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- How can you cheat to have more than the two hardware playfields?
-
- Well, there are more than one way to do this :
-
- One way is to use the blitter to put two of the 'fields' on top
- of eachother, ie. two of them use the same playfield. This means
- they must use the same colours aswell.
-
- Another technic that is used in many games, is to use the sprites as one
- of the playfields. LEANDER, RISKY WOODS and many more use this technic.
- The whole secret about this is to use the copper to change the x-position
- of the sprites, so that one sprite can be displayed more than once on
- each horizontal scan-line. In this way it's possible to have two
- 'playfields' with 16 colours in each. The problem is that you don't have
- the time to change the sprites bitmap-data aswell, so in the playfield
- with sprites you must repeat the graphics every 128 pixels in the
- x-direction. And if you use more than 4 biplanes, you steal some cycles
- from the copper, and then you don't have the time to replace all the
- sprites. Here's a copper example of how to replace the sprites :
-
-
- dc.w $2C37,$FFFE ; Wait for y = $2c , x = $37
- dc.w $0140,$0040,$0144,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite0
- dc.w $0148,$0048,$014C,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite1
- dc.w $0140,$0050,$0144,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite0
- dc.w $0148,$0058,$014C,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite1
- dc.w $0140,$0060,$0144,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite0
- dc.w $0148,$0068,$014C,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite1
- dc.w $0140,$0070,$0144,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite0
- dc.w $0148,$0078,$014C,$xxxx ; New xpos and data for sprite1
-
- repeat until you reach the end of the screen at x = $D0, and then do this
- for each scan-line.
-
- With the above copperlist, you can have a one-bitplane scroller across the
- screen without using any bitplanes, and you still have 6 sprites free!
-