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Investigating Blog
6th January 2021
I've been continuing my experiments with a future form of JMTrackr.

-=-=-

Although it would be nice to create an all-new form of the tool, I'm wondering how well a combined version might work, between SmileBASIC and Browsercade.

The overall challenge will be to take an empty mod, and a few lines of musical script, then build up a new tune inside the empty mod, and hopefully get the mod player to play it without needing to save the mod out and load it back in again.
Essentially, I'd be hard-hacking the mod whilst it's still in memory.
Can that be done?!
Who knows!!

I literally haven't even started to look into that part of the proceedings, yet!

The first task is to get a few lines of text from SmileBASIC, over to the Mac.
.. except text can't be sent to and from the Switch. But .. pictures can..?
And so, I started to think about compressing data into pictures, screenshotting the picture, then extracting the information on the pc*'s side.
I started to work on that, yesterday, with the idea of using php to extract all the information.
The biggest problem right now is that the Switch is saving the screenshot in jpg format, with all the glitchiness which results from the compression.
Minimal data, then. And as simply black and white as I can, trying my best to retain as much information as I can, whilst also allowing for large amount of data.
Not ideal.. But hopefully not "too" much of a problem.

Ugh...

This week's game is Flappadiddle, and I still need to tackle the flame-bars, but otherwise it's more or less ready to go.
The only thing lacking is the music, which I was hoping to have gotten up and running by now, but .. Nope!!
Instead, I've (for now, at least) simply reused some of the older choons in the engine. That'll have to do, for now.

Game releases on Friday, with or without the new music engine.

*Note : I seem to be using Mac and PC interchangeably a lot. I guess that means I'm getting comfortable, using the Mac!!
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