Intro

A slideshow with music that plays before your game starts, in its own program. It is an alternative to the title screen, not a replacement: a game can ship either, both or neither.

• Full-screen 320x256 or bordered 256x192 pictures, the same art rules as location pictures, with a hold time and an entry transition per slide: cut, fade through any colour, wipes in four directions, dissolve, blinds.
• Music from one of three sources: an Arkos Tracker song (AKY, with a 16K slot instead of the game's 10K, or the streamed AYS form loaded into memory), a stereo sampled stream converted by ffmpeg from any audio file, or a NextDAW song through NextDAW's own runtime player.
• Captions in the game's font or a 16-colour font of your own, with typewriter reveal and timing, and a scrolling credits page.
• Skip by any key, fire or mouse button, press-any-key slides, an attract loop, and timing that stays right on a 60 Hz display.

Create INTRO.TXT in the kit folder:

MUSIC AKY AUDIO\STARTER.aks
SKIP ANY 1.0
SLIDE DAAD.NX2 IN FADE 1.0 HOLD 4.0
  TEXT 30 CENTRE "A NextDAAD adventure" INK 255
SLIDE DAAD.NX2 IN CUT HOLD KEY
  TEXT 30 CENTRE "Press any key" INK 254 TYPE
END FADE 1.0

Run BUILD.BAT. RELEASE\ now holds <GAME>.NEX beside nextdaad.nex: launch <GAME>.NEX. It plays the show and starts the game. This example reuses the starter's own title picture (DAAD.NX2) and its boot music (AUDIO\STARTER.aks), which is why it works unmodified. INTRO.TXT.sample in the kit folder is this example; rename it to try it, then point SLIDE at your own 320x256 or 256x192 art - the numbered pictures in IMAGES\ are a different shape and cannot be used as slides. Remove INTRO.TXT and the next build removes the launcher again.

One statement per line. Keywords in any case; ; starts a comment. Times are seconds with one decimal place. Colours are the same 0 to 255 numbers as INK and PAPER. File names are relative to the kit folder, so IMAGES\ art and AUDIO\ songs can be reused; an INTRO\ folder is a good home for anything that belongs only to the show.

At most one MUSIC statement is allowed; music loops for as long as the show runs. Leave MUSIC out for a silent show.

SLIDE picture IN transition [time] [colour] HOLD seconds
SLIDE picture IN transition [time] HOLD KEY

picture is a PNG of exactly 320x256 or 256x192 with the location art rules, or an already converted NX2 or NXI. IN says how the slide arrives:

HOLD is how long the slide stays once it is fully in; HOLD KEY waits for a press. A slide carrying a SCROLL has no HOLD.

Palettes and copy transitions. A wipe, dissolve or blinds shows two pictures at once, and Layer 2 has one palette: the incoming picture's palette is applied as the transition starts, so the outgoing picture is recoloured while it leaves. The build warns when two such pictures differ by more than a few palette entries. For a sequence you want to wipe between, give the pictures one shared palette. A fade has no such constraint.

Width changes. Between a 320-wide and a 256-wide slide only CUT and FADE are allowed, since the other transitions copy between two surfaces of the same shape. The first slide arrives from nothing, so it too takes CUT or FADE.

TEXT row col "text" [AT t] [TYPE] [INK c] [PAPER c] [BLOCK n]
TEXT row CENTRE "text" ...

Rows are 0 to 31, columns 0 to 79 (or 39 in a 40-column show). AT delays the caption by t seconds after the slide is fully in; TYPE reveals it a character at a time, one every two frames - 25 a second at 50 Hz, 30 at 60 Hz. With the game's font, INK and PAPER set the colours (paper is transparent when left out). With a colour font, BLOCK selects one of the sixteen colour blocks. Write a quote inside a string as two quotes. Captions vanish when the slide leaves. Around a 256-wide picture the rows above and below it are in the border, which is where a caption under such a picture goes.

SLIDE picture IN CUT
  SCROLL SPEED 2 INK 252
  LINE "WRITTEN BY"
  LINE "Someone"
  LINE ""
  LINE "MUSIC"
  LINE "Someone else"

The lines rise from the bottom, centred, at SPEED pixels per frame (1 to 4); an empty LINE is a spacer. The slide ends when the last line has left the top. INK, PAPER or BLOCK apply to every line. A slide with SCROLL takes no TEXT and no HOLD, and allows at most 224 LINE statements.

END FADE t [c] fades the last picture to the colour and the music with it. END CUT goes straight to the game. END is the last statement.

• At most 64 slides.
• A SCROLL takes at most 224 LINE statements (see above).
• At most 255 TEXT and LINE items across the whole script.
• At most 128 distinct INK and PAPER combinations with the game's font.
• All caption and line text together: at most 3500 bytes.

A font sheet is a 128 by 128 PNG: sixteen columns by sixteen rows of 8x8 cells, cell n holding character n, so it reads like an ASCII table. At most sixteen colours, saved with a sixteen-entry palette, one of them magenta (#FF00FF) for transparent. Cell 32, the space, must be entirely magenta - it is what clears a text cell. The sheet's own colours are block 0; PALETTE lines define blocks 1 to 15 with the same shapes in other colours, and BLOCK n on a caption or a scroll picks one. Index 0 of every block is transparent.

AKY and STREAM take the same .aks source as the game's own music (Audio). The intro's AKY slot is 16K, larger than the game's 10K; a song still too big goes through STREAM, which is limited only by memory (384K). Compose for three PSGs for the AKY form.

PCM converts through ffmpeg to unsigned 8-bit stereo at 15625 Hz, the same format cutscene audio uses. Any source ffmpeg reads works; a mono source plays centred. The file on the card is about 31K per second, so a three-minute track is about 5.6 MB. The converted stream must come out at least 8192 bytes (about a quarter of a second) with an even length; the build fails if ffmpeg produces anything shorter or odd-length.

NDR plays a NextDAW export with NextDAW's runtime player. The kit copies that player from your own NextDAW install into RELEASE\INTRO\ at build time, because NextDAW's licence lets you ship it inside your game but not redistribute it, and the kit never contains it. Set NEXTDAWDIR in CONFIG.BAT to the folder holding RuntimePlayer\, or put your copy under tools\NextDAW\. Only the E000 build of the runtime player is accepted - RuntimePlayer\NextDAW_RuntimePlayer_E000.bin - and the exported song is capped at 64K. The licence asks for a credit line where your game credits its authors:

Music created using Gari Biasillo's NextDAW

NextDAW has no volume control, so at END FADE the notes release naturally while the picture fades.

Holds, transitions and caption delays keep their length on a 60 Hz display. With SKIP ANY, a press ends the show through the END fade (at most half a second) and hands over; HOLD KEY slides always advance on a press whatever the skip mode. The key that ended the show is waited out before the game starts, so it never reaches the game's first prompt. If a hold is shorter than the next picture takes to load from the card (about a second for a 320-wide picture, longer while music streams), the hold simply lasts until the picture is ready.

BUILD.BAT writes RELEASE\<GAME>.NEX and a RELEASE\INTRO\ folder: INTRO.DAT (the compiled script), the pictures as 001.NXC, 002.NXI and so on (NXC is a 320-wide picture stored in the hardware's own order and is not interchangeable with a location picture), FONT.TIL for a colour font, and one of MUSIC.AKY, MUSIC.AYS, MUSIC.PCM or MUSIC.NDR with NDAW.BIN. Copy RELEASE\ to the card as usual and launch <GAME>.NEX. Launching nextdaad.nex directly still works and skips the intro. A game shipping both an intro and a title shows the intro, then the title.

The launcher never stops a game from starting on a broken or missing show: a broken or missing INTRO.DAT goes straight to the game, and a slide whose picture fails to load is skipped (if every slide fails, the show ends there too, so a LOOP cannot spin forever on missing art). A missing or unusable font falls back to the built-in one, and a music file that will not open plays silence. Only a missing, unreadable or refused nextdaad.nex is fatal, since there is then no game to start: a failure opening the file or reading its header shows E9 nextdaad.nex on a magenta border; a card failure once the file's banks have started loading instead stops on a plain magenta border with no message. If a show misbehaves, check the build output first: every compile error names its line in INTRO.TXT.