Highscores
Entry posted by cd-w
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Well, it has been 5 months since my last blog entry! A lot has happened to me in this time, including finishing a book, getting engaged, moving house, and changing jobs. Most of these have been good things, and I will try to write about them in more detail in the future. However, it has all left me with very little time to do any Atari programming. I started the year with big ideas (i.e. PoP) and planned to enter the 8K minigame competition (with Juno First), but this has not been possible. It also looks like I will be busy for some time to come, and as a result I haven't been able to help out with this years' holiday cart. However, there is one small Atari project that I have managed to make some progress on, and I though I would post the initial results here.
A feature that is missing from most Atari games, but is ubiquitous in the Arcades, is the "high score" table. Now that the SaveKey is available there seems to be no good excuse for this omission. I though it would be a good idea to try and write a generic Top-10 highscore routine that people could include in their games. I also wanted to include a highscore feature in Juno First, should I ever find time to finish the game. It turns out that it is quite difficult to design a high score routine as there are lots of exceptions that can occur, e.g. if the savekey is removed, or errors occur during reading or writing. As a result, I first designed a state chart which covers most of the possibilities:
The main difficulty of developing for the Savekey is that it isn't currently emulated in either Stella or Z26. I had hoped that it might be possible to use the Savekey with the Stelladapter, but this doesn't seem to work. My Atari stuff is still in deep storage since I moved, so I haven't been able to test my code properly, but I have written some initial code that follows the state chart above. The code is completely unoptimised and takes up a full 4K, but I wanted to check that it works before I start shaving cycles. Also, I figured that anyone else using this code would probably want to customise it themselves, and any heavy optimising would get in the way.
Edit: Minor code update - fixed some obvious bugs and optimised a bit - still untested on real hardware:
The initial code and binary is attached above. In Stella, it gets stuck waiting for you to attach the Savekey, while in Z26 is acts as if the Savekey were connected. I have attached a couple of screenshots below so you can see the main screens. I will be grateful if someone could try this on a real Savekey, although it may corrupt any data that you have on there, so be very careful! Let me know if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for improvements. The text kernels are just for demonstration purposes and will be improved later.
Chris
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