Laydock-2 enhancement patch

Brazilian MRC user sd_snatcher, also known as FRS, has just released a patch to pimp up the MSX2+ game Laydock-2 Last Attack. It aims to improve the playability, performance, and balance the difficulty of the game between the one player and two player modes. An impressive list of changes makes this game worth replaying.

The MSX game company T&E soft released a few Laydock games, Laydock-2:last attack being one of them. This 1988 space shooter for MSX2+ is known to be very difficult. The FRS patch does not make the game easier, though.

The patch rewards skillful players that know how/when to balance the risks of playing offensive versus defensive, and who master the sub weapons available in the game. The docking power has a very important role in the game, so use it wisely. And yes, there's turbo and joyMega support now.

Here's the list of changes the patch makes:

• New title screen. The original title screen was a hasty digitization. The MSX2+ trump card was to have thousands simultaneous of colors, something just unseen at that price range in 1988, and even less so on an 8-bit machine. But the title screen of this game was almost monochrome, full of artifacts and left a not so great impression.
• Turbofixed the game. The turbo is automatically enabled on machines that have the CHGCPU routine on BIOS, and on Panasonic MSX2+ machines. Even the sample player will work at the correct rate, regardless of the CPU speed.
• Optimized many of the game routines, so it runs quite a bit faster now even at 3.57MHz
• Modified the sample player to play the samples at the PPI instead of the PSG. The samples were 1bit anyway, and this saved space for the new routines
• Fixed a bug in the intro demo that caused the loading screen to be shown (and the respective sample to be played) only once every 256 loops of the demo
• Implemented Double-buffering on the SAT (Sprite Attribute Table)
• Fixed a bug that caused the shield meter to show an incorrect percentage
• Fixed a race condition in the vertical scroll code that caused the sprites to jump on certain CPU speeds
• Fixed a bug that made the Alpha weapon launch backwards in the horizontal stages
• Bugfix: Bulldog didn't clear its explosion last sprite frame from the screen
• The shield energy is now refilled at the beginning of each planet. This was implemented since the game allows you to start with a full shield at any stage you already played anyway.
• Adjusted the power and speed of the weapons to match those of Super Laydock
• To compensate for the stronger weapons, the shield now works differently:
  
  • It holds 20% less initial power
  • As a reward for careful players, the undocked ships now can recharge up to 8 units (50% of the max) per planet. It slowly recharges when the docking power is kept maxed out for at least 4 seconds
• There's a new dotted gauge just below your shield gauge that show the amount of charging you still have left
• The docking power also plays a rule at the fire rate of your projectile weapons. At the minimal level, your weapons have the original Laydock2 fire rate. At the maximum docking power, your weapons will match the fire rate of Super Laydock.
• The docking power now discharges when taking hits even when the players are undocked. This will reflect in the ships fire rate (as explained before), and will also make docking harder, in a way to balance the difficulty between the single player and dual player modes.
• All the weapons you have can be fired at any time now. Some weapons were blocked from firing under some conditions as a workaround for bugs they had. This caused a nightmare for the player since he selected weapons that sometime just wouldn't fire without any explanation. Those bugs were fixed, so the blocks could be removed.
• The "Double" weapon now kills both airborne and ground enemies on vertical levels too
• Implemented 3 button joystick/keyboard support. They select the next/previous weapon respectively:
  
  • Changed the SHIFT to N and M for the keyboard 2nd and 3rd buttons
  • On the MSX joystick, press the trigger-2 to select the next weapon, and the triggers 1 and 2 simultaneously to select the previous weapon
• Added joyMega support: button-A = next weapon, button-C = previous weapon, START = pause
• Implemented support for quick weapon changes on single-player mode. This allows the secondary weapon to be changed while the older is still on screen. This will also solves the bug where the Condor missile got stuck on bosses
• Improved the Merry weapon: when no direction is selected, it will fire forward like Zanac's weapon-0
• Adjusted the launch point of the "Double" weapon on horizontal stages, to match the place on the ship were it is launched on vertical stages. This also makes it more effective.
• Replaced ESC with STOP to pause the game on the keyboard
• Fixed a bug that allowed line interrupts to happen during disk I/O (it was a miracle that it didn't freeze very often)
• Implemented frame skipping and dynamic vsync for a much smoother gaming experience. This also considerably reduced the tearing that happened in screen flashing and palette fading effects, and the glitches that happened on the sprites on the MSX Turbo-R at the top of the screen.
• Enhanced the shield gauge to show when the shield power is over-boosted
• Bug fix: Corrected the player 2 energy bar position, since it was misaligned
• Fixed a bug that corrupted the fixed point damage under some occasions
• Fixed a glitch that caused spurious sprites to be shown when the boss ship stage was being loaded

Relevant link: enhancement patch for the game Laydock-2.