FLAT1 demo version released

FLAT1 is a maze game written in BASIC‘n (or Basic-Kun as some people call it), still in development by Darkstone for MSX2 and up. The goal of the game is to find all the red spots inside the maze before your time runs out.

On his website, LordZett has shared a free downloadable demo, which contains the third level of the game. In return, he would like to hear some feedback about this project from the MSX community. So feel free to play the game and tell him what you think about it.

Once the game is done it will probably be sold on disk.

Relevant link: Flat1 on Darkstone

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Comments (21)

By syn

Prophet (2123)

17-07-2017, 20:54

An interesting, fun and very stylish game. I love it!

Lordzett add some pumping chiptune music as background music and it will be awesome

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

17-07-2017, 22:21

Direct playable in webmsx

The level 3 the level you play is 18 x 42 screens big. a screen is 7x5 blocks.

Level one will be all red blocks in a small maze.

By hamlet

Scribe (4106)

18-07-2017, 12:06

Man, I like the logo design very much!

By Pippo

Hero (521)

18-07-2017, 17:08

Very, very interesting and nice game.
I like it.
Good work, Lord Zett!

By TheKid

Paragon (1238)

18-07-2017, 23:38

Nice Work lord zett. One thing, I would make the build up of the maze size a bit smaller for the first levels. You say this is level 3, I would expect this to be level 20. Personally I would like to see the remaining red cubes to be found displayed in numbers (eg 6 of 20). And I agree, this game needs background music. Can someone help Lord Zett with that please!!

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

19-07-2017, 01:35

TheKid wrote:

thx. yeah heard that a lot so im thinking of making more levels befor this one. no counting on screen want to make it look as clear as possible. no text.

By meits

Scribe (6544)

19-07-2017, 12:15

TheKid wrote:

And I agree, this game needs background music. Can someone help Lord Zett with that please!!

It's kun basic. Never seen that happen.

By TheKid

Paragon (1238)

19-07-2017, 14:57

@Lord Zett:About the levels, cool. About text, it was only an opinion, if no texts is your goal, mission accomplished
@Meits: Not even psg music?

By Grauw

Ascended (10772)

19-07-2017, 15:05

Could visualise it in other ways, e.g. by showing the remaining tiles as a series of red squares, or a progress bar.

All the Kai Magazine games are Basic-kun too, and have MB 1.4 and MBWave music...

By meits

Scribe (6544)

19-07-2017, 15:40

I knew he compiled, I assumed he'd probably use Nestor's compiler which does allow moonblaster music.
@Zett, check out how Kai managed. He probably doesn't mind telling you which compiler he used and how he worked around this music issue...

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

19-07-2017, 16:45

Meits wrote:

TheKid wrote:

And I agree, this game needs background music. Can someone help Lord Zett with that please!!

It's kun basic. Never seen that happen.

mmm... Considering this is practically only combination that I've used to create demos I feel a bit sad...

Yes, if you want to use the original MoonBlaster BASIC-replayer then you need to expect some troubles & tweaking especially if you load basic kun from disk. (I think I've used it only once or twice in a finished product) but if you just take the replayer source delivered with MoonBlaster there is no problem as long as you don't do anything stupid such as load music on top of compiler or something like that. "Lately" also NestorBasic has solved this issue with build in functions. Only "problem" in this approach is that music start function may forget to enable interrupts.

There are also other options such as PT3... If you meant to say that you haven't ever seen music player written in kun basic, then I understand you much better... I've done one to play MOD-files, but it was not meant to be used with a game. I also made one multitasking one, but I really can't recommend this kind of approach. It just does not make any sense. Use the existing players, there are enough to choose from around.

By meits

Scribe (6544)

19-07-2017, 17:04

Ey, I never seen it happen. Haven't seen everything and the stuff I knew of that kun was involveld was always cloaked in silence. After Grauw mentioned it I realized that Kay indeed uses a compiler. I knew you did on occasions as well, but not in which.

If it is not too much of a problem, how come it isn't widely known how to use kun together with mb? I'd like to utilize it for sure as my ideas are always stopped by basic's incredible speed.

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

19-07-2017, 17:15

it is possible. never did it befor. not a big fan of music in game but it would fit nice. some bleep techno
I did mailed to kai about his way. but now im using basic'n not nestor. the sound fx now are made with sound commando.

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

19-07-2017, 21:04

If I'm correct Kai also uses some old and bit buggy version of BASIC replayer that is stitched to kun compiler with some binary patching... This is pretty much the problem: When ever you get in to this point (game pretty much ready, now music) you usually end up with two real choices: You just wrap something up in 10 minutes or you take a ready made solution.

1st choice usually means something like: You take a ready player routine, add 10-20 lines of assembly around it so that you can practically start and stop music from your BASIC program and compile it to address where it fits well this time. Loading routines? Naah... either you embed the music or you just binary patch 7-byte header to the music files so that you can BLOAD them when needed. Uuh ugly but works -> Next problem

The "ready solution" practically means that you throw out old basic kun (BLOAD"XBASIC.BIN",R) and replace the file with Nestor BASIC (BLOAD"NBASIC.BIN",R)... If only extra feature you need is to play music then no other changes to your code should be needed unless you have unluckily used some of the variable name you now need to load the music. Nestor BASIC in theory adds lots of potential to basic kun, but practically most people (me included) find it too hard to use for more complex coding... Each time you want to do graphics compression, SFX handling or something else that is not standard basic kun or MSX-BASIC you have to look the correct USR-function from manual that is thick like an old phone book and the resulting BASIC mess is pretty hard to follow. For stuff like loading music and playing it adding few messy looking BASIC lines is ok, but if you have dozens of similar lines it gets pretty ugly.

To solve this issue Konamiman did the Nestorpreter that compiles less restricted BASIC (better variable naming, macros, aliases, labels, functions, loops and stuff) in to optimized MSX-BASIC / basic kun code, but I think this idea was kind of born dead to be honest. I just don't want to write my BASIC in a text editor, then compile it to other BASIC dialect and test. It just slows down the development way too much.

I got a bit distracted from the topic, but these are practically the options right now.

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

19-07-2017, 21:25

Collected here few examples where I've used BASIC KUN togerher with MoonBlaster replayer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTdjdy5G5ow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMOuzW2PVrQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqWlOg9-SFs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YUtTexmzTU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHvXzBXjfaM (This one with Moonsound version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtW8qhp4f5g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV3edqRqdlI

... I think most of the code can be found from downloads section. Feel free to rip the related music code if some version fits to your project.

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

19-07-2017, 23:44

yeah i hope i learn how to do that to NYYRIKKI,
or can you make a explanation or a bit of basic howto?

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

20-07-2017, 04:19

Lord_Zett wrote:

yeah i hope i learn how to do that to NYYRIKKI,
or can you make a explanation or a bit of basic howto?

Well... ok, ok... quick instructions to get you to right direction:

NestorBASIC is nothing more than library of general purpose functions packed to same file with basic kun together with a loader. The main idea is that you can use these routines both from MSX-BASIC or from basic kun, but although the idea is good it also makes the routines a bit awkward to use.

From Konamiman page you can download latest version of NestorBASIC (NBASIC.BIN), Manual (NBAS111E.TXT) and samples package (SAMPLES.LZH)

From SAMPLES.LZH you can find MUS-E.BAS that does all that you need... As I said these BASIC sources are a bit hard to read and this is not any different as it tries to cope with every possible error situation you can ever imagine and also MSX-MUSIC, MSX-AUDIO, Moonsound etc... In theory very nice & great, but practically it makes understanding the example a bit painful.

If you look ie. "Tein minä sitten demon BASIC:llä" you can see that I just stripped down the example a bit and made it load all the songs that I need in future in to memory in AUTOEXEC.BAS. Then I load my first kun BASIC program... Only things in the next programs that really makes them NestorBASIC specific is that I've used USR(74) to start the wanted music, USR(77) to fade out and USR(75) to stop the music. Rest of the program is just good old basic kun program. I think this approach is most easy way for you to add music as well.

In user manual "basic kun" is called "Turbo-BASIC", I tend to call it X-BASIC, some people tend to call it "MSX-BASIC kun compiler" or BASIC'n. This more or less means that dear child has many names, but we all mean same thing. Moonblaster specific functions are explained in chapter 10.9 but I think you need to read a bit from the start of the manual as well.

NOTE!!! When you make music in MoonBlaster remember to save the result in USER format, not in EDIT format (This is by default "wrong" in the save menu)

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

20-07-2017, 15:38

thanks!

By NYYRIKKI

Enlighted (6067)

22-07-2017, 03:09

Let me know if you can't figure it out... I only now took a real look and realized how bad the example is... Print statements on graphics screen, starting music before loading etc... This kind of stuff happens when you try to have fun, alcohol is involved and you still have a strict deadline on a party place

By N.I

Master (178)

22-07-2017, 04:35

I read this post and thought of using the PLAY statement in basic kun by calling CALBAS in BIOS.

10 _TURBOON
20 A$=CHR$(34)+"v15t255cdefg"+CHR$(34)+","+CHR$(34)+"v15t255o5cdefg"+CHR$(34)+CHR$(0)
30 '#I &hBB,&h6D,&h21,a$,&h23,&hdd,&h2a,&hae,&h39,&hcd,&h59,&h01
40 IF STRIG(0) THEN STOP
50 PRINT RND(1)
60 GOTO 40

It works fine.
The source of line 30 is below.

ld	hl,a$
inc	hl
ld	ix,(39aeh) ;PLAY
call	159h	; CALBAS

By Lord_Zett

Paladin (807)

22-07-2017, 12:26

NYYRIKKI wrote:

This kind of stuff happens when you try to have fun, alcohol is involved ...

normal state of msxing.

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