worm of Bemer way too fast

[bradhig1]

I played it on several emulators and like this person it ran fast and the input was laggy.  It is from compute magazine in 1984.   Is it this bad on real hardware. 

[Rybags]

As long as your emulator settings are mirroring a real machine then the representation should be what you'd expect on the real thing.

I remember plenty of type-in games looking good in the pics but not delivering the goods when it mattered.

In some cases it was just simple programming technique mistakes that are fairly easily fixed, in others it was a case of trying to do beyond what could be expected in Basic.

 

I suspect this game is a case of the former - a possible point of slowdown is it's probably keeping a positional array so it can erase the tail.  If done badly an easy way to slow everything down.

[emkay]

It's a Basic program. The Input Lag is caused by the "basic" Input routines that don't store the controls, and just get the actual value of the joystick position at the exact time when the value is read, after any movement or game handling is done . This can be very annoying.   I did some Basic games, getting the value in between, so the last stored directional value was used to get a fluent gameplay . Doing that in Machine Language and using Interrupts for the controls, won't end up in such Input Lag as well.

[Mclaneinc]

Make sure on the emulator you don't have floating point math ticked, on Altirra its under System / Configure System / Acceleration.  That will make things in some cases waaaaay tooo fast.

 

As Rybags says, make sure the emulator is set to the right speed, on Altirra its in the same place as Acceleration except the Speed tab.

 

Again as said, things can look great in pictures but stuff in BASIC can unless some machine code data is added be quite slow and laggy. All depends on the coders proficiency. 

 

 

[bradhig1]

The emulator through gamebase starts in PAL  not NTSC.   Game runs a little slower in NTSC.  It's from COMPUTE! issue 84/4 #47