I read somebody talking about background scrolling, but cannot seem to find it anymore.
I would like to experiment much more techniques of background scrolling, because I have had to limit the size of the scrolling background in my game due to speed problems.
What it comes down to so far is that I have used the same idea with background scrolling as I have with using software sprites (like some object flying from right to left, page p and 1-p)

Is there some more information somewhere regarding different techniques.
thinkin about background scrolling for gradius/manbowkinda gamez?

Those games use screen 4, which is a pattern mode and very fast. However, as you probably know, it has limitations as well (mainly, only 2 different colours for each 8 horizontal pixels).

~Grauw

hmmm, interesting.
first I will finish my first level, my routines for enemies, routines for movement player, routines for scrolling etc.
then I can easily make the other levels, and experiment with other levels in screen 4.
I´m gonna ´set page´ in screen 4 to see how many pages it has.
So those games are in screen 4.......... nice 2 know.

I´m working as crazy on my new game, and it´s has the looks of spacemanbow. I even made the ship (as a test) look like the spacemanbow ship. Obviously later I can change it as desired.

But till now I restarted and deleted all my files several times.
(out of memory problems, speed problems, too complex programming problems, etc)

Hopefully (this is because my programming level is very low) I will have a first level finished within a week or 2 (it needs to be perfect !!!)

Sounds really very very cool! I really hope you finish that game! But alas, SET PAGE won't work in SCREEN 4... You'll need to directly access the VDP using the VDP(x) functions. Look for the appropriate registers on the MAP, or maybe Grauw's as nice as to mention the necessary registers. Don't have them in my head here, too bad .

I see, so this means that spacemanbow uses hardwaresprites in screen 4 only, and the background scrolling is done using the vdp's. Does this also mean that all the ending bosses require black background because those bosses are software sprites? I don't recall (100%) whether or not ALL the (moving) bosses have a black background, but it seems logical that this is necessary to make them move, otherwise they will mess up the background.

Yup, in Space Manbow all boss are made of tiles, orsoftware sprites if you prefer.

VDP 24 does that if I am correct...in basic it would even do it easily over the y axis,but horizontal scrolling was quite a bit more work (copying to pages and then swapping them)...
http://www.mccm.aktu.nl/millennium/milc/gc/topic_17.htm pages are in dutch,but there was a lot of info in it about VDP registers

the background scrolling in Space Manboy is done by moving patterns in the tilemap in VRAM (that's 864 patterns each time, so I dunno if Basic is fast enough for that), not by using a simple scroll register orso. Nevertheless, in screen 5, VDP(24) is a good method to be able to quickly achieve scrolling.

As for set page in screen 4, I think you can use one of the BASE() commands in Basic to achieve the same effect, though it's not as easy to use. Otherwise, you'll need to do some VDP settings (not really much harder).

norakomi: you got it right with regard to the Space Manbow ending bosses.


~Grauw

The S.M. boss of level 1 has a few sprites around the 'eye' btw.

Anyhoo, In S.M. de big objects that don't move smoothly up/down are tiles (for example those spaceships leaving that platform/vehicle/thing), the rest is done with sprites. The main issue with those sprites is level-design/path-design, to prevent getting more than 8 sprites on a row.

MSX sprites blow chunks... You have to be a blimmin' artiste to be able to do anything with 'em... I guess they're okay for bullets and whatnot tho...

well, can be handy for like a player character too, and such...

Sutchan is great at sprites!