Tuesday 7 April 2009

C64 :: More menu manipulation

Yup, i've been asked to do some more disk menu coding for Psytronik, this time for the release of (wait for it...) Armalyte! How could i refuse, it's one of my all-time favourite games f'crying out loud...! Anyway, the brief was to produce something similar to the original disk menu and Kenz sent over a lovely mock-up with the text nicely placed (i changed the position of two words so that one of the raster effects was closer to the original) and this is a fully-functioning menu that just lacks the loaders for when something is selected.

Oh, before some smart-arse says anything, the code was written from scratch without once looking at the original, even the colour tables for the bars were worked out by grabbing screenshots and squinting - i even had to create half the numerals in the font since they weren't there on the original and even managed to get a couple of sprite overlays onto the raster bars in order to enhance the Psytronik logos that took over from Mr. Thalamus in the top corners (it's been ages since i did anything even approaching timing-specific demo code, that took a bit of remembering on it's own...)



There's been a little progress on Co-Axis 2189 an' all (the code itself changed a few weeks back but the tile re-colouring happened just a few days ago) - it now has a full colour-per-character scroller as opposed to the colour-per-tile one it was running previously and the fourth level's backgrounds are in but for the moment are running with attack wave data from the third as test. Here's the "before and after" images and pause for just a moment to consider how bloody hard it must have been to pause the game on exactly the same frame twice like that!!