H-Tron
Posted: Fri Mar 02, 2018 11:34 am
I proudly present "H-Tron", my first ever game for the ZX81 (16K RAM required):
This is the classic overhead view "Tron" game from the movie of the same title (motorcycles that leave "wall trails" behind them). If you crash into a wall, your opponent scores a point. The player who first reaches a score of 5 wins.
Controls:
Turn left/right:
Left Player: A/S
Right Player: Cursor left/right (5/8) or N/M
(in one-player mode, human is right player)
Press Space or 0 to start a round
Pause game: P
End game: X
Thanks to Andy Rea for providing ASM plot functions (zx81plot.h), now you can see how they perform in a "plotting" action game. Two more functions were taken from z8048.c written by sirmorris.
@Fruitcake: is there a way to plot in colour using the Chroma Interface? I assume that this would go beyond it's capabilities. [EDIT: Andy's function plots by putting the appropriate graphical character on the screen - so colourising would work in theory, but it wouldn't make much sense. At least there is no way to give both player's trails a different colour.]
P.S. My stardom may be marred a little by the fact that Andy has already done a Tron game a few years ago (Tron Trails), so it seems that I have "re-invented the wheel". But I noticed that his AI logic seems to be a little different from mine, so we can compare our two approaches. Furthermore, I use rotational controls (left/right only) while Andy uses directional steering.
P.P.S. The history behind my game: in 2016 I decided to write a game for XT-class DOS PCs equipped with a Hercules graphics card, since there are so few games that truly support the Hercules card (most 1980s games simply blew up their 320x200 CGA graphics, but very few produced a real 720x348 Hercules screen).
So H-Tron was born (the "H" stands for "Hercules"), written in December 2016 in Borland Turbo C 2.01.
Later I found the great z88dk C compiler for Z80 computers that allowed me to port the game to the ZX81.
This is the classic overhead view "Tron" game from the movie of the same title (motorcycles that leave "wall trails" behind them). If you crash into a wall, your opponent scores a point. The player who first reaches a score of 5 wins.
Controls:
Turn left/right:
Left Player: A/S
Right Player: Cursor left/right (5/8) or N/M
(in one-player mode, human is right player)
Press Space or 0 to start a round
Pause game: P
End game: X
Thanks to Andy Rea for providing ASM plot functions (zx81plot.h), now you can see how they perform in a "plotting" action game. Two more functions were taken from z8048.c written by sirmorris.
@Fruitcake: is there a way to plot in colour using the Chroma Interface? I assume that this would go beyond it's capabilities. [EDIT: Andy's function plots by putting the appropriate graphical character on the screen - so colourising would work in theory, but it wouldn't make much sense. At least there is no way to give both player's trails a different colour.]
P.S. My stardom may be marred a little by the fact that Andy has already done a Tron game a few years ago (Tron Trails), so it seems that I have "re-invented the wheel". But I noticed that his AI logic seems to be a little different from mine, so we can compare our two approaches. Furthermore, I use rotational controls (left/right only) while Andy uses directional steering.
P.P.S. The history behind my game: in 2016 I decided to write a game for XT-class DOS PCs equipped with a Hercules graphics card, since there are so few games that truly support the Hercules card (most 1980s games simply blew up their 320x200 CGA graphics, but very few produced a real 720x348 Hercules screen).
So H-Tron was born (the "H" stands for "Hercules"), written in December 2016 in Borland Turbo C 2.01.
Later I found the great z88dk C compiler for Z80 computers that allowed me to port the game to the ZX81.