Retro Deluxe

For those who don't know about msx computers, the first generation runs a tms9918a display processor from Texas Instruments. Which was a quite capable video accelerator for the time, using 16Kbytes of dedicated video ram. It provides hardware tiles of 8x8 pixels with 1 byte of color per line (4 bits foreground, 4 bits background), which gives quite nice graphics if you manage to arrange the colors properly. Some japanese game designers in the 80's found the way the get the most of that limitation. You can also have single color hardware sprites of 8x8 or 16x16 pixels, max of 4 aligned horizontally and 32 at the same time on the screen. The combination of both things is very good to have simple hardware accelerated games. See for instance Nemesis 2 and Goonies from Konami. It is also true that these kind of graphic limit the kind of games you can have; mainly because the sprites are basically the only thing you can move on the screen. As tiles are plac...

Hoi,    here is a snapshot of the project I have been working on lately: Is called Demonio and pretends to be some sort of dungeon crawler for MSX.  The details of the gameplay still need to be defined, I am not sure if it will be more like Gauntlet or more like an RPG. It all depends on the combat and the dept I finally decide to give to the story, but in any case I think it will be quite shallow. At the moment I am focused in the engine, but for the combat is almost ready: Will keep posting about the technical difficulties I find and about the possible "innovations" I propose to deal with the limitations of the hardware. Target configuration is MSX1, ROM 48Kb, PSG; but as I already have a quite good authoring system for defining maps, graphics, etc. having a much bigger ROM is also a possibility.