Retrobot 2023-12-09 16:32
Adaptation of the arcade Baby Pac-Man minus the pinball portion. Still a bit of a work in progress as the goal is to have pinball as well. Fully playable with all the usual features- score, energizers, tunnels, 3 distinct maze layouts and fruit bonus items.
Plays like Pac-Man. Standard rules apply except with Baby Pac scoring conventions.
The A button pauses during gameplay. Press the B button to unpause.
I hope you enjoy it!
Awsa 2023-12-09 17:26
Wow, this is very cool!
Retrobot 2023-12-09 17:43
Thanks! I feel like my code could be organized better, and there's still some bugs, but I'm really happy with it!
Pablo 2023-12-10 02:50
Awesome.
was8bit 2023-12-10 03:41
Your games look just like vintage games fresh out of the box :)
Timo 2023-12-10 15:06
Also the sound is very good!
Retrobot 2023-12-11 01:57
Thanks so much! I honestly wasn’t even sure if anyone else would play it. I appreciate the encouragement from everyone!
Timo 2023-12-11 07:08 (Edited)
I have noticed you don't use sprites. Is that on purpose? I even like the little glitches caused by using cells only, so I'm not complaining, I'm just curious :)
McPepic 2023-12-11 16:02
Wow! Great job! I have a really tough time finishing projects, so this is really impressive! Is there a reason you didn’t use the ROM?
Also, invincibility hack:
McPepic 2023-12-11 16:19
This game gets REALLY fast.
Retrobot 2023-12-13 00:04
So, catching up with some comments:
Nope. No sprites. This is only my second project using LowRes NX and I wanted to figure out all the ins and outs of using the cells. I plan to use sprites when I make a pinball game (which of course will hopefully lead to a full version of Baby pac with pinball!)
Retrobot 2023-12-13 00:10
@McPepic- ummm I have a great reason for not using the ROM… I don’t know what that would mean. I’m going to fall on my sword on this one. In general I know what Read Only Memory is, and I know what ROMs are in emulation, but I don’t know what you mean in this context. Care to elaborate? You almost certainly know something that I do not!
Retrobot 2023-12-13 00:16 (Edited)
Also- yeah! It does get fast! What I’m loving about LowRes NX is that it fulfills the age old promise made by BASIC back when I was a kid. Back in the 80’s, Computers with BASIC would tout how you could write your own games- but it ran so slow, you couldn’t REALLY unless you knew assembly language (which I do not). Finally, I can write the games I always wanted to and play them at breakneck speeds! Woot!
Retrobot 2023-12-13 00:32
I just played the invincibility hack- what fun! Only, now I’m realizing that no human being would be able to play the banana level without the hack. I’m kind of wondering if I need to adjust that at some point.
Retrobot 2023-12-13 00:33
Thanks McPepic for the hack!
McPepic 2023-12-13 01:08
Fall on your sword? I've never heard this metaphor before?
LowRes has built-in tools to modify the ROM of the game. This data gets loaded on startup and can be read from and copied to other areas of memory.
The tools provided allow you to visually modify the character graphics, palettes, backgrounds, and sound data. There are tons of resources in the documentation! :)
Timo 2023-12-13 10:23
The variant with DATA statements and reading it to RAM is very C64 like :)
Retrobot 2023-12-14 01:57
@Timo - yeah, that’s not surprising! That’s what I did way back in the day trying to make pacman for the C64.
@McPepic - thanks for the info. I’ll check into that. I’m sure I ended up doing things the hard way. Actually, to do the picture of baby pacman on the startup screen, I wrote a program on C64 (using Vice on my laptop) that lets me visually design cell characters then it calculates the data for me. That helped out a lot although it sounds like I really didn’t need to do all that.
Last note: “falling on your sword” means to admit a shortcoming or own up to a mistake. The expression may be some kind of historical reference to a battle field commander taking his own life after failure? But I’m just guessing at that.
Timo 2023-12-14 14:43
@Retrobot Cool effort though :)
Retrobot 2023-12-15 00:47 (Edited)
I just uploaded a new version that seemed to fix an annoying bug that would randomly make baby pac pass through the fruit, without triggering the sound effect or changing the fruit character into the bonus value. The bug is still there. UGH! Sooooo... nevermind!
Retrobot 2023-12-15 01:26
So I just read the section about using the GFX tool to create characters in the ROM. NOW I know what you guys were talking about! I definitely did this the hard way! I mean up until I got to working on the startup screen, I was just doing math to convert binary into decimal! (SO MUCH MATH…)
I regret nothing, though. Now I really understand the mechanics of cell graphics. But now I think I need to re-read that section, try the samples given in the documentation and become comfortable using the editor. Anyway, thank again for everyone’s support with this project.
was8bit 2023-12-15 03:59 (Edited)
There is nothing wrong finding different ways to do things ;)
The whole point is to have fun here :) so go ahead and explore and have fun :)
Retrobot 2023-12-17 10:26
Thanks!
