Re: [stella] How did they do Centipede?

Subject: Re: [stella] How did they do Centipede?
From: Manuel Polik <cybergoth@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2001 08:31:58 +0200
> Dennis Debro schrieb:

> I saw an interesting question on the Atari2600 Nexus site.  How did
> they do Centipede with 128 bytes of RAM?  They kept track of where the
> mushrooms were, the score, level, number or lives, etc.  I'm a novice
> at programming Stella but it doesn't seem possible.  Could someone
> shed some light on this?

They seem to use PF1 & PF2 only. If I counted that right, it's 18 lines,
so they use 4*18=72 Bytes for tose blocks. That leaves 56 Bytes for all
the other stuff. Take some bytes for score, level & lives & some diverse
counters, they could still store some 20 sets of X/Y coordinates.

They're cheating on some things here, for example they're not buffering
how often all the blocks have been hit, they're only tracking the
current block you shoot at.

Greetings,
	Manuel

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