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Does anyone else also think that the hitbox of the character feels to big?
I keep dying by the first few obstacles. :(

I'm going to change that :-P

So, these days i tested the game on Megadrive, and it was working flawless, but as I saw the reports on Blocky and FlipFlap, i tested it today on a Master System.... And all is absolutely grabled... :-S

I think it's the same problem, writing to VDP too fast and too much.

Looking to solve that.

BTw, I've just sent version 0.2! :-D

Enjoy!

Garbled? It wasn't when I tested it! Also SMSlib is supposed to be VRAM safe... ok, there might be still bugs...

kusfo: just attach the new files (game only and sources) here and we can put them up on the page.

Here we are!

Sverx, i'm supossed to be using the newer Vram safe version...

gaudream2.jpg (104.95 KB)

gaudream.zip (24.84 KB)

Gaudream-src.zip (712.98 KB)

It seems to be missing inputs occasionally (when falling usually)

kusfo wrote

i'm supossed to be using the newer Vram safe version...

I'll check during the weekend which problems it's experiencing on the hardware, and hopefully fix the library ASAP.

May i have to edit the page manually to include the new version? I can't see an edit button!

You can now. Edit the version number and save, then click the link to upload.

I tested this again on my SMS II and I didn't see any VRAM corruption. Maybe it's happening later in the game so that I didn't see it because I just can't get past first few obstacles?

Just starting, the logo and main screen are ok, but the game is garbled as hell.

I tested that in a sms I with a Master Everdrive. On a Sega Megadrive it's working nicely

This is suggesting me timing differences between SMS I and SMS II VDP, which is quite curious, but not impossible after all.
Unfortunately I have a SMS II only so I either need to test this version myself on a friend's SMS I (and it's not going to happen soon since he lives quite far from where I live) or I need someone posting a few pictures of the screen so that I might try to understand what's going wrong.

p.s. all this reminds me that one SEGA manual said that a delay of 28 cycles was needed between VRAM writes but tests showed that 26 cycles were enough...

http://www.smspower.org/forums/14997-HorizontalScrollPaletteChangeMidFrame#81643

I'm going to post two test file later so that we can try to understand this thing once and for all.

Please test the two attached ROMs on your SMS I
@Maxim: I took your ONO since I had these ROMs already available, I hope you don't mind :)

ono26-28.zip (25.7 KB)

two ROMs in the zip

This is a video of Gaudream garbled graphics.

I'll try to test your roms and the one's Calindro sent me tomorrow!

VID-20150405-WA0004.zip (3.15 MB)

Amazing... tilemap seems correct, but tiles (and palette, probably) seems completely broken. Do you load the tiles with screen on? I mean, you probably are loading initial splash screen logo and main menu while screen is off and after that you're doing everything with screen on.
If you can run a test loading tiles with screen off instead you'll help me a lot in finding which function actually pushes data too fast.
Or it's a completely different problem, I'm going to read VDP revisions differences once more to see if something peculiar hits me...

I gave a look at the source code and I didn't find anything peculiar there, so I'm really quite puzzled.
I've just got one weird request: can you try using bank 4 for logo screen assets and bank 2 for main graphics assets (thus swapping them around)? Then let's see if the logo appears correctly.

Results from the test roms sent by Calindro

i'll try to turn off the VDP before updating the tilemap, and also interchanging the Banks..

Btw, the ONO rom is working flawlessly...

IMG-20150406-WA0002.jpg (93.01 KB)

kusfo wrote

Btw, the ONO rom is working flawlessly...

Which one? Both? So we should exclude VRAM timing problems.

sverx wrote

kusfo wrote

Btw, the ONO rom is working flawlessly...

Which one? Both? So we should exclude VRAM timing problems.

The testrom indicates that the VDP found in his SMS is the VDP known as SMS II VDP. That should make it even less likely to be a timing issue. :)

I just noticed that Gaudream's filesize isn't a power of 2. I remember an issue with a rom with a filesize that wasn't a power of 2 on an Everdrive.
Can you expand it to a power of 2 filesize?

I supossed that it is a VDP 2, because Micromachines is working fine on this machine.

Both ONO roms are working ok!

I'll try to make the rom fill 128k

Given all these additional info, I would say we're not experiencing VRAM timing problems, but something very different.
To me, it seems like it is loading VRAM contents from a wrong ROM location, but I'm not sure how this is happening. That's why you should run the two suggested tests:

1 - try to make the ROM 128KB (you can add few more banks with few bytes in it)
2 - try swapping the bank 2 and bank 4 contents (if the problem arises when accessing bank 4 then you'll see a garbled logo right from the start)

After those tests (and ONLY after that) please download the updated devkit. I wonder if uninitialized RAM might have been a problem.
I would say NO, but I'm known to be wrong often ;)

I'll try this afternoon!

I haven't been keeping up with this thread, but I think it is indeed possible that the problem is uninitialised RAM. Running it through debug, it is using uninitialised memory, and in the case of Flip-Flap, after testing a few different things I found that the graphical issues were a problem with uninitialised memory all along.

It works!
Simply rounding up the rom to 128k was enough! not need to update devKit nor changing the banks!

is these entirely related to the Master Everdrive? Or is it related to the console itself?

kusfo wrote

It works!
Simply rounding up the rom to 128k was enough! not need to update devKit nor changing the banks!

is these entirely related to the Master Everdrive? Or is it related to the console itself?

The console doesn't know anything about the file or the filesize so it can't be affected.
The Everdrive emulates a mapper and this mapper seems to fail with the filesize you had.

The Everdrive sources (for an earlier version) show that it only loads multiples of 64KB (possibly related to the flash chip requirements).

New version!

A lot of things still to do, but on the way to make it more polished!

kusfo wrote

It works!
Simply rounding up the rom to 128k was enough! not need to update devKit nor changing the banks!

Yeah, so probably if you had tested swapping banks 4 with 2 you'll end up with the problems I described. Data in bank 4 wasn't accessed (or loaded) correctly. An EverDrive problem, I guess.

New version with some more improvements!

The latest version 0.04 plays much better and it's also nice that it doesn't reboot to title screen between each attempt. It's a shame that the game didn't initially enter with functional gameplay.

yeah, that's one disadvantage of starting only a couple of weeks before the deadline :-P

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View topic - [Coding competition 2015] Gaudream by DanySnowman, Davidian, Kusfo

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