Acid Drop mystery

[Thomas Jentzsch]

While disassembling Salu's Acid Drop for NTSC conversion, I found that this game was originally only an 8K game, that was later converted into 16K. The first two 4K banks are 100% identical to the last two, but, due to some minimal code modifications, the game only runs with all four banks.

 

I wonder why Salu did this. Does anybody know

 

And Acid Drop was originally developed for NTSC. The are a lot of evidences in the code and you can even spot one yourself:

The height of the preview blocks is one pixel lower than the height of blocks in the playfield. The height of the playfield was probably increased to compensate for higher vertical PAL resolution and the preview block was simply forgotten.

[Eckhard Stolberg]

Maybe Salu still had some 16K boards left over from the release of a previous game, and wanted to use up those? That might have been cheaper than designing and building a special 8K board.

 

 

Ciao, Eckhard Stolberg

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Maybe Salu still had some 16K boards left over from the release of a previous game, and wanted to use up those? That might have been cheaper than designing and building a special 8K board.

Sure, but then, why did they also change the bankswitching code from F8 to F6? AFAIK F8 should have worked too.

 

BTW: Which could have been the "previous game", Pick N Pile?

[King Atari]

Man, I wish I understood that technical stuff, so I could understand what you guys are talking about.