RE: Aliens - update...

> It depends on what is at the ends of the file buffers...
> Think about it.. How many programs have you written where you
> write to a buffer without initializing it, then the whole buffer
> is written out to disc. What's in the unused part of the buffer?
> Whatever was written there last.
>
Yeah, I guess that would make sense. I figured that with RAM at a
premium that they probably wouldn't keep a big buffer with the entire
image in memory, but I suppose it could happen as the 2K blocks were
chopped up for the EPROMs... The "junk" did seem to occur in roughly
the same area on each EPROM (which didn't make much sense seing as how
the EPROMs form a linera bank of memory but the ASCII source usually
shower up in the latter 1K of each ROM...)

> re: Lunar Lander being in memory. It's possible that someone
> was looking at the LL sources, and it was just left over in
> memory.
>
And they probably weren't very far away from each other time-wise
either. The prototypes bear a 1980 copyright (and Tempest was Atari's
first color game) so if I was Dave Theurer and wanted to see how
something was done I'd probably grab some source from a recently
completed and debugged game... (LL, Asteroids, Battle Zone or the
like...)

-Clay
Received on Thu Mar 18 12:19:15 1999