Artrag: Everything is 8x8 blocks based, fixed. Of course you build maps often using bigger components, but they always consist of 8x8 blocks. The sprites can any size, but again based on 8x8 blocks. They have their own 'maps' for animation etc. This then automatically servers as a split: you just analyse each 8x8 block. But no, the engine doesn't really address smaller blocks (although, as said, bullets seem to move at 4 pixel increments, to make angle shots look much smoother)

How many pixels does the screen move at each step in the scrolling?
Do you use vdp 18 for horizontal scrol and border masking?

A full block: 8 pixels. If it would scroll smoother than this, you would also have to redraw all software sprites for each step, which is basically impossible for large software sprites and probably even fairly difficult for very small ones. This is the same situation for vertical and horizontal. It's basically a scroll by reconstructing a full new page. So no masking is needed.

But this is something you can easily tell from e.g. watching the Core Dump demo

hm, I believe there's something wrong with the ranking system if it denotes parallax (aka Cas 'Core Dump' Cremers) as 'msx novice'

Hi Cas, nice to see you here and thanx for core dumping erh... sharing your knowledge.

Just keep asking questions fellas, if parallax remains answering them, he'll be ranked the MSX legend he is in no time ^_^

Hi Cas, nice to see you here too!
When i visited the fairs in Tilburg and Zandvoort, i always looked forward the (upcoming) game of Parallax
You are a MSX legend in my eyes too, like many others.
I wanted to ask you:
Will the two programs you made, PAMM and SFX-editor ever be public? or are those 2 also lost due the well known crash? ( i think the whole MSX world knows this tragedy!!!)

Good question. Well, any recent stuff was indeed on the harddisk, and anything else has been in store for quite some years now. I always planned to transfer all the floppies to PC archives at some point, but this never happened. In a few weeks I'll be visiting my parents' place again, and maybe I'll just bring back some archives and see what there is to retrieve. If I find anything of interest, I'll notify you guys here.

Note that many more programs were made of course during development. I recall releasing ox once (the block/map editor).

Quote:

Just keep asking questions fellas, if parallax remains answering them, he'll be ranked the MSX legend he is in no time ^_^

It's the quality of the posts that really counts... not the quantity

Somehow the quality of your post and the number of posts you did proves that, indeed

parallax, yep, you did release OX.

Hah! I even remember fooling around a bit with OX and had no clue as to what to do with the map I created

(Now this a quality post -- /me goes up to the next level)

Well we actually used ox for all Blade Lords backgrounds. For Akin and Core Dump it was used for more detail work on backgrounds, but mostly for converting DD-graph screens into blocks and corresponding maps.

In coredunp do you use also HW sprites or only VDP copies?

No hardware sprites are used whatsoever. I got rid of them after Vectron and never looked back

Cas, is that malfunctioning Harddisk in your possession since it is never tried to possible recovery.
Romversion of Akin, looks also nice. But to be realistic it will never occur