TI BASIC Game: Aperture

[+adamantyr]

Good news...

 

Over the holiday break, I was cleaning up over seven years of office paperwork (much of which needed to be shredded and discarded) and I found my original maps for all the Aperture levels as well as design docs! This is a big key in figuring out how to fix the last level...

 

Not sure when I'll have time to look at this, but I definitely want to make sure the game is winnable.

[unhuman]

You wrote design docs? Scan 'em in... We'd love to see them!

[speccery]

I just discovered this great TI Basic game, thanks @adamantyr for creating this gem in TI Basic! 

@senior_falcon was using it as a test for his cool TI Basic CALL routine optimization concept and that's how I learned about the game.

I am working on getting that stuff working on the StrangeCart (i.e. GRAM support with MiniMemory), but before diving into that too much I of course needed to get aperture running on my StrangeCart Basic. No surprise, there was a bug in my Basic interpreter which this game uncovered. I have it now running but it is just crazy fast and as such unplayable. In order to slow it down, I support CALL VSYNC and I inserted one such call on line 1041. Normally I need to insert into most games many CALL VSYNCs in a row to slow them down enough, but in this case for the main loop one was sufficient, I guess because of the CALL KEY and CALL JOYST which I pass to the TMS9900 and console ROM which probably takes a long time to get back to the ARM code. That CALL VSYNC made the main game loop go slow enough to play, but when man is falling he just goes instantly to the bottom of the fall, making it impossible to create portals mid-flight. So need to find those other loops as well