Friday 16 May 2014

A 'hole' lot more...

In a nutshell, the player movement and interaction with the environment is complete. Running, climbing, swinging, falling, digging and collecting gold is all done, and the holes now fill themselves in, killing the player if they happen to be in the hole.

Here's an updated video,  showing the first 2 levels of the game. I've had to remove the title screen due to memory restrictions on the Coco3. I've also removed the guards from the game entirely because they affect the ability to dig. In the video I purposefully fall into a hole to show the player losing a life, and then use CTRL-R to end the game.


All that remains now, as far as I believe, is the demo mode logic (just a large look-up table) and the logic related to the guards. I'm sure there's also some housekeeping stuff I'm missing as well (like high score entry), but that will fall out in the wash.

The code, without the large data tables, is heading towards 2,500 lines now - roughly 4.5KB of 6809 object code. With the graphics data and a handful of levels the executable object is ~16KB.

To be honest, I've been quite pleasantly surprised by how smoothly the port has gone, and how easy the reverse-engineering has proven to be thus far - especially given my lack of experience with either the 6502 or the Apple II. It has certainly been easier than (arcade) Donkey Kong, for example! I can only hope that the remainder doesn't throw up too many challenges, though I suspect the guard AI will be the real thorn-in-the-side!

The next task is to get the demo mode running before I move onto the guard logic. I'm not expecting too many issues there, as it is little more than a large table look-up, and it should run correctly even in the absence of the enemy AI.

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