Fairlight cracktro remake on Gameboy Advance

[padman]

Hello fellow DBFers!

I've been playing around a little more with DragonBasic. Slowly I'm starting to understand how it all works...

This is a remake of an Amiga cracktro by Fairlight ( and was done for my own educational purposes, in case anyone gets annoyed by useless remakes and starts asking why... ). It's not exactly 1:1 due to screen size restrictions, but it's pretty close. And it features the original MOD tune by WOTW. It has been tested with Visual Boy Advance 1.7.2. and should also run on a FlashCart, after the header has been fixed. ( I've been too lazy to test this myself, since I doubt anyone else will try this on the real hardware anyway...  )

Enjoy!

Pad

(P.S. You can get the emulator here: http://vba.ngemu.com/downloads.shtml)
(P.P.S. ..and the original can be found there: http://www.intro-inferno.com/production.php?id=6365)

Edit: Oh I almost forgot: You can switch between the 2 pages with the A/B buttons. Now isn't that awesome! 

[LittleWhite]

I have tried it.
As always is nice .
For the effect, is it a transparancy trick, or a sprite modified in realtime ?

[padman]

Thx for checking it out mate!

For the effect, is it a transparancy trick, or a sprite modified in realtime ?

No, there aren't any sprites (in the gameboy sense) involved. It's 32x32 bitmap tiles mapped to two of the background layers and then scrolled. And yup, with black set to transparent. Dunno how the effect is done on Amiga, but I guess in a similar way.

I still need to figure out how to do a horizontal (sine) scroller. Then it'll be time for a decent production of my own and not just lousy ahem I mean:awesome remakes!    Any suggestions how to do that in DragonBasic are welcome! 

[LittleWhite]

In DragonBasic ... I have now idea ...
sin(xPositionOfTheLetter) ?
With using a sin table ... or just a for loop varying the y ... or just a function saying for this x use y :p

[padman]

Well yeah in theory it's all not that difficult.  I know how to do that with bitmap fonts in Basic on a PC. But somehow I have no clue (yet) how to do it on the Gameboy...   I'd be happy with a normal horizontal scroller with an 8x8 font for a start. It's gotta work somehow. We'll see... 

[va!n]

screeni looks nice! - oh its done in dragon basic? cool!

Is there any new release of dragon basic available? i tried it arround 2002/2004 and had very good contact with jeff (the author of the language) and we both had some very amazing ideas for new features... but sadly from one day to the next his email was no longer working and the project died as far as i remember... So i sadly lost the very good contact to jeff

If there is any new release of db, let us know pls
btw, thumbs up for your nice remake!

[padman]

Thx dude! 

No, it's still the old version (1.4.5) from back then. (with some personal fixes by users afaik) I know, I'm a couple of years too late with GBA coding. And that is what it makes so hard to find stuff or code snippets for DragonBasic, because  - like you mentioned - the whole project has vanished entirely. Still, it's fun to code with it and not too hard to understand since I use PureBasic on PC which has a similar syntax. And I even got a mod player for it. So basically I got everything I need to code something nice after I finally figured out how to do a scroller...