Return To Asteroids!

Today I finally returned to Asteroids, as promised for so long. Specially, the 6809 port to the Coco3. After spending 20 minutes familiarising myself with where I was up to all those weeks ago, I managed to fix the bug that I introduced with the last addition of code, which broke most of everything.

I also deduced the actual purpose of the function I had last added and had formerly named handle_shots(). It is now called handle_collisions(), and that's probably sufficient explanation. It's not completely debugged yet - it's a decent chunk of code all-up - although running into an asteroid splits it in two and the player loses a life.

I feel like I'm back in the groove with it now, so I'll look to knock as much of it over as possible (it's a touch over 50% complete) before returning to other side projects. I have a new incentive to finish it now; I plan to port it to the arcade Star Wars hardware once the Coco3 is done.

What I have been doing in the last few days was RE'ing yet another game, this time Berzerk for the Vectrex. I wanted to get a feel for how the Vectrex was programmed and how difficult, or otherwise, it would be to port games to another platform.

As it turns out, the BIOS is used quite extensively - in Berzerk at least - so porting the game would mean also porting a significant portion of the BIOS code. On the up-side, once that was done it would be much easier to port other Vectrex games that made use of it as well.

Regardless, Berzerk isn't the easiest of games to RE. I'm slowly getting there, but I've had to work for it. I had expected 4KB of code to be a bit easier to work out, especially given the use of well-documented BIOS calls, but it hasn't been the case. I've taken it as far as I need to at this point.

Purely for fun I took the Vectrex character data from the BIOS and converted it to Star Wars AVG commands (or near enough) and wrote a routine to render a string on Star Wars hardware in the Vectrex font. That's the picture in the last blog post! It uses an insane amount of resources on that platform - somewhat paradoxically the Vectrex rasterizes its characters - but still looks cool!


But for the moment, I've done what I need to do with Star Wars (and the Vectrex) and will set them aside whilst I work towards finishing the Coco3 port of Asteroids.