Metal Dragon

Likewise

Good looking game and nice action. One question, since it's SC8 and only uses GFX9000 due to the higher speed, should it be possible to a version for all based FPGA MSXs around? FPGA MSXs have an Turbo VDP option which boots the speed a lot (I think x5 at least)

Considering the big base installed of this kind of users (OneChip, Zemmix, SX1, SX1 Mini...) perhaps it's an interesting market . I'm the proud owner of one Zemmix

Very good! Another great game for v9990

BRING IT ON KAI :]

Aww sheeeeeitttt. I'm in

Thank you everyone for your enthusiasm!
We will begin a preorder soon.

I love the speed. And nice to see another high spec game.

Any chance this game will also have a 2 player coop mode? Always found it a pity that the msx contra had no 2 player mode (despite the pictures in the manual showing 2 people). This could fill that gap in that case.

@gdx, this is a work in progress version. I am sure Kai Magazine will do their best to polish some details that might be improved.

I would also refine a bit the helicopter blades that appear in this part of the intro to look more like these ones (now they look a bit like a cloud). Anyway it is up to the artist to decide to change such tiny details. The game already looks pretty spectacular and I am preordering it! :)

Thanks for the clarification. It's supposed that OCM / Zemmix has an extra mode of 1Mb VRAM, I don't know if it really's fake VRAM since V9958 can't address more than the basic 128Kb, I can investigate if you want. Another solution should be to use normal RAM to store graphics and move to VRAM, you have up to 4Mb RAM, but in this case, I don't know how should be the performance moving data from RAM to VRAM with 8,06Mhz Z80 included.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.
I must clarify:
This newspost is based on a facebook news we released over a month ago, so many things have changed within the game and many improvements have been made.
The intro font is now clearer to read.
The jeeps leave some marks now (whenever it is possible. Due to the way the game engine works, it is not always possible to leave permanent marks on the background, and dealing with the wheel marks as live objects is not an option here).
I know it is easy to compare this game with many arcade/16 bit games and see all the details that are missing from a real 16 bits game with a kick-ass cpu and graphics card, but this is still an 8 bit game.
This game already requieres a turbo cpu (panasonic 2+, zemmix and all its variants) in order to work at full speed. If we add more stuff (2 players, more details that should appear on a 16 bit game, etc) the game would requiere a Turbo-R.

We will release an updated video very soon (probably this weekend).

I also wish to clarify that we are making this game for fun. Lots of sales are NOT the objective here. We just want to make a nice v9990 arcade-like game with all the stuff we want/can fit in it and loaded with frenetic action, while parodying belic games from the 80's. That's all.
So, reaching a wider audience by making the game as hardware friendly as possible or making exclusive versions for lower specs is not in the priority list.
The priority is to make a cool looking v9990 game with 256 colors and have fun while doing it.

Having said this, I apreciate the feedback and please keep it coming. The v9990 vram and performance are at its limits, as it is the cpu and the memory, so adding details will be difficult, but if it is a matter of correcting a mistake or changing something we might be able to do it.

Thanks for your comments and looking forward to your game!! Always cool to see the v9990 get some love...

@Kai Magazine Have you tested this on the MSXVR?

Looks like a fun game and I will probably want to order one!

We haven't been able to test it on VR at this point. I am still waiting for mine, which should have arrived in February, but I belive the VR team are fine-tunning some things and I am not sure when will I receive it.

This game will use a special cartridge (with a lot more capacity than the usual 2048kb we use) and extra ram for those who don't have a ram upgrade in their panasonic 2+ so I am pretty sure the game will not run on msxVR straight out of the box since it will probably requiere the msxVR team to make this cartridge compatible with the VR.
Since we don't know when (or if) this will happen since this deppends on the VR team, the game will be announced as NOT msxVR compatible until we can test it ourselves and we see it works correctly.

A great development team ! A futur hit on MSX

I thought of adding extra features for r800 users but:
1- this doesn't solve the vram maxed out issue (and yes, we load different graphics and enemies in every stage, even in most sub-stages).
2- This would make feel most people (the non-r800 users) as if they are missing on part of the game/fun.

Also:
3- The game already adapts/supports to a lot of different hardware:

z80 (disabling sprite priority)
z80 turbo
r800 (enabling vsync)
fm pac
music module
fm pac + music module
opl4
English or spanish
and more stuff I can't remember at the moment.

Implementing and taking care of all this and testing for all those variants and checking over and over that everything works with all the possible different configurations in different machines is already a nightmare, both coding and testing.
Cpu, ram, vram and v9990 performance (speed) is maxed out, we added literally as much stuff as we could.
Trying to add something like this would requiere massive changes, just to see if it is viable, and I am pretty sure it is not, or at least not worth the effort.
Belive me, if it were viable and relativelly easy, I would have included it already.
The v9990 has more limits and is not as powerful as people seem to think (it is just a fraction of what a similar arcade machine video chip actually had). Making this game as it is right now (as you will see in a couple of days on a new video) is already a huge challenge.

Thanks Kai, I can wait.

There have been some BIG releases recently, this will be another one!

@kai magazine : did you use BMLX or only LMMM. As the linear copy commands are faster.

I use different kinds of copy commands depending on the task and necessity.

Hi, but where is the preorder, in this thread? if so, please Kai, count on me.

Thank you for your interest
The preorder will begin very, very soon.

I saw, just preordered..