Writing stuff in Assembly for Sega Genesis #5

In this post I will describe the process of reading the joystick, changing the position of the sprite, horizontal flip, the Sega Genesis emulator and potentially the console itself.

Reading of clicks, processing of “events” of the shogi joystick is carried out according to the following scheme:

  1. Request a combination of bits of pressed buttons
  2. Reading the bits of pressed buttons
  3. Processing at the level of game logic

To move the skeleton sprite, we need to store the variables of the current position.

RAM

The variables of the game logic are stored in RAM, so far people have not come up with anything better. Let’s declare the addresses of the variables, change the rendering code: 

skeletonXpos = $FF0000
skeletonYpos = $FF0002 
frameCounter = $FF0004 
skeletonHorizontalFlip = $FF0006

    move.w #$0100,skeletonXpos 
    move.w #$0100,skeletonYpos 
    move.w #$0001,skeletonHorizontalFlip 

FillSpriteTable: 
    move.l #$70000003,vdp_control_port 
    move.w skeletonYpos,vdp_data_port  
    move.w #$0F00,vdp_data_port 
    move.w skeletonHorizontalFlip,vdp_data_port 
    move.w skeletonXpos,vdp_data_port

As you can see, the address available for work starts with 0xFF0000, and ends at 0xFFFFFF, in total we have 64 KB of memory available. Skeleton positions are declared at skeletonXpos, skeletonYpos, horizontal flip at skeletonHorizontalFlip.

Joypad

By analogy with VDP, work with joypads occurs through two ports separately – the control port and the data port, for the first it is 0xA10009 and 0xA10003 so-but. When working with a joypad, there is one interesting feature – first you need to request a combination of buttons for polling, and then, after waiting for the update via the bus, read the necessary clicks. For the C / B buttons and the cross, this is 0x40, an example is below: 

ReadJoypad: 
  move.b #$40,joypad_one_control_port; C/B/Dpad 
  nop ; bus sync 
  nop ; bus sync 
  move.b joypad_one_data_port,d2 
  rts

In register d2, the state of the buttons pressed, or not pressed, in general, what was requested through the date port, will remain. After that, go to the Motorola 68000 register viewer of your favorite emulator, see what the d2 register is, depending on the keystrokes. In a smart way, you can find out in the manual, but we do not believe a word. Further processing of pressed buttons in register d2

HandleJoypad:  
    cmp #$FFFFFF7B,d2; handle left 
    beq MoveLeft  
    cmp #$FFFFFF77,d2; handle right  
    beq MoveRight  
    cmp #$FFFFFF7E,d2; handle up  
    beq MoveUp  
    cmp #$FFFFFF7D,d2; handle down  
    beq MoveDown  
    rts

Of course, you need to check individual bits, not whole words, but for now it will do. Now the simplest thing is left – to write handlers for all events of movement in 4 directions. To do this, we change the variables in RAM, and start the repainting procedure.

Example for moving left + changing horizontal flip:

MoveLeft:  
    move.w skeletonXpos,d0 
    sub.w #1,d0 
    move.w d0,skeletonXpos 
    move.w #$0801,skeletonHorizontalFlip 
    jmp FillSpriteTable

After adding all the handlers and assemblies, you will see how the skeleton moves and rotates around the screen, but too fast, faster than Sonic the hedgehog itself.

Not so fast!

To slow down the speed of the game loop, there are several techniques, I chose the simplest and not affecting work with external ports – counting a digit through a register until it becomes zero.

An example of a slowing loop and a game loop:

StartWaitFrame: 
  move.w #512,frameCounter 
WaitFrame: 
  move.w frameCounter,d0 
  sub.w #1,d0 
  move.w d0,frameCounter 
  dbra d0,WaitFrame 
GameLoop: 
  jsr ReadJoypad 
  jsr HandleJoypad 
  jmp GameLoop

After that, the skeleton runs slower, which is required. As far as I know, the most common variant of “slowing down” is counting the vertical sync flag, you can count how many times the screen has been rendered, thus binding to a specific fps.

Links

https://gitlab.com/demensdeum/segagenesissamples/-/blob/main/8Joypad/vasm/main.asm

References

https://www.chibiakumas.com/68000/platform2.php
https://huguesjohnson.com/programming/genesis/tiles-sprites/

Published by demensdeum