April 2003

Chomp/PacMan v1.4 Released! 4/22/2003 by K3V

The latest release of Chomp (aka PacMan) has been released from DragonShadow Industries. Here's what's new: Level editor. Four new tournament levels. A couple new graphic sets. And one new sound effect. (Ten geek points to the first person to identify the source of the new sound effect.) A more emulator-friendly version will follow shortly, and source code will be posted soon. For now you can download it right here, and it will be added to the PacMan page here on NUON-Dome soon. Oh, and don't forget to get in on the web rankings. Looks like there's already a bit of competition going!

Progress Continues on Breakout 4/22/2003 by K3V

Here's the latest on NUON Breakout, from it's coder, Stephen Anderson: For anyone that still remembers my little Breakout demo, I have some news. I have made changes to or completely re-written over ten pages of code. The changes include: 1 - Animated title screen. 2 - Menu driven controller config screen. 3 - Animated starfield on controller config screen. 4 - Game engine (i.e., the ball ) now uses fixed point variables instead of integers. The ball can now travel in more than 3 directions! 5 - Greatly optomized the collision detection routines by the use of pre-generated LUTs (look up tables). 6 - Completely re-wrote the ball to paddle collision and rebound routine. I will be writing up a small piece of code so I can tweak the ball speed and find appropriate range of angles with the program running. This will save me trial and error testing and many many re-compiles. The time to write the test code will be well spent. Future changes will include : 1 - Algorithmic starfield effects that change with each level. 2 - Game play additions (such as obstacles or "gravity spots"). 3 - A proper game over screen with scrolling credits. I will release all the source code when the game is complete. I'll try to over comment it. I am trying very hard to get the next release done before the end of the month. However, I can't guarantee when it will be done. I will be releasing a goofy little starfield demo I coded up while testing my fixed point code and some sprite animation routines. Expect that within a day or two.

Chomp Level Editor 4/15/2003 by K3V

DragonShadow Industries has posted the documentation for the Chomp in-game graphical level editor to it's website today. Head on over and take a look at what to expect when the next release of Chomp/PacMan hits. From the documentation, the editor looks pretty robust and easy to use, and even will display the level in it's ASCII counterpart so you can make your level a permanent part of the game by adding it to the levels.h file.

New Chomp/PacMan release on the way? 4/8/2003 by K3V

According to the DragonShadow Website, the next version of Chomp will soon be finding it's way to a NUON DVD player near you. The site reports that "Not much will be different. The only major additions will be an in-game level editor and a few more tournament levels." Not much is better than nothing, I always say :) Stay tuned for further developments. In the meantime, have a look at DragonShadow's TimePilot 84 website for some classic shooter nostalgia.

NuonEm 0.1.6A Release 4/5/2003 by K3V

Version 0.1.6A of the interpreted Nuon emulator for Windows was made available recently. Here are the changes from 0.1.6: [list][*]Implemented Z-comparisons in 16-16Z pixel mode DMA transfers. Bomb! now displays perfectly.[*]Fixed bugs in MUL_P, MUL_SV and DOTP which were performing unsigned multiplies instead of signed multiplies. This eliminates the color corruption that was commonly associated with bilinear filtered sprites in libsprite. Chomp and Breakout now display pristine graphics. Click here to download the file. As always, visit EmuForge for the latest news on NuonEm.

Snake Source Code Released 4/5/2003 by K3V

Chad "Beefman" Tindle was kind enough to release the source code for his NUON game, Snake, to the NUON community today. He says that he hopes the source will be helpful for other beginning NUON programmers. You can find the zip file with the source code over on the Snake Page.