I had a busy week and didn’t get too much done. I added the code to reset all of the damaged mushrooms after each death so you can see that in the attached video. Also, I added the code to restrict player movement in a single frame to a maximum of 8 pixels. This does make the game pretty much unplayable under GSPlus because the mouse movement is restricted to the size of the host machine’s screen and I was finding it difficult to deal with, even before the capping of movement. So, I used Kelvin’s awesome program Ample to get mame working. I can now launch either mame or GSPlus from my build environment. With mame, I pretty much have to run at 2.8MHz though so boot times are slow. If I run at accelerated speed, it seems like it also accelerates the vertical blank because the game is crazy fast. So, I will continue to use GSPlus for quickly booting a emulated GS and testing things out but when it comes to real play testing, I will be using mame or real HW. The video this week is captured using mame and does show the new “reset all of the mushrooms” after each of the three deaths.
Next, I should finish the work on player movement and actually implement the code for not allowing the player to pass through mushrooms. Now that capping movement to 8 pixels per frame is done, the algorithm for preventing motion through a mushroom shouldn’t be too bad. After that, it is either work on some niceties like high score lists, two player game support, ability to pause the game or maybe it is time to actually add some sound. Depends on how ambitious I feel I guess. In other good news, in order to use up my banked vacation, I will be off work and looking for something to do starting December 12th so I am hoping to focus more on it over the holidays. We will see.