I added the applause meter tonight that shows how well you’re doing overall and how close you are to failing. As can be seen, its a vertical bar separated into three sections, filling from bottom to top. When doing well, the bar fill is green, when okay its yellow, and when bad its red. When empty its game over! (Though I don’t have a game over yet). Your applause increases when you correctly strum a note, and decreases if you miss a note or incorrectly strum. I also fixed up some bugs recognizing correct strumming, and separated the code out into multiple files now that things are getting bigger. Next up is reading note and song data from files, and then the SID converter plugin!

I snuck some hours in yesterday before I went to the dentist and worked on things. Shredz64 can now take a (static) list of button data (e.g. buttons to be pressed at what time and in what order) and correctly show it on the screen. For instance, I can encode data that says “A green button should be pressed at 00:00:10, 00:00:20, and 00:00:45, a red button should be pressed at 00:00:10, 00:00:30, etc, and it will correctly show and scroll the sprites on screen. It will also detect if you strum the correct chords at the correct times and increase your score upon success. I’ve also added a “Shredocity” meter that mirrors the functionality of Star Power in Guitar Hero for the Playstation. I will soon be adding a crowd meter that will determine how well you’re playing. Here is a screenshot that shows some button data on the screen. The Shredocity meter is a bit chunky looking right now, I’ll be thinning out the graphics.

Overall, things are going really well. The framework of all the controls and graphics are pretty much done, there is only the big project left of incorporating SIDs in as the source of the music, and the smaller task of reading the song data from files on disk. SID music is ironically incredibly hard to work with on a C64 since its just machine code that was ripped from some other program, but I have plans incorporating SID plugins for XMMS to convert it over to a different usable format. More on that later after some code has been written.

Well, I got a few more things done. As I mention on the Shredz64 page, graphics are simple and confined to PETSCII and sprites right now, no high res stuff. I want to save all the processing power I can for good response and music. I’ll tweak up the sprites later on, but for now this is fine. Anyway – I have the fret board showing, and button indicators at the bottom. They do respond to the guitar controller now, so if you press a button on the guitar it will light up on the screen. I have the strum bar just playing a beep out of the C64 right now to let me know its working. As can be seen, I also did a simple sprite to represent the note/button as it slides down the fret board.

I had a day off from work today, though I ended up sleeping pretty late and not getting everything done I wanted to. I did, however, build a PC64 cable and get cbmlink installed and running on my Debian box. Now I can successfully read/write files/disk images to my C64 from my PC, read/write memory, remotely execute programs, run disk commands, etc. The reason this is related to Shredz64 is now I can actually test it on a real C64 with the controller as opposed to only the emulator with no controller. The cable isn’t too exciting looking to no pictures, but it does operate on a 4-bit parallel connection between the user port and the parallel port, as opposed to a serial connection.