Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987

Re:Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987 by Jare on Tuesday July 02, 2024 @05:09PM (#40860446)

Thank you for your kind words! I drew most of the environment graphics and designed/encoded the maps in pen+paper as you can see. That style of graphics fascinated me since I saw Uridium on the C64 and then the Spectrum port. Julio Martin (a real artist) drew the ships and sprites and frame, the actually artistic stuff.

Fun bit: the explosions and possibly other sounds were just us pushing graphics bytes to the audio port (a 1-bit piece of metal which you had to flip in software to make it vibrate) as we rendered them. A poor man's source of noise.

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Re:Let's write a video game from scratch like it's 1987 by ddingus on Tuesday July 02, 2024 @11:55PM (#40862595)

Lol, I feel that!

On my 2600 game Ooze! I would drop item Y values into the audio registers as a poor man's way of making some cool sounds of enemy advancing.

Same for the player missile. As it travels, some variation of its Y value becomes the sound.

Tossing bytes at ports does insure the user associates the noise with the right on screen action.

Anyhow, great art! You did a fine job making things stand out and that is not easy.

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