[Coco] Mary demo

[Roger Taylor]

At 06:19 PM 1/9/2008, you wrote:
>Roger Taylor wrote:
>>Ok, folks, with testers hard to come by at the rate I'm trying to 
>>finish this game, I've released a demo that plays by itself to give 
>>you an example.
>>Mary and the Butterflies
>>http://www.coco3.com/downloads/marydemo1.bin
>>http://www.coco3.com/downloads/marydemo1.dsk
>>Those with the VCC emulator can just click on the .bin file from 
>>Windows and it will start right into the game.  I urge you to try 
>>this on your real CoCo 3, any kind of setup, and give 
>>feedback.  I'm adding joystick support at this time.
>>Thanks, and enjoy.
>
>Far as the colors go, they are the same on 60Hz composite and RGB. A 
>slight amount of tint, color, and brightness tweaking was needed but 
>that is typical. There is no flashing or screen glitching. The sound 
>is pretty good but if Mary is yelling when stung that does not come 
>through  as a voice but a strange sound.
>
>I did notice a problem with sprite crashing that was slight on RGB 
>but quite noticeable on composite. When Mary runs past a tree, the 
>green of the leaves and the pink of her dress turn into orange with 
>some black edging. That does not seem to happen with the bees and 
>butterflies but they mostly bounce off the trees anyway. Mary is 
>definitely transparent rather than solid.
>
>Looks like a great family game!


Thanks, Robert.  So you're saying that in CMP mode on a composite 
monitor or TV, the colors appear close enough to the RGB version?  I 
used my own eyes instead of a translation chart to tweak this so I 
was hoping it went ok.

What is the strange sound you hear for the screaming sound?  It 
sounds ok here but it's definately not super quality.  Space is an 
issue.  The sample was rendered down to 8000hz using Audacity, and 
it's from a sound effect database of real sounds.  How about the 
"bleep" sound when you catch a butterfly?  That was done the same 
way, from a database of effects.

Yes, Mary is the only sprite that is OR'ed to the screen and I got as 
many colors as I could to look close enough instead of flipping to an 
opposite, etc.  Try all that with masking and the framerate will be 
terrible.  I even use spaghetti code to improve things.

I can probably rearrange or alter some colors so that Mary's dress 
stays purple.  Nice trick.  Some of the palette isn't used anyway, so 
I can probably use color 3,7,15 to achieve this.  The other smaller 
portions of her can stay like they are with very decent results.

The game itself fits from 3584 to just under the stack area below 
32768.  The screen is at 32768, so it all fits in 64k... the music, 
sprites, screen, sound effects, and code.  :)