[Coco] MINIHOG Demo Here Now!

[Chris Spry]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <alsplace at pobox.com>
To: <coco at maltedmedia.com>
Sent: Friday, July 30, 2004 1:22 PM
Subject: Re: [Coco] MINIHOG Demo Here Now!


> I may have missed it, but earlier, Chris, you said something about
> convering Sonic MIDIs to text so you could play them on the CoCo.  Do
> you have any music code in the demo?  (If so, it could just be MESS not
> working -- just wanted to check.)

Nope. In that message I said that I would like to put in music later.  Music
and sound is going to be one of the last things I add to the program as they
are a neat little feature to have and not vital to game play, so it can
wait.  Roger gave me some example code that has given me a few ideas on how
to use the FIRQ for timing to make music in the background.  On the PC I've
played around with this Midi to Text converter which is a great program.  It
takes an entire MIDI, and converts it to text just like a report.  In the
text file, it seperates each track, when each note is played on the exact
tick, the volume used, and other special things.  I can cut out the tracks I
don't want with a text editor and the other extra info that's not needed,
put it on a CoCo disk and then write up a program on the CoCo that can
convert this info into something usable in a program.

> How close is the game grid to Sonic?  When I had an original Genesis
> ($189!) it came with Altered Beasts (later they packed in Sonic) and I
> remember going down to buy Sonic -- had a blast playing that game.  One
> of the few I actually played thru and won.  :-)

I was a nut when I was a kid. I defeated about 50 games or so.  Sonic 1
being one of them (as with the one for the game gear).  The game is going to
have a feel and look of the game gear version, since the game gear is pretty
much an 8-bit system or a portable sega master system.  All the levels
however are made from scratch.  It's just going to side scroll (not scroll
up and down).  Scrolling up and down would also require more code and more
time into making a level. It'd also slow down the game a little too and I
need every ounce of CPU speed I can get.  In future games I may make this a
possibility, but would shrink the play screen down (like in Super Pitfall)
to adjust.  I know that PacDude 2 had a full screen scroller
up/down/left/right but Brian O'Neill is a programming genius. I'm not.

> I will certainly buy this when done if you can make it available at the
> Fest.

I hope I can have it done in time for that.  Finding time to work on it is
hard to do.  Usually I can only find time late at night and maybe add a few
new routines and debug a few things on every session.  I don't work on it
every day either.  I'm not asking for much.  Probably around the same as the
current price of Gate Crasher.

>      -- Allen

-Chris