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Announcements And Comments > Six Pack Man beta

#82918 - drenehtsral - Thu May 11, 2006 4:51 am

SIX PACK MAN Beta

Hey, I've been mainly lurking for the past three months but now I have
my first small game to present. It's still a Beta version, but there are
currently no known issues and it runs well on the hardware, and on the
emulator as well.

The game is written in C pretty much from the ground up, making some
minimal use of libc and libgba, but mainly just by bit-proding (I've put
in a couple years writing microcontroller code for a living, so it comes
pretty naturally at this point, or at least one the rust was dusted off
that part of my brain). There are three levels, each somewhat more
difficult than the previous.

You can find a copy at http://www.greasybastard.com/index.php?page=games

(direct download link is http://www.greasybastard.com/6packman_gba.zip)

#82938 - Lord Graga - Thu May 11, 2006 8:21 am

Super nice! I really like the way this is playing, good job!

I haven't played it much right now, but might later on - why is it so big? Don't you compress your data?

This game really deserves better graphics.

#82951 - tepples - Thu May 11, 2006 1:30 pm

Lord Graga wrote:
why is it so big?

Cool Edit gives the answer: 70 KB of sound effects and nearly 5 MB (4 minutes 32 seconds at 18157 Hz) of music as raw 8-bit PCM. Gleam had the same problem.

Quote:
Don't you compress your data?

It might be my fault that I didn't make my Toast port (used in GSM Player and Luminesweeper) easier to reuse.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#82958 - drenehtsral - Thu May 11, 2006 2:06 pm

My audio data is indeed stored uncompressed. Now that I've optimized some of the other aspects of the game there is probably CPU time to at least compress the music (the big boatanchor in terms of footprint is indeed the music) in some lossless way. Any lossless codec suggestions?
(that is to say, that as I am cutting it down to 8-bit/18k anyway I don't want to lose much more quality in compression). I suppose a CVSD-ADPCM solution might work if you gave it 2 bits per samle, that would be a 4:1 compression... Still potentially lossy, but not too bad.

As for the graphics, yeah, I am certainly no artist =:->

#82959 - tepples - Thu May 11, 2006 2:31 pm

drenehtsral wrote:
I suppose a CVSD-ADPCM solution might work if you gave it 2 bits per samle, that would be a 4:1 compression... Still potentially lossy, but not too bad.

The 8ad codec has a quick GBA based decoder.

And if you still don't have faith in lossy compression, go play Luminesweeper for a while.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#82960 - drenehtsral - Thu May 11, 2006 2:55 pm

Wow, I have to say, I may be addicted to that luminasweeper game =:-) It is tricky, and I'm a sucker for action/puzzle games ever since Rocky's Boots came out. Hmm. Maybe I should do a remake of Rocky's Boots, that was a bad-ass game...