Stupid Asteroids Tricks...

I was tinkering a little this weekend...

Asteroids and Deluxe are just plain entertaining to play with. :-)

I found some curious stuff in Asteroids:

        1) You can enable asteroids as being active, but not having any
momentum. They just sit there... Hmmmm... Mines! They still explode
when shot, and they kill the sauce and the player ship when collisions
occur.

        2) There's another bit you can flip in the saucer status
location and the saucer roughly doubles or triples in size from the
"large" UFO. This must have been a planned feature at some point,
'cause hit detection still works... Mothership! Probably modify it to
take multiple hits to kill it or something. ;-)

And I came up with a weird variation for Deluxe:

        Protect the Asteroids! Game lasts only one wave and you have
unlimited (well, lots of) ships. Score as many points as possible by
shooting UFO's and death-stars (or whatever those are). Game over when
all Asteroids are destroyed. Kind of Rip-Off with moving rocks. :-)

I'm also thinking of a different architecture for the multigame. Rather
than ROM everything I might make the entire memory space RAM except for
the top 2K. The menu system lives there and loads the RAM with the
appropriate code for a game (instead of just switching banks in a big
ROM).

The reason for this would be to make code patches easier. I'd keep one
"master" copy Asteroids and then have a file (in ROM) that tells what to
change where. (Could even use IPS I suppose.) That way the menu system
could apply patches prior to running the game and do things like
"trainers" -- unlimited lives, more thrust, no friction, lots of
friction, etc... Otherwise a memory mapper gets pretty ugly when you
only want to change 16 byte chunks of code at a time.

Oh, I don't remember if I wrote this before or not, but I have Deluxe
running now too on Asteroids hardware-- easy compared to Lunar Lander.
Have to patch some locations still, but nothing major.

-Clay
Received on Mon Feb 22 19:42:57 1999