02-06-2022, 01:53 PM
Hi ya'll
New to the forum and NGPC in general. Picked one up recently along with Sonic Pocket, though I've wanted one ever since little 10-year old me read an issue of Game Informer that ran a profile on the system. My programming skills are...not the best. What little work I do is in MatLAB, and haven't done any games since a C++ course freshman year of college (waaay too long ago).
To get the basics down, I am working on a simple port of the calculator classic "Block Dude". Since Assembly is complete nonsense to me, I re-wrote everything in C and got the game up and running. The mechanics are complete, it plays through all 11 levels, and runs on a NGP emulator (Bizhawk with Windows10), but it is ugly. And not just because a dyslexic fifth grader could have written cleaner code.
As of now, the game is completely in ASCII, because I cannot import sprites or tiles. I got started by following Chris Ahchay's blog and using the compiler/tile editor/Library/etc. he uploaded, but I can't get either InstallTileSet function to work. And I am not smart enough to write my own function that imports tiles and sprites directly to RAM for an obscure platform like the NGP. So, two questions:
First, does someone have an absolute basic sample code (in C) of getting sprites on the screen using this library? Like "here's a 8x8 pixel face on the screen"? I learn best by studying and reverse engineering example code. In other words, copying and pasting till it works. Below is a sample code I put together from Ahchay's blog.
Second-where's a good spot to upload finished NGPC games? I don't have a flashcard yet (Stoneage Gamer is sold out) and cannot test on real hardware, but might as well send this program out into the wild.
Thanks in advance!
New to the forum and NGPC in general. Picked one up recently along with Sonic Pocket, though I've wanted one ever since little 10-year old me read an issue of Game Informer that ran a profile on the system. My programming skills are...not the best. What little work I do is in MatLAB, and haven't done any games since a C++ course freshman year of college (waaay too long ago).
To get the basics down, I am working on a simple port of the calculator classic "Block Dude". Since Assembly is complete nonsense to me, I re-wrote everything in C and got the game up and running. The mechanics are complete, it plays through all 11 levels, and runs on a NGP emulator (Bizhawk with Windows10), but it is ugly. And not just because a dyslexic fifth grader could have written cleaner code.
As of now, the game is completely in ASCII, because I cannot import sprites or tiles. I got started by following Chris Ahchay's blog and using the compiler/tile editor/Library/etc. he uploaded, but I can't get either InstallTileSet function to work. And I am not smart enough to write my own function that imports tiles and sprites directly to RAM for an obscure platform like the NGP. So, two questions:
First, does someone have an absolute basic sample code (in C) of getting sprites on the screen using this library? Like "here's a 8x8 pixel face on the screen"? I learn best by studying and reverse engineering example code. In other words, copying and pasting till it works. Below is a sample code I put together from Ahchay's blog.
Second-where's a good spot to upload finished NGPC games? I don't have a flashcard yet (Stoneage Gamer is sold out) and cannot test on real hardware, but might as well send this program out into the wild.
Thanks in advance!