Ablaze

Title screen



Ablaze was to be classical horizontal scrolling shoot'em-up for the MSX 2 home-computer system. The game was to be a be a mix between Gradius and Last Resort and allow for 2 players simultaneously. This project involved a lot of techniques which can now be considered 'old-skool' such as using hardware sprites and screen-splits for scrolling images around the screen.


The majority of this project was written in Z80 assembly code and took a lot of experimentation in order to able to scroll the smoothly screen in a relatively high resolution bit-map screen-mode on the limited MSX video hardware (yes, 256 by 212 pixels was a lot in those days). The end result was very satisfying though thanks to the excellent graphics from my cousin Marcel Engels.


Most of the major components of this project were written by myself:

  • Scroll and game engine completely written in assembly (for a 3.5 MHz 8-bit Z80 processor).
  • Hardware sprite multiplexer (displaying 2 different sprite sets on alternating frames).
  • Horizontal screen-splits for having multiple screen-modes and colour palettes on a single display frame (also known as 'line-interrupts').
  • Sprite editor in BASIC (emulating the MSX 2's rather unique sprite modes).
  • Level editor in BASIC.
  • Music/sound replayer (assembly) and 'tracker' editor (BASIC + assembly) for playing stereo-music using MSX-Music and MSX-Audio hardware cartridges.
  • Simple pre-compiled batch language for file I/O data and running backbone sub-routines (C and assembly).

Other people which contributed to this hobby project were Bas Vijfwinkel (code, tools), Marcel Vijfwinkel (graphics) and Mark Sletterink (music). Regretfully we never got to finish it due to other commitments (school amongst others). The sad thing was that the majority of tools and 'infrastructure' of the game application were actually finished to a large degree. Still, it was a great project to do and provided for a lot of experience and fun.


Screenshots - Game






Here are some artist impressions of the game.


Demo videos - Game

The following movies were created by using an MSX emulator (blueMSX) some time ago and a free screen-capturing tool (Hyper Cam 2). The blueMSX emulator is excellent and the first one that can handle most of the intricate timing tricks that where applied in the game, I can really recommend it. Note that these movies are of an early alpha demo versions that can give you an impression of what the game would have been like. No sound has been included in order to keep the movie lengths to a minimum.



Movie #1 (.mpg, 3.21 MB)



Movie #2 (.mpg, 6.97 MB)



Movie #3 (.mpg, 19.4 MB)




Tool screenshots: Level editor


The level editor for bit-mapped levels uses a virtual foreground and background layer which are simply merged to a single scroll layer in the game. This 'trick' greatly improved the overall graphical quality with only minor additional costs.


Tool screenshots: Sprite editor




The sprite editor was basically a software emulation of the MSX's sprite rendering video hardware.


Tool screenshots: Cell density editor


Cell density editor used to define the 'solid' parts of the background scroll.


Tool screenshots: Music Builder






The music editor had a classical 'tracker' approach for sequencing the music. Patterns are individually edited per hardware voice/channel. A song is represented as a sequence of patterns which are replayed successively with a possible detune level if so desired.


Tool screenshots: Character/cell Editor
Because both bit-mapped (main scroll) and character-based (bottom status bar) screen modes were used in-game, a specific character editor was also implemented. This editor could also be used to edit bit-mapped cells according to character-based restrictions. The idea behind this feature was that it would be possible to toggle between display modes for the main scroll during the game itself.