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BASIC on CART Contest (BoCC)


Opry99er

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Okay guys--- First prize is....

 

Your game will be put on cartridge and the winner shall receive (3) cartridges of his game. I had to wait to announce until this had been tested to make sure it was possible in application, and I know for a fact that it works now. :) Cartridges will come with nice color label and will be installed into a black cartridge case.

 

As an aside, there will be 6 cartridges made... Bill Gaskill and Jim Fetzner will receive a copy (TI historians and cartridge collectors) and I plan to keep a copy as well. As the winner of the contest, you will receive the bin files required to make your own cartridges out of your game in case you wanted to distribute them.

Wow ! That is an absolutely wonderful and terrific idea/first price. :thumbsup: :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

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Just as a note--- this cartridge will not speed up the game... It will, however, eliminate the load time at the beginning-- prescan. It will start immediately at the beginning of your program, without having to do any BASIC loading and prescan.

 

1) For TI BASIC

2) For Howie's winning game

 

Click 2, you're at your title screen. :)

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I am not sure I want to live in a world where you can't IF A=1 THEN CALL SOUND (100,110,0) ELSE IF A=20 THEN CALL HCHAR(1,1,128,1) ELSE IF A=1000 THEN PRINT "I forgot how much BASIC sucked!"

 

Or how about just simple AND and OR?? I made logic by math an art back in the day!

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something to help everyone with using IF THEN in basic. Basic has no AND and OR functions so if you have 2 arguments or more and want to check them all you might think something like this,

AND

10 IF A=1 THEN 20 ELSE 40

20 IF B=1 THEN 30 ELSE 40

30 PRINT "BOTH TRUE"

40 REM ON WITH THE SHOW

 

OR

10 IF A=1 THEN 40

20 IF B=1 THEN 40

30 GOTO 60

40 PRINT "TRUE"

50 END

60 PRINT "NOT TRUE"

 

But in basic the IF THEN is a compare to 0 function

so when it sees,

IF A=1 THEN 40

if a=1 it computes 1, if a<>1 then it computes 0

so a true is 1 and a false is 0

 

Now this really helps with multiple compares where you can do this,

 

AND

IF (A=1)*(B=1) THEN 30

you have 2 arguments, so it breaks down each argument to 1 or 0 and multiplies them together. if both are true it is 1*1 or 1, if one is false it's 0*1 = 0 , if both are false 0*0=0

 

OR

IF (A=1)+(B=1) then 30

as long as 1 of the arguments is true the value of the statement is greater then 0 and there for true.

 

you can have long statements to

IF (A=1)*(B=1)*(C=27)*(D$="YES") THEN..... as long as all the compares are TRUE the IF THEN proceeds as TRUE

 

and you can do AND and OR together

IF ((A=1)+(A=2))*((B=1)+(B=2)) THEN...... so here it is if a=1 or 2 and b= 1 or 2 then a TRUE IF THEN

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Dunno if this will qualify as a handy tip, or one more example of Keith being an idiot, but... assuming you're filling your screen with graphics via PRINT, it's good to remember that PRINT adds a carriage return. In my colorful little screen above, I had each of those 24 lines generated, then printed, and when I went back to manipulate them on screen, I couldn't figure out why A$(20) wasn't the 20th line on the screen. A simple semicolon at the end of the PRINT statement keeps it from jumping down a line (something I'd have noticed a little sooner had I been displaying an actual drawn graphic, and not random color patterns, on the screen).

 

Moving on!

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colorjourney2.jpg

 

 

A little more progress on my game. After each turn, a few rows or columns are pushed to the right or downward, respectively, with a black space opening up behind them. Your player can shift along with the row/column. You can move onto any square that isn't black, and you get varying points for the different colors.

 

Right now, I'm leaning toward the ultimate goal of the game being to touch the top right corner, bottom right corner, and then a 'secret square'. You'll have an indicator to tell you if you're getting closer to the secret square or not. I've gotta see if I can balance it out so it's hard, but not impossible, to reach the secret square before too much of the board goes black.

 

So far, the color-shift in the rows and columns isn't too bad, speed-wise. It's slower for a column, because I have to modify more strings, but not maddeningly so. The initial pre-game setup is a drag, but that was pretty common in most BASIC games, if I recall.

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Looks great man!! Remember... If your game wins, there won't be ant "pre-game" setup time when your cart loads. :) actually, it's zero load time because we will be "freezing" your game state at the first line of execution, so as soon as you select 2 for "Keith's awesome game", it kicks in. :)

 

Nice looking game screen, man.

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The silliest thing -- I'm so used to visualizing game screens with scores, status indicators, and other such text, the idea of giving the screen over entirely to the game board, and indeed modifying enough charsets to make text on the screen difficult, was a big leap for me. It was kind of a panic moment when I realized I was gonna have to go 100% abstract. :) But I like it now, it's kinda liberating. I'm setting a goal for myself of having a finished version of this game done this week so I can get back to my other unfinished mess.

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Alright. I'm really in. Got my idea and started coded. Man do I hate these 1 statement per line things... But, I think I'm gonna be able to do pretty well. Although, I'm already ready to ack Aperture as the winner.

 

Thing to remember, you got the same code space as Extended BASIC... it's just not as compact. :) On the plus side, it's way easier to follow.

 

Worst problem I'm running into is a lack of good line number management tools. I may need to load this up into Super Extended BASIC and use the advanced RES command to reallocate the line numbers in a slightly better way.

 

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but the game's not finished yet... I'm working out the gravity and controls right now, which are tricky because I'm trying to make the looping as tight as possible so I get the most speed.

 

Adamantyr

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Here's a question I don't think has come up yet. Technically, there's a smidge more memory in TI BASIC with no drives attached than can be accessed otherwise, which is why a few games from the old days were only released on tape (including the Atlantis game I still haven't finished rescuing yet). However, realistically, this would require a) programming on real hardware, and b) downloading to real hardware, and saving to tape, to load and run. Is anyone actually gonna do that more than once, no matter how awesome the game is?

 

Just something to consider if you're going old-school and programming "on iron," as Owen likes to put it. I'm wussing out lately in that department, strictly for the sake of convenience (been doing bits and pieces of coding during work breaks).

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Good thoughts there Keith... If you plan to do that, you're a god. :) seriously though, as long as I can test it on my system (and I DO have a cassette recorder hooked up) I say it's fair game. You'll have to send me a tape to test it though. ;)

 

I doubt any of these games will require that extra memory, but it's definitely in-bounds if you're working on a real /4a. ;)

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I doubt any of these games will require that extra memory, but it's definitely in-bounds if you're working on a real /4a. ;)

 

Tursi can chime in on this, but I think Classic99 does give us the disk drive in BASIC with the amount of memory that a TI could have without the DSR's taking up room.

 

On the TI itself, you can also do a CALL FILES(1) followed by NEW to reduce the number of DSR files from the default (3) to 1. That will get you a bit more space to work with.

 

Adamantyr

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Hey guys--- got to thinking--- since we are not doing on-screen instructions, we should all write a nice little instruction set for our games... In the line of what Codex was working on, I would like to do a full compendium manual for this contest. If anyone gets in contact with our beloved Mr. Codex, see if you can get him to email us the manual he was working on for the SSGC. I want to complete it so we can distribute the disks and manuals to all the coders who entered games into the contest.

 

I'll try to get ahold of him... I know he's a busy man. :)

Edited by Opry99er
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Worst problem I'm running into is a lack of good line number management tools. I may need to load this up into Super Extended BASIC and use the advanced RES command to reallocate the line numbers in a slightly better way.

 

Adamantyr

 

What does that version of RES do different? I've never used it.

John

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What does that version of RES do different? I've never used it.

 

Super Extended BASIC has several very useful line number management commands. It was sold from the Triton catalog and was developed by Millers Graphics, I believe.

 

COPY, MOVE, and DEL commands will let you copy, move, or delete whole sections of code by line number ranges.

 

RESEQUENCE (shortened to RES, who types out the whole thing?) has the ability to renumber a range of lines rather than the entire program.

 

Adamantyr

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