Re: Re: [stella] New members

Subject: Re: Re: [stella] New members
From: <kurt.woloch@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 6 May 1998 11:08:32 +0200
At Tue May  5 19:12:55 1998, Eckhard Stolberg wrote, in answer to my
reply regarding Plotting:

>>Well, on the 2600 I consider this (Plotting, I hope you meant this one)
>>as rather complicated, even if you don't implement a 2-player
>>simultaneous game. You have up to six rows of symbols on each line, plus
>>the player holding another symbol. The symbols differ in color AND
>>pattern. A one-player version would eventually be doable if you leave
>>out either the pattern or the color differences, and if you let
>>everything flicker, for instance, displaying the player and its symbol

>Plotting had a playfield of 12*12 and there were only 4 different
>symbols. If each symbol would only be 4 pixels wide, it would
>fit into the 6 sprites routine, which gives you 48 pixels. Or
>is you would allow flicker, you could use symbols, that are 
>8 pixels wide.
>You might need to use Supercharger RAM to hold the display, though.

Well, believe me, I thought of the RAM problem too. In fact, the
Plotting issue didn't let me go yesterday. Unfortunately, I didn't have
time to look for my Amigabasic source and put it onto a PC format disk.
Well, anyway... now as I think of it, it'd be quite doable...
I think if the symbol would only be 4 pixels wide, the playfield would
be monochrome, still looking ugly, and only about half the size of the
original one - which isn't quite true, since there seem to have been 2
versions of the Plotting arcade machine: in one, the symbols were 16
pixels wide, in the other one, 12 pixels. Anyway, I'd go for the
"colored blocks" scheme without flicker, using the "puzzle game kernel"
that was presented earlier on this list. It's true that the entire
playfield is 12*12, but the target block, I think, never consisted of
more than 6*6 blocks, so the 6 columns can be displayed by this kernel,
as it has been done before in "Klax". The remainder of the playfield
only consists of empty space, border, or pipes. You could display this
by the playfield registers. The border and the pipes basically have the
same function (except for the bottom of the playfield, which you could
do in another color), so they don't have to be graphically different.
You still could give the target blocks another shape (like the diamond
in the kernel), while the border and pipes are simple blocks, so the
player can distinguish a pipe and border from a block he can hit, which
would have to have the same color as the border, due to the playfield -
ball restriction, since you'd display the player's block by the ball.
In my Amiga program, I have defined the screens with strings, for
instance:

         bbb
          bb
           b
            
          p 
            
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxx
      xxxxxx

When a level is first displayed, the computer turns every x in one of
the symbols, which is chosen randomly. However, you can put these
descriptions (12x12 byte each screen, maybe compress it to 12x6 or
12x3?) into the ROM. You only need to store the contents of the xxx area
in RAM. For game calculations, the VCS would lookup the position your
symbol is flying to, then look into the ROM what's there. Only if it
encounters an 'x', it would look into the 6x6 RAM array what's really
there. This way you could do with 36 bytes of RAM to hold the playfield
of the current round, displaying this with the puzzle kernel. I think
you don't need the Supercharger RAM here.
By the way, the "4 different symbols" isn't quite true. At least on the
Amiga and Gameboy versions, there's a yellow "Z" symbol appearing from
time to time, giving you an extra life if hit. 

And at  Wed May  6 04:49:24 1998, A. wrote:

>OK, there are a couple of things in Eckhard's post I am not familiar with.
>Could somebody please explain what or how to achieve...
>
>a) small playfields (ie: 12x12 mentioned here)
>b) "the 6 sprites" routine

a) I don't know myself, but I'm sure it's rather complicated... :-)
b) To my understanding, this is a common way to display a 6-digit score
counter, or a title screen. Both players are used for this, with 3
copies each, and narrow spacing. The CPU writes to the player registers
in-line to make the 2nd and 3rd copies look different than the first
ones. In alternation to this, you can write to the color registers to
have 6 equal symbols, but in 6 different colors, on one line, which is
the way I would do it in this case.

With love (and many, many colored symbols to shoot...)
Kurt Woloch

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