INCOHERENT RETRO RAMBLING

The approach flying shark takes to drawing the screen is quite involved. It is a kind of "virtual" tile map approach similar to that used...

There are four stages in the zx spectrum port of flying start. Each stage is described by this struct: The two most important fields are...

All object instances ( player, enemies, bullets, etc ) use the same type. This is a large - by eighties arcade game standards - struct of...

Flying shark is a 1987 port of the Konami arcade game of the same name. It is vertical scrolling shooter in which the player pilots a...

My last post argued that White Lightning didn't really make the task of writing arcade games any easier. But maybe writing arcade games...

I am coming to the end of my somewhat indulgent dive back into the world of in Forth. I have shown that you could write games in White...

Frogger is all very well, but we're not going to make it big with poor quality arcade knock-offs. If White Lightning is really going to...

Writing a game in Forth alone is challenging. White Lightning addresses this with a sub-language called IDEAL - Interrupt Driven...

So what was White Lightning? A short answer would be that it was a version of the Forth programming language (...

When I started programming back in the distant past of the 1980s, there were only two options if you wanted to write your own games. You...

Get Room Dimensions for either the current room ( 800 ) or the room passed in LR ( 840 ). 800 LL = KR: GOTO 850 840 LL = LR 850 V3 = ...

There are up to 10 types of traps on a level. These are defined after the room descriptions. { // TN byte MonsterIdForAmbush[10]; // TV...

Inaddition to combat actions, the player has various actions to help them to explore the dungeon. (O)pen door. If the player is facing a...

The game starts at 5000. The initial room is always room 1 and KR is set to this. The string O$ lists all the player actions. These can...

If there is an Apshai game engine, it is the DM program. This 342 line BASIC porgram runs all the titles in the Dunjonquest series. The...

In the previous post, we looked at a small fragment of code. In this post, we look at the Innkeeper program, which accounts for roughly...