Ok , many thanks bruceuncle wait for your opinion. All the best
Finally managed to get some 'quality Amiga time'
- other problems continue
..
Ran it on an A4000 (WINUAE emulated on a PC) with Kickstart 40.86 and Workbench 40.42. It's a very simple Workbench with only Freewheel installed so's I can use the mouse scroll wheel. No joystick. My 'plain vanilla' testbed.
Unfortunately, I can't get past the Parallel Worlds screen as anything I try (mouse or keyboard) doesn't let me into the game. So I just get the 'File not found' message after a while. Is it coded for joystick only? In which case, you need to give the Parallel Worlds screen a simple 'press any key or click mouse' exit and insert a setup or requirements screen after it.
From the little I saw, I think you do very tasty graphics. And the sounds and music are good too. Lovely picture for the Parallel Worlds screen.
You might consider a little more animation in the characters to indicate who's talking. Nothing fancy, just a small wiggle would do to catch the player's attention.
There's a bit of flickering with the character's icon in the text area when a large Bob is being moved or animated. You'll need to sync to the Vbl better to get rid of it. Is it double-buffered, etc?
As that text area is a simple black background, you might try making it a separate screen laid over the top of the main screen. You could then make it Hires and get more text in and move it to any vertical position. You might be able to drop the number of colours too to save a bit of chip memory. You'd also need some duplicated double-width player icons to get it to look right with the main screen, or float a sprite over it if you can get the palettes to work out okay.
- Needs 68020+ (else 8000 0003 error when starting)
Thanks Lonewolf10. I should have tested on an A500 as well.
8000 0003 = CPU Trap: Address Error
Usually caused by word or longword access to an odd memory address. A 68020 and above CPU allows that but a 68000 CPU does not.
Now that's a bit of a worry for an AMOS program. Without the source code for the game it's very difficult to see what would cause it. AMOS Pro 'out of the box' should never give that error (I'd certainly want to know what caused it if it does!). The one exception is a compiler bug affecting
Length(BankNumber) mentioned below, but it would be rare even then. So is there any extension library involved? It's something I need to follow up as it needs fixing if it's an AMOS Pro bug. Note: I'm not interested (at this stage) if it's an extension causing it, just if it's AMOS Pro itself.
As this is a compiled AMOS program, it might also result from the compiler bug that rounds all Bank allocations up to the nearest word in length. That can cause any calculations using
Length(BankNumber) to work fine until they're compiled.
Don't worry about the AMOS Deek/Doke and Leek/Loke instructions accessing odd memory addresses. AMOS checks for that. It shifts the data and uses byte access to avoid it if necessary. So it's difficult to see how it could happen without any machine code being involved, or maybe an odd memory address being passed to another AMOS instruction.
Let me know if you've got any more info on what the cause might be. And many thanks for the effort in getting this game to this stage.