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The Journey Begins!

disjaukifa

Entry posted by disjaukifa

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Hey Guys,

 

As some of you know I'm in the process of releasing my first homebrew game called Candy Catcher which I'm very excited about and have been extremely happy with the responses I have gotten from the game so far. However during the development of that game, i quickly realized not only the complexity of my statements I was making in batari Basic, but also the amount of ROM (Read Only Memory) space my code was taking, I had some statements that were easily pushing 50 ~ 75 bytes. That doesn't sound like much but when you only have 4096 bytes to work with, you only have ten of those statements, you have used a 1/5th of your available ROM space. I was limited to 4k, easiest way for my to make my game into a cartridge and release what I was considering a budget title. I had many more ideas for additional features in Candy Catcher that never saw the light of day because of ROM limitation issues.

 

So for my next game that I'm keeping quite until I have a playable demo to present, I decided to learn assembly to reduce the amount of ROM space my code is taking and to give me great control of the number of objects that appear on the screen and to give me more flexibility with the speed and execution of my code as well as cutting down on the ROM space my code requires.

 

I'm going through Atari 2600 Programming Tutorial posted on Random Terrain's site, getting my machine setup and learning the basics of Machine Langauge from the beginning. I also have Machine Language For Beginners by Richard Mansfield and 6502 Software Design by Leo J. Scanlon as references as I go.

 

I'm going to be doing all my development on my Mac Mini Server as its my main desktop (Mirror Raid Harddrives are freaking awesome) and I'm not having to run a VM of Windows XP to do development of my game which is also nice which I did for Candy Catcher.

 

My goal is to update this blog weekly with examples of what I have figured out and with tips to help others along as well.

 

Thanks

Disjaukifa

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Dave Neuman

Machine Language For Beginners by Richard Mansfield is a good reference, I used it when learning assembly for coding Space Battle. Another reference I utilized was Programming the 6502 by Rodney Zaks. Have fun, I look forward to reading about your progress.

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