Anyone attempted a Crackpots paddle hack?

[+wongojack]

Title

[Nukey Shay]

Don't look good...code is pretty tight in this game.  That and because many of the "worst case scenarios" in the kernel push cycle counts into the 60's and 70's means there's not much opportunity to poll INPT.  The less and inconsistent opportunities which remain may not be enough for a good sample rate.

 

On the bright side, most of the branching done is dedicated (i.e. the tagged destination is always reached from 1 specific branch), so it's feasible to spread sampling code across 2 consecutive scanlines - like what was done with Centipede.  Highly doubt you'd be able to retain the 4k romsize, tho.

[Nukey Shay]

Hm...unless choppy movement is acceptable, where the player only appears directly above one of the six windows.  That only needs 6 samples at a general spacing within the display.

Edited August 17, 2019 by Nukey Shay

[+wongojack]

Choppy movement is probably a dealbreaker for some people, but I would certainly give it a try.

[Bakasama]

Well, if adding paddle controls isn't doable, would adding driving controllers doable?

[Nukey Shay]

That could be a worse solution than choppy paddles...you still need to build up a decent sampling ratio within the display - Otherwise, the player could end up moving the opposite direction than instructed if you turned the knob too fast between the code that does the checking.

[Marcos Moutta]

Came from the future to ask if this is possible now

Homebrew cartridges being 32k and having a co-processor 10 times faster than the 6502 is now the norm. Is it still that hard to check where the paddle is?

 

This game has a lot of potential in my opinion but the controls are its main limiting factor. Would love to love it more, and to the best of my knowledge no improved ports exist

[+splendidnut]

3 hours ago, Marcos Moutta said:

Homebrew cartridges being 32k and having a co-processor 10 times faster than the 6502 is now the norm. Is it still that hard to check where the paddle is?

Yup, still hard to check where the paddle is at, since it typically needs to be read every scanline during the display kernel, which is still written in 6502 assembly.

 

I will point out that the issue here is talking about hacking support into the already existing display kernel.  And it sounds like one of the goals was to keep it within 4k size of the original ROM.  There seems to be quite a bit of free time to read it, but only for the bottom half the screen.