Hi!
When working around the general design of my 'Star Fire' port, I was
thinking about doing the Hiscore table.
Such thing would be a big waste of RAM, wouldn't it?
Say, for the ten best scores using three bytes for the Name and two for
the score you'd need 50 Bytes for that alone... (Not speaking about a
whole font needed in the ROM...)
Is there actually any (No Supercharger of course!) game doing a Hiscore
table or anything close to it?
And in addition to that, is there any working binary displaying anything
with Jim Nitchals 12 Digit Routine? How many additionally Bytes of RAM
would this waste? (As far as I understand, it is self-modifying code
executed in the RAM?)
I know Hiscore Tables on the VCS are pretty useless, but I want to do my
port as close as possible to the arcade. (Especially as 'Star Fire' was
in fact the Arcade game that invented Hiscore tables!)
So please give me some brainstorming thought's on Hiscore tables, on how
to realize 'em (and why they're not realized at all), if you miss them
for VCS games in general, or tell me other nice/funny things to reward a
player when he breakes a hiscore!
Second design point is about thrust. The 'Star Fire' arcade let's you
not only steer&fire, you can increase/decrease the speed of your ship
too (You can even fly backwards, IIRC). I don't see how this can be
realized on the VCS. How should I do that?
My first though was using a joystick and an additional paddle for the
speed, but I don't think it makes fun to handle with, when you have to
switch between two input devices during mid-(action packed)combat.
My second thought was changing the speed when the fire button is
pressed:
Fire+Up go faster
Fire+Down slow down
Not too good either I think. You cannot fire then, when changing speed.
Third way would be doing it like the C64 version: Just letting the ship
fly on a fixed speed, with the enemies constantly rushing against the
own ship. It'd make fun too and save lot's of calculations I think.
Maybe go the easy way here?
Again, is there any game where you can steer in all directions _and_
change your speed? I think there was a Flight simulation out for the
VCS, how did they solve this problem? (And would this be a good way for
fast space combat? :-))
Any ideas for these two thought consuming design aspects appreciated!
Greetings,
Manuel
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