Improved "The Hobbit"

[Dbug]

I did a commit of what I had so far (intro + picture + music + font), no work done on the loading/saving at this point.
I call that one "version 1.5".

Here is the program:

ImprovedHobbit_v1.5.dsk

(131.5 KiB) Downloaded 210 times

And the source code for the ones interested:
https://osdn.net/projects/oricsdk/scm/svn/commits/1578

[Dbug]

And a small youtube video showing the two versions side by side.



That should give a good idea of how different the speed is

[kenneth]

More beautiful! Faster! We must archive this precccious improvement...
(tenor.com)

[Dbug]

More beautiful! Faster! We must archive this precccious improvement...

There are a few more things I'd like to do before we put that on oric.org, right now it's still a half-baked thing, not having save/load working is lame

[Steve M]

I remember the movement of Gandalf in the game being annoying. In some places I think you needed him to do something for you and he'd keep wandering off. Doesn't this happen when you get locked up in a cell? Seems a bit illogical that he can wander off when you are trapped.

[coco.oric]

There are a few more things I'd like to do before we put that on oric.org, right now it's still a half-baked thing, not having save/load working is lame

So archive on oric.org will wait. Anyway, it seems that there's nothing about the hobbit in the mag so i'll make a review in next issue ... if i've enough time.

[Dbug]

I remember the movement of Gandalf in the game being annoying. In some places I think you needed him to do something for you and he'd keep wandering off. Doesn't this happen when you get locked up in a cell? Seems a bit illogical that he can wander off when you are trapped.

Yeah, either Gandalf or Thorin should be there to help you reach the window.
When I play-tested I moved too fast, and I was alone when I was captured, I waited, waited, waited, ... but I was trapped.

[Dbug]

So yesterday there was a bit of talking about The Hobbit, so this morning I made the version 1.6 I promised.
Still no load and save to disk, but we have additional options:

• Added Thror's map as well as a credit picture to the intro, with two new display effects
• Added a menu to toggle the sound ON/OFF
• Added a menu to allow the player to start the original version of the game
• Fixed the brief flash of white corruption appearing when the game starts by clearing the entire video memory area

Here is the program:

ImprovedHobbit_v1.6.dsk

(144 KiB) Downloaded 182 times

And the source code for the ones interested:
https://osdn.net/projects/oricsdk/scm/svn/commits/1579

And here is what that looks like:

[HigashiJun]

Nice !

Can't wait for the final release...

[Dbug]

I started digging inside the save code, and I've to say that it's like a giant spaghetti mess with variables changed on the stack, JSR that don't return because the return address is popped out and replaced by something else.

So instead I'm trying another approach, I replaced the few ROM function calls by my own functions, but even just writing to a buffer and trying to read that back returns me a checksum error Oo.

[Silicebit.]

I started digging inside the save code, and I've to say that it's like a giant spaghetti mess with variables changed on the stack, JSR that don't return because the return address is popped out and replaced by something else.

He he he, welcome to the chaos of The Shire, be careful with trolls.

[Symoon]

I started digging inside the save code, and I've to say that it's like a giant spaghetti mess with variables changed on the stack, JSR that don't return because the return address is popped out and replaced by something else.

So instead I'm trying another approach, I replaced the few ROM function calls by my own functions, but even just writing to a buffer and trying to read that back returns me a checksum error Oo.

I wrote some simple save/load routines lonnnng ago, it was published in the CEO-Mag "20 ans". But it did heavily call existing Sedoric code, not sure it can help.

[Dbug]

I wrote some simple save/load routines lonnnng ago, it was published in the CEO-Mag "20 ans". But it did heavily call existing Sedoric code, not sure it can help.

The problem is not really the actual save/load, the problem is to get the code that save/load do it in a way that makes the game still behave correctly.

Basically there's one main save routine, and two load routines, one that does load-load, and the other which is load-verify, and these routines are called with a bunch of different memory locations and number of bytes, which are individually written/read and check-summed, partially relying on the ROM header/sync code but also some manual header reading and writing for some parts of it.

So far I ended up with the checksum code not agreeing with what I had "saved".

[Dbug]

Hmm, has anyone actually managed to load back a saved Hobbit game session?

I tried with Oricutron using ORT format, and I was not able to do it.

image_2022-03-15_214224.png (10.48 KiB) Viewed 3561 times

[Xeron]

Tape saving/loading in Oricutron was ways the weakest part. I was never happy with the tape code, so it may be the fault of the emulator.