crazy idea for sidescroller game

[notwhoyouthink]

The print statement naturally pushes older lines off the top of the screen.

So, we can make use of that by having the display rotated on its side 90 degrees.

Now, as it prints the last row, it would push the game world forward.

 

Lol, yes i am kidding. I can not imagine anyone ever coding a game this way.

This was just one of those random puffs of brain lint you get from too much espresso.

[Opry99er]

A vertical scroller, on the other hand, is certainly possible using PRINT.

[RXB]

I thought about a RXB command to do this so it would grab a chunk of memory in CALL MOVES and move it to another spot.

[Asmusr]

Many arcade games had the screen turned sideways, so the idea is not that crazy.

[x24b]

I'm a hopeless programmer, but I seem to recall doing this ages ago...

 

Vertical Scroll

Print the screen as all blue or green to simulate water or land.

Print a full row of chars (bottom of the screen, all the same chars, color match the main screen color), change those chars data to imitate motion pixel-line by pixel-line within the char.

An 8x8 solid char would lose the bottom row of pixels (Bottom row 8, all 1's to 0's) in the first round of animation. Green to blue or vice versa.

Then the 7th row.

Animation is repeated, all the way until the char is all zeros.

Once the char animation is complete print a new line of chars.

Repeat, based upon a map or database.

The land or water would scroll up pixel-by-pixel. Slow but believable.

 

Add a dual sprite aircraft with shadow. The proximity of the shadow to the aircraft denotes altitude. If the shadow is close the aircraft is either on the ground or at low altitude... etc.

 

I think I did this from the top of the screen so the aircraft flew to the top of the screen. It would not have used the line scrolling.

This line scroller would go down the screen instead.

 

None of this seems right. Just like my crap earlier programming. I must have used hchar or vchar. It has been over 20 years ago since I've thought of this. Scroll up, scroll down...

 

Any games do this?

[PeteE]

I did a vertical scroller in TI-BASIC using PRINT statements back in the day. The level data was stored as strings in DATA statements, and the player car was a single character that was controlled by the joystick, erased and redrawn after the PRINT statements moved it up, resulting in jumping. At the end of the DATA statements, it would start over and change the character patterns and colors. One phase had a night color scheme where only the head and tail lights were shown on a black background. The level data had a blind dead-end that you had to avoid, otherwise the car would be stuck and crash. I don't have the program any more, the cassette it was on probably got reused.

[coolio]

I actually wrote a game like this back in the mid-80s. Even got collisions with the edges worked out. Never released the game, as I never really finished it. As I recall, I never was really happy with how the game locked. The scrolling wasn't smooth like Parsec, and I wondered how they did it on Parsec.

[iCamefromEarth]

I'm still relearning Basic so it's probably a bit out of my range, but I think this is a pretty cool idea ?

[x24b]

It's a perfect mind teaser for us having to relearn Basic and Extended Basic.