Classic Game Technical Descriptions

[RedBeard]

Hey all. I was wondering if there is a place that I can find information on how certain games were made. For example, Pac Man uses a reflecting playfield, but has more than two sprites. If I recall correctly, multiple ghosts were accomplished by reusing the sprite (hence all the flicker), but how were all of the dots done? Ball? Missile? Playfield trickery?

 

I'm not good enough at reading code to figure out such details so I was hoping to find a more general description of such things...

 

I feel awkward posting a giant list of such items, but a few that I have been thinking about lately are:

Enduro - the road and mountains move a lot. Assymetrical playfield? or tricks with player1, missile, ball, etc?

Mario Bros - no baddie falls down to the next level if that lower level already has a baddie on it... Is this because they are reused sprites? And cannot be drawn twice on the same line?

Pitfall - it looks to me like many of the "obstacles" are playfield issues, including the pits and vines and maybe even the alligators? Or the gators are "tripled" sprites, probably?

 

 

Obviously, there are tons of others. If there is a "best" place to find such intricate details, please enlighten me. Thanks.

 

:wq!

[GroovyBee]

Plenty of stuff here :-

 

http://www.biglist.c...tella/archives/

http://www.alienbill.com/2600/

 

And of course AA's very own programming forums.

[Joe Musashi]

You can use Stella's 'Fixed Debug Colors' mode ( press alt-comma ) to get a fixed color encoding of the TIA objects.

 

For example, in Pitfall! we can see that the ball is used for the vine, three player 1 copies for the alligators, and the playfield for the swamp/ground.

 

Also you can press "`" to go to Stella's debbuger mode. There you can scan to a specific line with "Scan +1" and then look at the TIA registers in the TIA tab to see what's used on that line.

[RedBeard]

Hey, thanks. Those are both great resources. Truth is, debuggers scare me, though. Most of it I don't understand (yet...), and the other parts I am afraid that I'll break something.

 

:wq!