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HomebrewSega Master System / Mark III / Game Gear |
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Artfull
Game for Master System
| Version | Date | By | Download |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.4 | 9 Apr 2023 | Z80ASMprogrammer2022 | Artfull-SMS-1.4.zip (259KB) (includes source) |
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Discuss thisThere is a forum topic for Artfull |
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Competition EntryThis was a competition entry in 2023 |
Old Versions
| file name | size (bytes) |
|---|---|
| total 2 files | 513K |
| Artfull-SMS-1.00.zip | 256K |
| Artfull-SMS-1.3.zip | 258K |
Description
This is a Sega Master System game like no other (to my knowledge). Upon starting the game you will see the six options below in the title screen animation. Pressing 1 or 2 selects the options.
Artfull is an original Sega Master System game. Two teams of human players, using designated artists, referred to as P1 and P2 in the game,take alternate turns as the team doing both the drawing as artist and as the the guessing team. Only the team of the current artist is allowed to guess the opposing team stays silent. Player's 2 of the red team with score represented by the red counters. Player's 1 of the blue team with score represented by the blue counters. The artists sends graphical commands (in the MergeDraw programming language) to draw the desired object (known only to the artist). The guessing team must guess the desired object to win a point. A clue of the type of object e.g. “creature” is shown at the bottom of image.If the guessing team is correct a point is awarded by a designated person(can be for example a non-player or the artist). One game consists of 4 points (i.e. each player must draw 2 images each). At the end of the game the team with most points wins. Artists either: draw over pre-selected images to express the associated object (or phrase) , draw an image entirely from scratch where the object to be drawn is noted on paper (referred to as “on your paper” in the game) beforehand. This is a human only game-in other words there is no vs CPU team-the (Master System) console is used like a “game board” (a bit like if 2 human players are playing computer generated chess board to use a random game example) but the important difference here is the console is essential to be used as the “board” ; unlike chess there isn’t an non-electronic version of this game because its based on programming on an electronic console . The number of blue counters and red counters shows the score for the blue team and the red team respectively in every game. The score is also shown below the image after every point played for. Though the game is based on programming it is designed to be fun to play so even non-programmers can program without maybe knowing! The aggregate scores over a series of games (drawing over existing images or draw from scratch) since the console is turned on is shown on the title screen see above. The numbers by the blue counter and red counter,on the title screen,shows the aggregate scores for the blue team and the red team respectively. The aggregate is over the sum of points for both types of drawing game modes. To reset the aggregate scores you need to turn the console off or on. The aggregate score may be used,for example , to compete which team gets the first to five points after two games. At the moment the game is a Two-Mega Cartridge which means it has enough images/art works for three unique games (four images are required for one game) -which is enough to experience what the game is like to play for the drawing over art work mode. Having 15 images (which requires a two-Mega cartridge to store) does not have an impact on the mode where you draw all the images entirely. The code is designed so it can be expanded to accept up to 512 images (though it would have taken a long time -many days past the 27.3.23 deadline-to do all 512 images) and with 512 images it would be a Four-Mega Cartridge since each image takes 8K memory.
The game is coded to make good use of the Sega Master System Hardware in the following ways:
- It uses nearly all the graphical tiles to show the colour works of art and an easy to use well presented game GUI/MergeDraw programming GUI.
- It uses the fact that the Sega Master System is a console that does not have high resolution colour clash (not true for all Z80 based computers) this allows to draw over existing images as the player expects without colour clash artifacts.
- It uses the Sega Master System’s built in feature to have a up to Four-Mega cartridge without any extra mapping hardware which works fast enough (accessing the memory past the 64K limit) to draw over the images in real time where needs be. The generous Four-Mega Limit (provided already by the console) means there is plenty of space not to use compression and actually it is required not to use compression (for the curious-I tried compressed and Z80 ASM decompressed images and that turned out to be too slow) . Instead the images are paged in (past the 64K limit) on the ROM and then drawn over (which is quicker than reading from loading the image into VRAM then accessing VRAM to draw over it). The game uses paging in slot 2 and two uncompressed full colour 8K images are stored in each 16K page-any commercial flash cartridge has slot 2 paging i.e. no custom mapper chip is required (not true for all z80 based system cartridge games).
Tested and working with MEKA 0.80 Alpha.
