Not much progress, but slow progress is still progress!
I’ve been mostly working on the new project: the CRPG without name (and I should come up with a name, really).
I’m glad that I started with some flashy bits first, so you can see the player moving around the world, because now I’m designing the data structures that will keep the information to model White Box –not sure if that’s the official site, but there are links to buy the book and a free PDF download–; which is the D&D ruleset I decided to implement in the game.
I mean, it is difficult and boring, and there isn’t much to show. Hopefully I won’t make any fundamental mistake!
I have also tackled another important part of the game: being able to read data from disc –using the “c” as Amstrad did–. In reality is not that hard if you use the firmware, but that requires having enabled some ROMs that will reduce considerably the amount of RAM for the game (16K for the lower ROM and a reduces a bit the memory usable between 0x8000 and 0xc000).
My approach when making CPC games is to disable the firmware and unmap all the ROMs, so I have access to all the memory. But in that case, if I wanted to use the disc, I would need to use the hardware directly. Although there are libraries for that, it would reduce compatibility with some hardware expansions like the M4 board that don’t provide full FDC emulation. As I have mentioned here, my plan is to support 64K and disc; and using a M4 is a simpler way than having an external disc unit!
So my plan was to find out if it was possible to enable the firmware “on demand”, so I had all the memory, and taking into account that when I’m using the disc –and the firmware is enabled–, the memory under 0x4000 is mapped to ROM and some memory between 0x8000 and 0xc000 will be used by AMSDOS (the kernel jump table, variables, buffers, etc).
And turns out it is possible, after some help from CPC Wiki forum, to enable back the firmware. It is tricky and it requires knowing some internal functions of the firmware that change depending on the CPC model; but considering that there won’t be any new models, it means that supporting 464, 664 and 6128 (and the plus is the same), is just enough. I wouldn’t mind adding specific support for other ROMS as well.
That is one of the good things of making software for a computer that is frozen in time. Hacks like these wouldn’t be a good idea back in the day, because a new model could break the game (kind of like happened with the ZX Spectrum floating bus trick).
After I had my disc routines working, I’m now loading the map and the tileset from disc, which opens the door for a lot of content.
After I have all the internal structures ready and I implement the “use item” function, I may work on something exciting: the combat!