For most of the day, I’ve been thinking about my Water Bug game as I never really gave it a proper write-up. Finally got around to playing it again, I was surprised to find elements in that I thought were unique to Water Bug II are actually in this version. That made me want to walk through each board, understanding better what I had done, what worked, and what didn’t. Let’s dive right in.
Like many teenagers in the early eighties, I was playing video games on my Atari VCS. Yars’ Revenge was a popular purchase, and I spent many hours dodging that stupid missile and trying to take down the shields of the Qotile. It then should come at no surprise that I tried to recreate that game at 13. My attempt on the ZX81 didn’t look horrible, but it sure played bad. Let’s see how much.
My original plan was to create an z80 assembler version of Moon Lander. But with the trailer release for the next Matrix movie, I found myself revisiting another program. Built entirely in machine language, Z80 Digital Rain expands on my previous version with a splash of color. Let’s dive deeper.
Last month, I shared an old moon landing program I wrote back in the early 80s. Right after that, I decided to give it a bit of a face lift, updating the visuals without changing the game play. Moon Lander v2 is my updated game, yet still the same BASIC code under hood.
When I first started programming, one of the games we would play on the old teletype machines was a simple moon lander game. The premise is you would use your thrusters to softly land on the moon. Moon Lander was my take of that program a few years later.
As a young teenager, I often wrote programs that I would integrate into other play. In this case, I had probably watched War Games again. The idea of a computer talking to you made for some fun fantasy play. Comp Control a little pretend play where my lowly ZX81 mimicked a much more sophisticated world. I’m sure I was running around my room thinking up some crazy way to save the world.
While watching a review for the new M1 iMac, they ran the typical Blender test as a benchmark. That wasn’t overly surprising, but the reviewer did say something that peaked my interest. Apparently, the latest version of Blender now supported Apple Silicon. Tucking that tidbit away at the time, I got around to downloading LTS 2.93 today and giving it a whirl.
I was hoping to have finished Gem Quest by now, but May didn’t afford much time. With Summer arriving and the pandemic seeming to be winding down, at least in Boise, my attention is elsewhere. With a short list of ideas, I decided to play off last month's theme. Picture in Motion isn’t new, but it is more interesting to watch.
When Simeon Dwyer shared his machine language line drawing routine, I immediately thought of redoing “The Picture.” Most of my z80 assembly has been with my Gem Quest game. I decided it would be a nice diversion to work on something else, even if a quick one. Picture Asm is the result of that diversion.
I’ve talked about ZX-Ultima before. It was first attempt at building an Ultima like game on the ZX81 using BASIC. Written in 2012, it was a pretty ambitious project for me. I really enjoyed playing Ultima III on my C64 as a teenager. I always wondered what it would look like on my ZX81. It was bad. Yet, at the same time you could see the seeds of what would come later.