New "zig" demo--20 chars one line NO FLICKER!

[supercat]

Here's a preliminary taste of my "zig scroller" routine. Still needs some improvements, but the display is unlike anything I've seen on the 2600. The top line is controlled by moving the joystick left and right; the next line by moving it up and down. The remaining five bounce at various speeds. Pushing fire will let the joystick move text faster, and reset will restart the top two lines in their default positions.

 

I'll release some source code once I get everything improved to where I like it, but for now I'd be curious how well people can guess (without peeking at the code) how it all works. Anyone want to give it a go?

JPZIG1A.ZIP

[uosipa llamxew]

I love demos like this. It's always neat what the VCS can do with a bit of tricky coding!

[nudicle]

supercat,

 

This is slick.

 

cheers.

[Bryan]

Cool trick. It's a similar idea to the ground in Defender II.

 

-Bry

[supercat]

Cool trick. It's a similar idea to the ground in Defender II.

874439[/snapback]

 

It is somewhat similar to the ground in Defender II, or the web in Krull, or a few other things, but I've never seen anyone use the triple-sprite feature with precalculated sprite shapes to produce a conformable zig-zag object. BTW, a somewhat similar technique which perhaps someone else can try coding up would be to use a 48-pixel wide sprite shifted one (or two, or 3) pixels per scan line to yield a 48 (or 24 or 16) pixel high full-resolution diagonal 'stripe' that ran the full width of the screen. Perhaps one could even construct a flicker-free 'mini-Zaxxon' game using such an arrangement.

[+batari]

  Perhaps one could even construct a flicker-free 'mini-Zaxxon' game using such an arrangement.

877832[/snapback]

Cool idea! It could correct the abomination that is the existing Zaxxon.