blastar is back. - Page 1

Hello, it's me, blastar... after all these years I'm back to the NG-scene.

A few weeks ago i purchased a USB-2-NEO, installed a Unibios in my
frontloader and started from scratch. Now I release this little intro to
celebrate my comeback and to show you what I'm working on. It's a
simple oldschool intro with a twister in front of a moving transparent
mirror with a sinescroller and a short chiptune loop... runs on real
hardware, of course, but because of hw-timing and hw-compatibility
most emulators will fail, only M.A.M.E. is good enough, I'm suprised
how close M.A.M.E. is to real hardware.
It's also Unibios combatible, no corrupt bootlogo or wrong colors in
menus.

Run it with USB-2-NEO on real hardware or in M.A.M.E. as "Puzzle de Pon".



twister_in_a_mirror-intro.zip

Ohhh great!!!

I was able to run this in MAME using the multislot support; everything worked as expected

thanks for the shoutout; glad to see you're still around and kicking on the Neo. Do you happen to have your old archives for the games/demos you released? I'd like to add them to the wiki, but I don't have everything and I'm not sure my files are the original versions (required, as mentioned in the readme)...

Here's an entry for the neogeo.xml hash database:

<software name="twister_in_a_mirror-intro">
	<description>Twister in a Mirror</description>
	<year>2015</year>
	<publisher>blastar</publisher>
	<sharedfeat name="release" value="MVS" />
	<sharedfeat name="compatibility" value="MVS,AES" />
	<part name="cart" interface="neo_cart">
		<dataarea name="maincpu" width="16" endianness="big" size="0x100000">
			<rom loadflag="load16_word_swap" name="202-p1.p1" offset="0x000000" size="0x080000" crc="514bf0fd" sha1="d7d084b83ae5ae776d6cc7b7d183bd79b2ab114a" />
		</dataarea>
		<dataarea name="fixed" size="0x040000">
			<rom offset="0x000000" size="0x020000" name="202-s1.s1" crc="111ea86c" sha1="1251d7ef30493b76b15ddc8975a0278ad4a48434" />
		</dataarea>
		<dataarea name="audiocpu" size="0x020000">
			<rom offset="0x000000" size="0x020000" name="202-m1.m1" crc="c1c27b33" sha1="655c1b01deacacbdbfe3a89196d4b0d9d3aae1eb" />
		</dataarea>
		<dataarea name="ymsnd" size="0x80000">
			<rom name="202-v1.v1" offset="0x000000" size="0x080000" crc="0c5e044c" sha1="e5717ea0e6daaf7c529f1e8cf5e4e73ee4a3f26f" />
		</dataarea>
		<dataarea name="sprites" size="0x200000">
			<rom loadflag="load16_byte" name="202-c1.c1" offset="0x000000" size="0x100000" crc="72ceed51" sha1="aa5ead993db739cf34917287988aeb43afa7f7d5" />
			<rom loadflag="load16_byte" name="202-c2.c2" offset="0x000001" size="0x100000" crc="27da57ee" sha1="323fcd0893aec82cc3c78687834920e2eeedb67b" />
		</dataarea>
	</part>
</software>

obviously the rom name doesn't match mame naming specifications, but this is optimized for lazy people

Fantastic demo blastar, very impressive! I wasn't able to stop watching on it for at least 5 minutes
Would you please tell me how many sprites are used for the twist effect?

I am glad that you came back to the Neo Geo homebrew scene. I watched all your demos back in the day when I was starting to learn something about programming for the Neo.
Too bad that the Neo Geo gamers gave you only minor positive feedback for your work 10 years ago.
I guess you program your stuff exclusively in 68k assembler? Do you maybe have any tips where to start for beginners (68k books or websites) ?

the twister uses just one sprite 64x80 pixels (but 64x64 is also ok)... it's no animation - it's calculated in realtime!

only x- & y-position is changed per scanline to fake the move and stretch-effect . it's very tricky and needs perfekt timing, because of this only M.A.M.E. can emulate it.

And yes, it's 100% ASM. 68000-ASM is very simple and easy to learn. If you want to learn it then play around with existing sources, try to understand it (with help of some books or websites, search for '68000 Instruction Set') and try to enhance it.

This is really gorgeous blastar

Hello Blaster

Very glade to read you again and to see your work on neo geo

have you an neo geo CD version of your démo ?
and if you have not could you do it ?

sorry for delay:

Burn and enjoy on real hardware only - real hardware exclusive because no ngcd-emulator is close enough! :-(
It's (again) an AIO-file, there are no separate Files for fix, sprites, z80 or pcm... all needed data is inside the prg-file and uploaded by bios.

twister_in_a_mirror-intro-ngcd.zip

This is awesome, reminds me of some of the old Amiga demos. Great work Blastar!

Is there any chance someone can make a very basic example of moving a sprite each raster line in 68k for us beginner coders to play around with? Only a small step on from that to a Neo Geo version of Outrun