/cleanup of the code, splitting it into more functions rather than the previous enormous loop. This allows me to get nice call graphs with KCachegrind, in which I confirm that my whole screen drawing is just under 4000 cycles on average.
It makes it faster than it takes the ray to reach the top-left of the screen during vertical blanking (4550 cycles) and leads to no tearing or flickering!

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #MARCHintosh

New side quest unlocked, extending cc65 in a satisfying way to include the original 48kB Apple ][

I've added a "you win" message at the end of the game, a a going back to the start screen, instead of just quitting.

We know the game is won when loading the next level from floppy fails, so I wanted the victory message to acknowledge that, a bit tongue-in-cheek.

Commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/acf87dadbc0582866ccd30734d550292eb12242d

#RetroComputing #Apple2

Added the start of a high score table. There are four steps in a high score table:
- load it
- figure if player has a spot in it
- ask them their name
- save it.

I've started with step three because I felt like it and also because it's easier to do steps 3 and 4 so I have data for step 1 and 2.

Commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/9f0897c276dcae0c7a3c4d0142261a110288a2dd

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #MARCHintosh

It even helps with loading times! The floppy is slower to read 11-13 more blocks than the decompressor takes!
Double win.

(sorry for the flicker in the video)

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #MARCHintosh

The only annoyance is that it requires 4kB of memory to store the compressed data before decompressing it in one go.
I should look into making it work with a 1kB buffer and decompressing in multiple reads. That's probably not obvious.

So, with the possibility to ship 30 levels, tonight's work is cut out for me : I'll replace the "go to next level when the plane X reaches the right of the screen" with configurable level exits, as in the original game

I implemented dynamic exits (commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/ff28f3b1ce923d93dd93836dd933a74f54e4a545) so I added exits on the left of levels too, allowing to revisit levels (commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/f8be708eb1426c1d21b94530b17d5b42a6c0c1db).
Time bonus is only counted once otherwise it's too easy!
Level state resets when we come back to one, but that's fine by me.
(Edit: and this demo showed me a wrong hitbox on level 3's table hitbox, so commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/291e624951a68c296018c6e6b6f755b91d300bde)

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #GameDev #MARCHintosh

Working on levels. I'll have you know that I steal most of my level elements from Shutterstock, scale them down, and use them to draw my things. Here, have a hot bath!

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #GameDev

Let's start the weekend with a little animation on crash. It's a mix of hacky and clean and I like how I did it, so there's that!

Commit: https://github.com/colinleroy/a2tools/commit/c51ff3f98a23c2734fd25dd1dad229d178508fa9

#RetroComputing #Apple2

I've started working on a "house map" because it's getting confusing to remember which level is which when I define them in the assembler sources.

Maybe I'll get super-wild and make a house map generator?

#RetroComputing #Apple2 #gameDev

I went off a tangent and cleaned up my sound player/samples generator.

It is fully configurable and allows one to play sound clips from .wav files in an Apple II program.

From a otherwise very small program, it is able to play a 4kHz, ten seconds file from memory.

Maybe it will be of use to other people.

#RetroComputing #Apple2

Full write-up on how to use my sound player in a#cc65 Apple II binary.

https://www.colino.net/wordpress/en/archives/2025/03/01/apple-ii-a-simple-way-to-play-sound-samples/

#RetroComputing #Apple2

The side quest of the day is to figure out why Gimp crashes when I copy thin bands of pixels, patch it, figure out it's already fixed upstream, and provide an Ubuntu package patch.

It happens only when the Patterns dialog is visible, and it's because the preview of a 40x1 copy buffer is scaled down to 16x0, and it's indeed fixed upstream (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/commit/64f45df6ce6)