In actuality, I believe that both Thomas and Eckhard looked at my screenshot
of Crazy Valet (which is itself basically a rip off of a game on my Palm
device, which was ripped off of the game Rush Hour on the PC, which was
ripped off of the manual puzzle game by Nob Yoshigara), took one look at the
extremely unoptimized disassembled code, and decided to write one from
scratch.
All of which is no bother to me whatsoever. In fact, Thomas e-mailed me
about his project before he let the Stella list in on it, and of course I
told him that it was A-OK to go ahead and show off his incredible work. The
variants that have appeared have given me some ideas and some motivation to
continue to work on the code and improve it. (My version had 30 bytes of
ROM free and 26 levels, Thomas' has hundreds of levels! I am still trying
to understand how he did that.)
And as far as Eckhard's code, I haven't looked at a disassembly (seeing as
how I still have trouble reading my own 2600 assembly code), but I believe
he is using the self-modifying playfield drawing code in RAM. (Wasn't there
some kind of demo posted here a while back about that?)
Brian
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-stella@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Andrew Davie
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 7:46 AM
To: stella@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [stella] parallel efforts / Invaders
> You look hungry, so have at it :)
I've had an evening's play with this code. It is quite fascinating. I'm
even more impressed, now that I understand essentially what is happening. I
don't think you can really do that (understand) unless you get it assembling
and start playing with the code itself. I was also most impressed with the
other variant from Eckhard; in fact, I didn't realise there were TWO until
I started playing with the code for Erik's version.... I thought this was
the code for Eckhard's variant!
One thing that disturbed me a little bit was the recent clash with the
'crazy valet' program - where two brilliant programmers independantly
decided to work on a secret project of essentially exactly the same game.
I felt very sad when both the crazy-valet variants showed up - for it seemed
to me that both programmers, to some degree, must have felt a bit
disappointed that somebody else was working on the same idea. (I still have
to think about how the colour version was done).
And it appears that the same thing has happened here, with Space Invaders -
although I'm sure people have been working on the perfect space invaders
clone since day 1 ... kind of the 2600 holy grail, now that Pacman has been
tamed. There are probably a few more variants hiding in the closet.
I do not plan, for the while, to take over Space Invaders. I think that
this sort of coding is probably still a bit beyond me. I was delighted at
the chance to have a good hack, though. Personally, I don't think the
'together' invaders at the right of the columns is a problem. During
gameplay this will barely be noticeable. I also don't think that one should
worry about pixel-resolution in horizontal movement. In fact, every 3
pixels is just fine (or even courser). These things are distractions. The
invaders need to be as large as possible (ie: 8 pixels wide)... it makes a
big difference to the look/feel.
I would be delighted to follow the progress of this code on the list.
Anyone game? Thomas, perhaps you can work your magic? Truth is, I'm
tempted.... but I'm still not decided on my next project; and I'm rather
(well, very) burnt-out from the effort on Qb. It was very interesting
reading the archives (re: Oystron) and seeing Piero feeling exactly the same
way.
Cheers
A
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Erik Mooney" <emooney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2001 4:49 PM
Subject: Re: [stella] Trick12 - inv3.bin
> On Wed, 14 Mar 2001 13:57:58 +1100, you wrote:
>
> >MMMhhhh... it's amazingly clever, Erik. Very impressive work.
> >
> >> I don't expect to go much of anywhere with this; it's been in its
current
> >> state for a couple years actually.
> >
> >Soooo.... are you throwing it to the lions?
>
> You look hungry, so have at it :)
>
>
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