On Tue May 5 06:46:02 1998, Russ Perry Jr. replied to my message "Re:
New Members":
>>Then I moved on to the Amiga. I tried to port Q*bert (again), Space
>>Invaders, Toobin', Plotting and Pole Position to it, but only Plotting
>>was rougly completed.
>
>I'd thought in the past about putting this one on the 2600. You game? :-)
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
every odd frame, and the target symbols every even frame. I think
there's no way to use a missile or the ball for the player's symbol -
you could maybe use it for the player itself, which then wouldn't have
to flicker.
A possibility without flicker would eventually be not displaying the
player itself, using the ball for the symbol to be thrown, which appears
as a block not carrying the symbol, letting the symbol which is up
appear on another position on the screen, where it doesn't conflict with
the symbols to be hit. Or - wait! If you use color blocks for the
symbols, you could turn the whole playfield into the color that's up,
which, of course, also turns the ball, which is used as the thrown
symbol, into that color. I think the game would look better with colored
blocks than with one-color symbols of different shape.
Speaking of Plotting, I thought if it would be possible to adapt "Mario
& Yoshi" for the VCS. Here you have only 4 columns of blocks, which
could be spread by 32 pixels across the screen. I'm not entirely sure
if, in this case, there'd be enough cycles to change both color AND
shape of each pile.
With love (and many possible moves left - if you look at it this way)
Kurt Woloch
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