>
>At 02:16 PM 3/3/97 -0700, you wrote:
>>Please, stop tormenting Glenn. You're only making it harder on the rest
>>of us.
>
>I'm not THAT picky. I'd gladly try enjoying Combat again, for instance, if
>it had a decent 1-player mode.
Wouldn't be completely impossible to modify the existing Combat to do that.
The original Combat only took up 2K, leaving the other 2K free to do AI
work. The only issue is, of course, time and RAM constraints. Using the
Supercharger, RAM might not be a problem, but time issues might be.
I'm going to compile a version of Combat that turns off VBLANK immediately
after the end of game calculations, so I know how much time I have.
>Some of the primitive Atari 2600 games are still my favorites. But I do
>feel a lot of the primitive-ness of the early 2600 games were due to
>factors which should no longer be a concern for today's 2600 programmers,
>even relative beginners.
>
>I think Combat and other games of that vintage were written painfully on a
>Mainframe, for instance...
That was certainly true in 1977. Defender was written in 1980 to 1981,
though, and the code in it seems a bit more inefficient than that of
Combat's, despite the appearance of better graphics. For example,
Defender used LDA Location, AND #$40, BEQ BranchLevel, where Combat
would have used BIT Location, BVC BranchLevel, which does the exact
same thing without affecting the accumulator, and takes two less
bytes and cycles. This inefficiency smells of someone who used to
program a microcomputer and didn't need such archaic instructions as
BIT.
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