• Pinacolada's Projects

  • by Pinacolada

Wherein I enlighten you, dear reader, on the status of my many eclectic hopes and dreams for Commodore projects.

Jul
20

Reviving CMD's Space Combat type-in

How about trying a space combat game, then CommodoreServer-izing it?

I started typing in Space Combat by Gene Barker and CMD, in the hopes it could be converted to CommodoreServer. It is a big BASIC game, spanning five issues of Commodore World. First I had to debug the listing of the checksum program from the PDF. That took a while. I am done with installment one, there may be some bugs lingering though. You can move the ship with @, ;, :, and / keys (the quintessential diamond shape from such RPGs as Ultima). Hitting A-Z (Shift is required) to view starship stats is supported, as is quitting. All other functions have not been implemented yet.

Commodore World issues can be downloaded from the Internet Archive.

A link to the disk image, which will be updated as I add more installments. Here is the C64List .lbl file.

Another feature to add would be sound, I don't think it has any.

Leave a Comment

You must be signed-in to post comments.

Responses

HowlinAl 7/28/2014

I remember reading that series. Great work!

Pinacolada 8/10/2014

Thanks HowlinAl! I'm up to installment three right now, but I want to make sure everything got merged successfully before posting it. I'm using SysRes to do the merge work.

I discovered that for whatever reason VICE will lock up in the middle of merging files using my preferred merge utility. I looked in the ROM routine and it seems that bits 6 and 7 of $DC00 aren't toggling properly, and the routine is stuck in a loop, CMP #$40 / BNE'ing endlessly. So serial bus activity just... stopped for no good reason. Weird.

Anyway, SysRes' MERGE command works just fine, but it still seems that the three modules aren't playing nicely. The checksum program takes program lines into account, so unless I'm really needing to delete lines that the issues say to delete (I've just REMmed them out) I can't see what is causing the problems.