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My homebrew: Hot Air


stlouisrod

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So I went back to a game I created in high school called Hot Air in Atari BASIC, which played OK but was way too slow and graphically unappealing. So 30 years later I got back into Atari programming and restored my two Atari 8-bit machines (800XL and 130XE) to full working order. Then I pulled every programming trick I knew of to improve the game in every possible way (custom display list mode, display list interrupts for many more colors, vblank interrupt routines to move the main character liquid smooth, etc.). I never had Turbo XL Basic as a kid, but now I use it to autoload the game and increase the frame rate even more. I'm posting it here for your enjoyment and feedback. Yes, it's similar to Joust, so sue me ;)


I have all 4 2-bit missiles left to utilize (either independently or combined for 5th player sprite), so I'm thinking of adding bullets or bird flying across the screen on later stages for added challenge. Let me know your suggestions.


The game attempts to save your 5 highest scores to a file "D:HSCORE.DAT", but this will not work on some emulators that set floppy drives to read-only (i.e. XBOX Atari 800 emulator). If the game can't write to D: it will attempt to write to the H: (hard drive) device. If THAT can't be written to, then it will display the error and restart the game anyway.


Enjoy!

TXL_Hot_Air.atr

Edited by stlouisrod
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So I went back to a game I created in high school called Hot Air in Atari BASIC, which played OK but was way too slow and graphically unappealing. So 30 years later I got back into Atari programming and restored my two Atari 8-bit machines (800XL and 130XE) to full working order. Then I pulled every programming trick I knew of to improve the game in every possible way (custom display list mode, display list interrupts for many more colors, vblank interrupt routines to move the main character liquid smooth, etc.). I never had Turbo XL Basic as a kid, but now I use it to autoload the game and increase the frame rate even more. I'm posting it here for your enjoyment and feedback. Yes, it's similar to Joust, so sue me ;)
I have all 4 2-bit missiles left to utilize (either independently or combined for 5th player sprite), so I'm thinking of adding bullets or bird flying across the screen on later stages for added challenge. Let me know your suggestions.
The game attempts to save your 5 highest scores to a file "D:HSCORE.DAT", but this will not work on some emulators that set floppy drives to read-only (i.e. XBOX Atari 800 emulator). If the game can't write to D: it will attempt to write to the H: (hard drive) device. If THAT can't be written to, then it will display the error and restart the game anyway.
Enjoy!

 

Sorry, but if you downloaded this prior to 8:45pm CST on 10/14, i had left test code inside only giving you 1 life and starting you with 5000 points, lol. Please re-download the ATR with the correct version if so.

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Oh boy.. Good question. I am using most of the available ram not being used by os and turbo xl. I only tested on stock 800xl and 130xe which have 64k and 130k respectively. I will test in an emulator with limited memory and provide some insight.

Well, I tried every machine setting possible in Atari800Win+, including running Turbo Basic XL as a cartridge, but TBXL itself only appears to work on a machine with 64k of memory or more. I would provide a compiled version of the game, but the TBXL compiler throws an error on my code for some reason.

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