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Vitor Vilela
@hackervilela.sneslab.net

It's been a while since I shared last SimCity SA-1 update because I was thinking some very complex things with SA-1 Character Conversion DMA and with the terrain generator, but I did it. I got animations to work and 10,000 maps support on the game. #1,000-#1,999 are the alternate maps from original

Vitor Vilela
@hackervilela.sneslab.net

The game used to generate the terrain, then another routine converted to a bitmap using SNES format. Now, while the game generates the terrain, it stores its pixel to the bitmap buffer, which at every frame SA-1 Character Conversion DMA converts instantly to SNES GFX format, becoming an animation.

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Vitor Vilela
@hackervilela.sneslab.net

The game converts the map numbers into a seed which is fed to the map generation. There was a bug that allowed to you have up to 2,000 maps due to an uninitialized value when entering the main generation menu without touching anything. Now they are #1,000-#1,999 maps.

Vitor Vilela
@hackervilela.sneslab.net

And finally, #2,000-#9,999 are additional maps done by re-feeding seed in another way, so you can have much more maps on the game with a cheap change. When you click on the map, there's a full screen view (made with Mode 7) and the animations work as well.

Vitor Vilela
@hackervilela.sneslab.net

L/R allows you to increase or decrease the map number and it's immediately generated. I'm implementing the same approach to the overviews map too, with live and instant generation, but it's still work in progress so I'll share more later.