[stella] Turtles (was: And now, for my next trick...)

Subject: [stella] Turtles (was: And now, for my next trick...)
From: Kurt.Woloch@xxxxxxxxx
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2001 09:10:51 +0100
Clay Haliwell wrote:

>> Turtles.  I always loved this game in the arcades and
>> play it every once in a while on Replay.

>I've had this same thought (I play it in MAME now and again). I even faked
>up a technically valid screenshot of 2600 Turtles, which can be seen here:
>http://www.gameovernet.co.uk/newpac.htm#turtles

>You'd need a good single-line-res sprite-multiplexer to drive it though.

Sprite Multiplexer? Never heard of such a device...

Well, anyway, your fakes don't look to be QUITE valid... at least some
things would have to flicker in the real thing...

Let's take this from top to bottom...

The score display would be doable. Nothing special here.

The playfield can't have another background color than the border is, unless
it would be 160 pixels wide, which it isn't in your shot (only 112 pixels).

The question signs, if you display multiple on one line, would have to
flicker. A solution to that would be to make the walls 8 pixels wide instead
of 4, so you'd end up with a spacing of a multiple of 16 pixels, which could
enable you to design the mazes so the question marks can be displayed as
multiple copies of one player. Still the spacing would have to be 2 or 4
squares between them, not 3 as shown here for the upper and lower question
marks, so basically, if done this way, the mazes would have to be
re-designed.

The red eyes of the creatures also look unrealistic. If moving left and
right, they could be done with a missile of the red players (but what about
multiplexing then?), but when moving up and down, there would have to be two
missiles next to each other, which is quite impossible, other than
flickering, which doesn't look very good.
Still, the kidturtle being on the big one could be displayed with the ball,
but the question here is if there's enough cycles in the kernal to do it.
But since everything else seems to be rather simple to do, there might be
enough...
Finally, the bottom display... it seems to be two six-chars next to each
other, which is also impossible, unless you let them flicker.

The other, non-flickering variant would be to abbreviate the text displayed
there and squeeze the two-digit numbers into 8 pixels, as it's done with the
letters now. Then you could do two sets of 16 pixel wide displays, which in
this case would show something like that:

P-00            H-06
F-02            B-22

I don't know what looks better, this one, non-flickering, or the two
flickering six-chars...

And please, include the music from the original! I loved those tunes already
back then and even did a song out of them (where these melodies were mingled
with tunes out of Amidar, and with Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson").

With love from Austria (and much music to write)
Kurt Woloch

P.S. Are there any screenshots of the Ebivision version of Pac-Man
somewhere?

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