Hmm... I never thought they might look like that. They will have moving limbs, right? And won't they be front-facing, not creepily staring at you all the time? What does the original game look like? Nevermind; I looked at the first post, and used Google. They are creepy! 

And why does the dude turn green near the end of the GIF?
 

Haha yes they will have moving limbs, and front-facing when walking. When standing still they tend to look "out of the screen" creepily


The green thing is just a glitch in the GIF, it doesn't actually occur on CEmu or on calculator

The weird artifacts at the border i assume are from the lack of sprite clipping? It seems you're missing a column when the map isn't aligned, though i guess for the CE being byte aligned isn't such a huge deal since every pixel is byte-aligned The speed is looking nice, though i imagine drawing all those color sprites is gonna be a pain in the neck, hehe.

Correct - because there's no sprite clipping it glitches out a little, and it currently only draws 7 rows / 11 columns when it's not aligned. Only because I threw this together in a rush to see how it looked. Once I get more up to speed with the LCD controller and vram flipping, as well as clean up the sprite rendering, it will look much neater

Cool so far! Would it be hard to put the heath/ammo bar in red/blue on the playing screen?
I can help with sprite drawing with Piskel App if I have time in school.

Yeah eventually there will be a stats bar for both players at the top and bottom of screen, same as the original Amiga version. The sprite drawing shouldn't take me too long, I'll be using the original Amiga sprites, but probably simplified to 8x8 instead of 16x16.

Especially considering you don't have to deal with a smooth scrolling tilemap, i'd say grayscale would work pretty well here

Exactly Plus some of the visual effects such as rising water would look much nicer with grayscale.


I opened up my code last night and ran the game just to see where I was at - which was pretty much halfway through having mission 1 re-written with the new code base, graphics, etc. I'm confident that if I start a new 83+/84+ flash app version (with grayscale) and an 84+CE program version (with colour) that I can improve upon this "v2.0.0" substantially. I'll try to make some time to start experimenting over the next week or two (whilst still moving along with AB5 v3)


I think I need to get myself more determined to finish this, with all 4 completed missions as well!

James, i wouldn't mind helping out with this project, you could share your ideas for what you wanted to add/change and i can get started on implementing them as you still focus mostly on the ab5 series Both Alien Breed and Thunderbirds were games that really impressed me back in the day (and still do today!). Another game i've been meaning to overhaul for a long time now is Dying Eyes.

Thanks for the offer, chickendude! At this stage I'd like to work on it myself. I will say that seeing some interest in it here is certainly giving me more motivation to get back on to doing something with the project. It would be great to finish this in some form as a tribute to the late Gerry Anderson (creator of the original Thunderbirds TV series).


I'm considering taking the new 83+/84+ code that I'd written as a "program" and converting it to a flash app, and also creating an 84+CE colour program version that (for the most part) runs off the same code base.


It would be great to have the 83+/84+ flash app version utilising greyscale as well, to give the graphics some more clarity. I've not done anything in greyscale on the 83+/84+ before, so that in itself would be a good little thing for me to learn

Was that a glitch? The tile-out thing stopped and looked kind of choppy there for a sec.

That was just the game quitting out to Cesium - it's currently set up to quit when a level is complete, just for testing purposes as I have made the level transitioning code "CE compatible" yet.

The TI-84+CE build now functions essentially the same as it's TI-83+/84+ counterpart (sans text). You can now play through a level collecting items, killing aliens, etc.


Next up I'll be splitting the level data out into appvars for the 84+CE build, as the program is currently sitting just shy of the 64KB limit.


Thanks to MateoConLechuga (and everyone who has assisted him) for CEmu, which I used to capture the below video

Wow, at first i thought that was a screenshot of the 83+ version, it does run much smoother/faster on the CE. That's exciting, i'd like to take a stab at porting some of my old projects over to the CE

It's not super hard, just depends how much "hardware dependent" code you have (such as accessing port $10 on the 83+, etc.) and also accounting for the 24-bit multi-registers. I'm happy to send you my gbuf -> LCD drawing & scaling routine if you need it