Re: Getting files from a IIGS to a Mac OS X Mac (G5)... how can you do it?

[bloomer_au <bloomer@iprimus.com.au>]

Man you guys are knowledgable. I can't believe I never came here
before!

Thanks for the many ideas. Mike's suggestion that you could still use
a 3.5 inch as a gobetween seems the easiest idea, and is just a
continuation of what I used to do. I just wasn't sure that an external
3.5 floppy you could get for a G5 (wasn't even sure they existed?)
would be able to read the GS-formatted HFS disks. But if I can get
this combo running, it would be fantastic.

Thanks for all your compliments on Dragon. Here's some more info in
response to questions and such:

> Did you use a package for the graphics or roll your own?  I *really*
> like the opening screen with its great sound and simultaneous graphics
> updates.  Was it using a Mockingboard?

Okay, there is only one cheat moment in the video, and that is when
the graphic roll and music both happen at the same time - laugh- sorry
to disappoint. What happened was, I recorded the clips making up the
video in several different emulators, testing which ones did which
parts best, and at the start, I cut in the soundtrack from the
emulator which sounded best over the vision from another. In the
process I didn't bother to restore the part where the music pauses
after you hit a key and trigger the screen roll. But the music does
keep right on playing after the roll if that's any consolation ;)

Re: The screen roll itself. There was a hi-res screen file compression
scheme I found on a demo disk back in the past, and used lots of times
after in games. It typically achieved 50-75% compression of the 32
sector file size. And when it unpacked them, they rolled across the
screen in the fashion you saw.

The music was programmed with Electric Duet. I still don't understand
the physics of how Paul Lutus managed to get the effect of two tones
playing at once, but he did, and I loved making tracks for games with
that program. I produce electronic music these days and I actually
still pip bits of Electric Duet in there because it is such a unique
sound.

> I like the cave graphics, but why are wall
> collisions fatal?  Must be a tricky game!

The graphics - I built all the creatures and a cavern scenery tileset
using Apple Mechanic's font editor. Each 'character' was just a
different frame. Then each screen in the game reads in a tilemap to
print out the image before you enter it.

Heh... wall collisions are fatal because my method for detecting if
you had been killed was entirely dependant on a routine built into the
Apple shape table routines that would check if a shape you'd drawn
(the dragon in this case) had touched any other lit up pixel onscreen.
This meant that touching anything had to be fatal. It did save me tons
of programming, like I didn't have to poll enemy X,Y posiions and I
didn't have to store anything about the scenery in game memory after
it was drawn.

This was my first and last game written 95% in assembly (it actually
has a tiny basic program running during the main game which still
reads paddles and does some math in each frame, then calls a routine
which runs the whole game for a frame - then back to the basic
program, etc.) - the price was a speed hit, but seriously, there was
tons of stuff I didn't know how to do in assembly :)

In terms of trickiness, when you hold button 1 on the joystick, that
became caution mode, which makes you move very slowly ala prince of
persia, one space at a time. That was the necessary way to get through
the windiest parts.

Unfortunately I don't have the time or understanding of assembly
anymore, or of the related paraphenalia (Merlin etc.) to complete
this. But I was glad I did eventually program one assembly core game
that ran at a good pace. There are several similar Apple II action
games I wrote before it, but all are in basic (the first version of
Dragon is super slow, loops endlessly and has only 5 screens).
'Conjurer' was my attempt at Conan. Silverblade and Silverblade II
were inspired by Golden Axe, but consist of two thumb sized warriors
fighting on a horizontal line :) I might put up vids of some of these,
too.

Thanks again for IIGS ideas, I may follow some of them up with you
individiaully.

- Wade