XeO3: bits and bobs...

Sound is interesting.... you can work away trying to get perfect pitch and volume and then when its working just the way you want, you can sometimes make it really course and never notice the difference. I put keys for volume control into the game, and all the work spent on the ADSR (a whole day of it...) is reduced somewhat to a whimper depending on the volume. Now, when playing back on the actual machine TED sounds are far FAR louder than Solder's SID chip addon, so I need to set a volume of around 2 or 3. This means all my ADSR values of 7 down to 0 are now just 2 or 3 down to 0. Not a lot... But they do still count, because if you dont use ADSR at all, it sounds terrible... weird.

I have to confess, I've been playing with some C64 code tonight.... I found the source to the Armalyte Multiplexor on (Lemon64), and thought I'd go through it... and perhaps get it up and running. However, this has lead me to look back at my Blood Money multiplexor (which itself was based on me hacking Armalyte - although I wrote it myself once I had the gernal idea), and its not bad either... theirs is a bit larger with the loops unrolled a lot, but mine wasn't too bad at all. Anyway, I think with very minimal work (and a working multiplexor) I can get XeO3 up and running pretty quickly on the C64. I'm kinda half waiting on Luca to do some more sprites now anyway, so I've an excuse to play a little... well... thats my reason and I'm sticking to it! It will be a little harder to get .PRG's onto the C64, although my MMC64 will help a bit, but a download cable would be much better.....

So, after looking through the source, I've started to macro it a bit more to make it easier to follow - for the sort at least, I may well write my own multiplexor bit again... but I suspect I'll try and get something running first. The great thing about doing a C64->Plus4 or a Plus4>C64 conversion is that being 6502, it'll just run - I won't have to rewite it all the way I used to do when doing a port. This means I get to do all the fun stuff and dont have to do ANY of the boring stuff again!!! Great!!!