#PCエンジン #pcengine #tg16 #retrogaming #rondo #draculax #castlevania #retrodev Time to show some progress on this PC-Engine Dracula-X demo that has been over a year now in coding development. The fire effect and most of the foreground sprites were done a while ago. All these little things to make it feel like a game now, and not just a graphics demo.. way too much time. It's the little things that are time sinks. This still isn't the final version - need some more polishing. I ended up doing more than I had originally planned.. and having more detail and things that were originally not calculated for. Yes, this is a PC-Engine.. no graphic chips or SuperGrafx here. But I did end up using more LUTs for the added detail, and expanded beyond my memory budget (512k CD RAM). I'm converting it over to Arcade Card for the required memory budget and to just make things a lot easier on me hahah. Some interesting things here; the translucent fire layer and house layer take up the LEAST amount of CPU resource here. To the point where I would have so much cpu resource left, that I wouldn't know what else to do with it. But see that large wall section with the stairs? THAT part eats up soo much CPU resource. Part of that is my own fault because I wanted more detail than I had planned for that part (and I made the sin-wave effect more aggressive than it was supposed to be). You see how the background has all that sin-wave effects? The foreground in that large wall section.. is dynamically counter acting every single offset! I'm not gonna lie.. the idea is a little crazy. I'll post a video showing the tilemap section in a reply. On average, the cpu cost is like 55%.. but heavy areas like this average 70%.. and heavy spikes as much as 90% cpu usage! But it's still a rock solid 60fps. Anyway.. this has been what.. 16 years in the making? I designed and spec'd everything you pretty much see here back in 2010. All the number crunching, total costs, design, effects.. everything you basically see here, I had already figured out back then. That's how I work.. without writing a single line of code.. I design the graphic effects and cpu costs all upfront. From there, it was just a matter of coding it up (the boring part haha). Feels good to have it in a playable state. A proof-of-concept on paper.. to a proof-of-concept in action. 3 layers of parallax, translucency, and 60fps on a 1987 "8bit" console. Not bad. FYI: If this was on the SuperGrafx.. this would be a cake-walk. By far. Maybe I'll do an upgraded SGX version too.