Looking for a specific book of BASIC games

[Kyle6502]

For quite a while now I’ve been looking for an old book of Apple II games I used to check out from the library when I was a kid. It had a Space Invaders clone in it, and it was just about the only Apple programming book I've seen which extensively used sprites in its programs. Several of the games had sound effects routines encoded in DATA lines. But I don’t remember the title. The font was tiny and the programs were very long, and I think the cover was yellow, but my memory of it has grown hazy. Anybody know what this book was?

[centuri]

I know what you are talking about and my local library used to have a copy of it.  I unfortunately live with a bunch puritans who understand nothing about this or having a good time so I may or may not be able to help you.  I could probably actually write a good amount of it without the book.

[Keatah]

What's the title then? Was it a kilobaud publication?

[micahcowan]

Could it perhaps be Apple Graphics & Arcade Game Design by Jeffrey Stanton? The book seems to have a Defenders clone rather than Invaders, though (possibly it has both? I only saw the Defenders one mentioned in a synopsis, though).

 

FYI, "extensively used sprites" is a little inaccurate, as no Apple II models has any hardware sprite support (unless the IIgs does? - don't know as much about those). But AppleSoft supported "shape tables", which had no hardware support but did have machine language routines to speed up their use well beyond what could be written from scratch in BASIC (but still required significant cycles to process, relative to true hardware-supported sprites). Unless you meant sprites the way we usually mean them today - just pixel graphics that we copy over and over again onto the screen. But at the time at least, "sprite" typically meant something where you didn't actually have to code how to draw it, because special chips would do it for you (NES and C64 had that; Apples did not).

 

Whether this is the book you were talking about or not, it certainly looks like a fun read. Think I'll be checking it out myself! I know a lot of the concepts in there, but haven't actually experimented with all of them (in particular I've yet to do shape table stuff in AppleSoft), and this would be an excellent excuse to do so.

[Keatah]

Apples didn't even have a graphics chip. Let alone hardware sprites. They had software shape tables as a firmware function, software sprites if you will..

[Kyle6502]

On 3/17/2021 at 3:16 AM, micahcowan said:

Could it perhaps be Apple Graphics & Arcade Game Design by Jeffrey Stanton? The book seems to have a Defenders clone rather than Invaders, though (possibly it has both? I only saw the Defenders one mentioned in a synopsis, though).

 

FYI, "extensively used sprites" is a little inaccurate, as no Apple II models has any hardware sprite support (unless the IIgs does? - don't know as much about those). But AppleSoft supported "shape tables", which had no hardware support but did have machine language routines to speed up their use well beyond what could be written from scratch in BASIC (but still required significant cycles to process, relative to true hardware-supported sprites). Unless you meant sprites the way we usually mean them today - just pixel graphics that we copy over and over again onto the screen. But at the time at least, "sprite" typically meant something where you didn't actually have to code how to draw it, because special chips would do it for you (NES and C64 had that; Apples did not).

 

Whether this is the book you were talking about or not, it certainly looks like a fun read. Think I'll be checking it out myself! I know a lot of the concepts in there, but haven't actually experimented with all of them (in particular I've yet to do shape table stuff in AppleSoft), and this would be an excellent excuse to do so.

 

Yes, by "sprites" I mean shape tables.  Unfortunately, that's not the book I was thinking of.  But it does look interesting.