> Joystick movement is a little wonky (try it)
You need to reset the debounce counter at the moment the joystick
is pushed in a new direction. Right now you're just keying in to a
slow background counter and the initial reaction could occur
immediately or after a time interval, depending. (Fire button also
seems to have this defect, it should respond immediately regardless
of the background debounce timer's state.)
> I haven't tested it on real hardware yet.
I'm not feeling that energetic, as I have to burn a 2532. If nobody
with a Cuttle Cart does it, I'll do it tomorrow.
> And maybe the worst problem of all: The entire game only takes up the
> right-hand side of the display. I'm drawing 5 cards, using interleaved
> players 0 and 1, like so:
>
> 0 1 0 1 0
>
> using NUSIZ0=6, NUSIZ1=2, so each card is 8 clocks wide, with 8 blank
> clocks between columns.. I can move it over a few pixels to the left,
> but centering it will be rough (or impossible) since I don't have
> enough RAM left to buffer the sprite data & therefore must use the
> time-consuming LDA (zp),Y mode...
I don't see this as a problem. Stick some playfield bars there to fill
up the real estate and don't sweat it. The text in Stellar Track
doesn't fill up most of the screen, either, and the game is perfectly
understandable and potentially playable.
> The code is kind of rough... I waste a *lot* of ROM by storing 12 bytes
> of sprite data per card, rather than storing each suit symbol once and
> each number or letter once... and the kernel is bloated too... but I
> wanted to get the thing working before I killed myself trying to optimize
> it...
Unless you find you need it for something else, ROM is cheap :-)
> When you first start up the game, the deck is being shuffled. I keep
> displaying the first 25 cards of the deck while it's happening, which
> I think might be the coolest effect I've ever achieved on the 2600 :)
> (well, I think it's cool anyway...)
Definitely cool. The shuffling impression is perfect. You can't get
this kind of animation on a bitmapped display without 100+MHz
processing.
> So as usual, asking everyone for their opinion... does it suck? if so,
> can it be made to suck less? Does the fact that the display only takes
> up half the screen really matter? (this is a matter of taste I guess).
Run with it. Frame it with some PF graphics if you find it tooooooo
boring but a lot of 2600 games waste screen real estate. The
concept itself shows a lot of promise.
--Roger Williams
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