Kirk,
> (And man, having done my own game, I *really* can appreciate the
> sheer genius of some games that before I considered mundane and
> blah...)
After reading the Stella programmer's guide, your 2600 101, and many other
docs, I suddenly had *that much more* respect for Activision in particular,
and what it'd done for gaming. Their games had a way of making the 2600
seem a trivial thing to program. Little did I know (or really care) about
the genius behind them. But isn't that what game programming is about?
> Like, today I fired up Wizard of Wor, dumped an AVI in PCAEWin,
> and took it frame by frame in Animation Shop (easiest frame by
> frame I know of). It looks like 6 enemies take turns flickering
> through 1 sprite! But I never thought of it as a super duper
> flicker game. (I wonder if Adventure suffers from its light background?
> I know color can play a big role in perceived flicker, but I'm not
> sure of the details) But I liked the # of enemies in it, that really
> makes the game.
WoW looks pretty flickery on my monitor. There's probably better
persistence on a television. Still, it's great fun. :)
> Tron Deadly Disks, an old favorite of mine (because it feels so
> symmetrical, like the enemies are just computer controlled versions
> of me, practically) is probably doing some relatively subtle motion
> restraint so each enemy gets its own horizontal area...but I barely
> noticed that - if ever - when I was just an atari gamer instead of
> an atari coder
No kidding. It is subtle... and very clever.
> When I get some freetime, I'm really going to dive into old Atari
> ROMS, try to see what tricks I know and what ones still make me go
> "how the hell did they do THAT"...
Which disassembler do you use for this? Please tell me there's a magic one
that names labels and comments code...
mainGameLoop bit plyrStat ; Appears to check if player health is
gone
bpl killPlyr ; Yep, I was right
php
jsr dynAssem ; Huzzah! This old trick again!
-Lee
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