Date   : Mon, 30 Apr 2001 09:33:53 +0100
From   : "Rich Talbot-Watkins" <rich@...>
Subject: Re: Any new games?

"Daniel Johnson" <D.Johnson@...> wrote:

> I recently noticed some new games written for an Atari VCS emulator.
> I was wondering, does anyone still write games for the BBC for the fun
> of it, or is it just regarded as an exercise in futility!
> If anyone has any I would be most interested in having a look.

A little while ago, I started to experiment with some hacky tricks which to
my knowledge have only ever been seen on the Beeb in 'Firetrack', namely
pixel-by-pixel vertical hardware scrolling.  I figured how to extend this to
only scrolling a window, leaving a stationary bit at the bottom for
status/score/lives etc.  I thought it'd really suit a 'Mario Bros' type game,
which I started to write, but which only really got as far as a kind of blob
moving around a smooth scrolling landscape.

I thought it would've been interesting to see what sort of games we could've
got out of the Beeb had someone exploited this sooner, but sadly I've never
really had the time to make anything of it.

To give you some idea of what I think could be achieved, here's what my
highest-possible specs looked like:

* Mode 2: 128x160 scrolling window, 128x16 or 128x32 status panel, in total
using 11 or 12k, leaving about 19k free for everything else (eek).

* Running at 50Hz (which looks VERY nice), we can have at least 10 12x24
masked sprites animating (obviously more if they are smaller) + landscape
plotting.

* Running at 25Hz (looks a bit yuk, but would learn to put up with it I
guess), we can have many more - I had 25 12x24's going with virtually no
flicker.

* Probably there'd be room for some simple particle effects, e.g. dots.

So what sort of game could be written around this, given memory constraints?
We can scroll very smoothly in all directions, and probably keep track of
quite a lot of sprites at once... so we just need a game designer now!

Any thoughts?

Rich :)