This week, I fixed up some bugs I mentioned last week with the “can shoot” indicator leaving some dirty pixels behind and the spider misbehaving on player death. But I also did a fair bit of play testing and added more issues to my bug list. I also worked on sound. I have sound for the flea and the scorpion working now and you can hear them in the video. Also, I added code for stereo. The sound of the spider, scorpion, flea, player shot etc is panned left to right based on their position on the screen. I found quite a bit of inconsistency about whether channel 0 is left or right. The emulators I am using (GSplus and mame) say 0 is left but Apple’s docs say the opposite. Specifically, GS tech note 19 says that even channels should go to the right and odd to the left. The documentation for the 4soniq also says that 0 is left. It seems like my ancient sound card though treats 0 as right. I may have to take a soldering iron to it. Is there real inconsistency out there among the sound cards? Maybe I need to make L/R configurable which is annoying.
And as a Christmas present to everyone on the appleiigs channel, here is v0.9 of BuGS. This is not a bootable image, just the executable. If you are using an emulator, I suggest using mame. I am using “apple2gs -skip_gameinfo -mouse -window -resolution 1408×1056 -ramsize 4M -sl7 cffa202 -hard1 <boot image>” as my arguments to mame and that is working for me. It does work under GSplus but the mouse control isn’t ideal and you will probably find it frustrating. I haven’t tried other emulators. I have tested this on real HW and it seems to work there although the sound is decidedly more “muddy” than I get on emulators. Keep in mind this is a pre-release build and there are known bugs that are documented here: https://github.com/jeremysrand/BuGS/blob/master/BUGS.md
My next step needs to be some more bug fixing and some more play testing!