The Nes Dizzy I've seen is the first one, Dizzy the Adventurer. I'd forgotten how good it was, even without an energy bar..
So what size can a single 24kb screen compress down to? Hand drawn screens would be amazing. I've never used 1 or 2 bit tile maps for collision before so it would be great to learn this. I couldn't immediately see how it could be generated from the screen image itself though. For the test I would have sacrificed colour 0 for a duplicate black to out-line solid objects with. Collision could be detected from just the screen image itself but the collision tile map could be generated from a screen like that too. I'm not sure why there needs to be a foreground and background if the screens will be hand drawn? I was going to arrange the palette so several colours could be variable too, would this be a problem? > That all being said, it's a disc-based machine so multiloads aren't a > problem, are they? I vote aim high and break the world into chunks if > we overshoot. I wouldn't have a problem with that.. > I wrote a little Dizzy engine for the PC once, but have never built it > for Windows (it's SDL) and was based on the PC sprites and metrics on > a scrolling tile map. So it's not directly useful. I'm familiar with SDL so that would probably help a bit! I don't know what to say about the assembler option. I'm working on the real hardware and with Sim Coupe and I really want to carry on doing so at it is tremendous fun :) That said I can see the benefit of working with modern tools so maybe some sort of compromise could be reached? As to the screen format you propose, as I barely understand it and am potentially about to learn some very useful stuff from it I think it would be churlish to object! It would be good to establish what is on the table though. I'm just looking at how the Nes graphics translate to the Sams screen. ST or Miggy gfx look funny with the horizontal stretching and the Nes has a larger vertical resolution. Using the Spectrum screens as a starting point might be a good way to go but I need to do a bit more experimenting first. Also are we talking about porting a specific game or creating an original one? If original then the remit for the graphics changes dramatically. I would be more interested in remaking a specific version and then moving the objects to create a variation of the original. This could be an inital goal though. It would be easy to go back and make an original game later on using the same code and in the long term I think that would make the project more approachable for me. Rob.
