Articles by Retro Ports

After adding the thrust (pixel) rendering, I decided to bite the bullet and implement the ship explosion to round off the port before I move on to optimisations for the Coco3.

I’ve ported all the original code, despite the fact that one of the routines isn’t required for the Coco3 (or …

I’ve finished the RE of the exploding ship routines, both in the original and Norbert’s emulator.

Norbert patches the explosion routine to call his routine to render a piece – using intermediate results from the caller – and then jumps back to the original routine. There’s a decent amount of code …

Some progress in a couple of areas.

Firstly, the high score display/entry is now fully debugged. IIRC there were at least 5 bugs in the code; not completely unexpected since – by necessity – I ported pretty much all of the code in one go before being able to test any …

I’ve ported the remaining high score routines, which leaves just two ‘core’ routines remaining – those concerned with the explosion of the player ship. The high score routines are almost functional; they just need a bit of debugging but don’t adversely affect anything else.

So back to the mysterious end of …

Today I did a quick audit of what was outstanding in the ‘core’:

7x routines for high score display/entry2x routines to display exploding player ship
There’s also a few routines not strictly necessary for game play, but will likely be implemented at some stage to round off the port:
4x sound routines4x sundry …

Quick update on the Coco3 port of Asteroids tonight.

Have managed a few sessions over the last few days…
Fixed score displayFixed end-of-wave detectionAdded shots (player & saucer) and fixed shot directionAdded shrapnel (explosion) rendering Added end-of-game detectionAdded hyperspace
The game is all-but-playable now. Although it detects and displays Game Over, it …

Today I finally returned to Asteroids, as promised for so long. Specially, the 6809 port to the Coco3. After spending 20 minutes familiarising myself with where I was up to all those weeks ago, I managed to fix the bug that I introduced with the last addition of code, which …