Hurricane update.

I went outside before going to bed, around 1 AM Saturday morning. The winds were fairly strong, but not destructive or anything. The power blinked off and on twice, but we didn't lose power for any extended period. There was no damage to our house. In fact, the only thing we lost was cable TV for a few hours. My kids were devistated by this loss. :)

We attempted to evacuate Houston, but after going 6 miles in 6 hours, on I-45 North, we turned around and came back.

Now that the excitement is hopefully over for awhile, I hope to get back to the FM Towns and CD-I versions of Frog Feast.

I have small changes to make in the FM Towns version. I am having some issues playing back CD audio, but I think I'm close to figuring it out. Then, I have to figure out how to playback PCM files, but there is a sample program to show how to do that.

No! I meant a MargaRITA!

We're riding out Rita here in Sugar Land. I went outside, and the winds are blowing. The gusts feel pretty strong. We are only getting a small amount of rain. We are just now feeling the outer bands.

FM Towns version sped up.

There is not a 256 color 320x240 video mode, supported by the bios. It's probably possible to set it up using the CRTC registers, but I don't have good enough documentation to do that.

But, I was able to optimize the assembly language blit routines to gain some speed. I haven't used my 386 optimizing skills in 6-8 years. I did some loop unrolling, but was limited by the width of the fonts (8 pixels) and sprites (multiple of 16 pixels). I did optimize the sprite and font transparent blits by reading 2 pixels (DWORD) at a time and writing each pixel seperately, skipping 0 colored pixels (16 bit). I also did some simple stuff like using an 'or' instruction instead of a 'cmp'. It doesn't seem to slow down much (in the emulator), and I haven't tested the updated version on real hardware yet.

I also gained some speed by eliminating the wait for vertical blank, since this seems to be handled by the egb page flipping routines.

The next challenge is finding a way to change the sky color as time passes. I could change the color in the background image, but this would probably cause a noticable slowdown. It might be easier to create multiple copies of the background at startup, but this may take too much memory...

FM Towns fixes.

I'll be receiving a beta version of the CD-I emulator this weekend (at the earliest). This will speed up development of the CD-I version. I've already paid the registration fee for this excellent piece of software. The CD-I version will be resumed at this point.

Since the CD32 version is going to be delayed, I've decided to fix up some of the problems with the FM Towns version.

I've fixed the speed issues. I turned off the sprite animation system update checks, which was causing all of the sprites to be drawn each frame.

I've also fixed the flashing text and sprites, by adding a changed flag for each double buffered surface.

The play still seems a bit uneven. I need to further optimize some of the routines. I may also convert everything to 8 bit, which will further speed up the updates.