Gravity defying eggs?

[joeybastard]

This has probably been covered before but does anybody know why the eggs in the VCS Joust defy gravity and keep floating around until they turn back into knights? It's one of the reasons I never play this version.

[Godzilla]

bit of kludge around the vcs's ability to not display a lot of things on the same scan line. i still like it better tho

[Room 34]

Yeah... It seems to me that perhaps it was too complicated to code the different physics of the eggs' movement. It looks like what's happening is that the patterns of movement never change... just the sprite changes from a jouster on a buzzard to an egg.

 

I don't play 2600 Joust much since I also have the near-perfect 7800 version, but for a 2600 arcade port I don't really think it's that bad.

 

(Note to Godzilla: The "it" in that last sentence refers to the 2600 version of Joust. )

[Nukey Shay]

That is probably closer to the real reason. Coding on the 2600, you are short on everything (especially precious Ram). So anywhere that you can trim things, the better. Normally, the program would go...

 

Enemy:

Is it an egg?

If so, jump to this routine...

If not, use this one

 

...and the individual routines would call up the other variables like if they are moving, etc. and display the appropriate sprite. On the other hand, you could save nearly half of that space by using this...

 

Enemy:

(jump to routine that deals with all motion issues)

Is it an egg?

If so, use this sprite.

If not, use the one we have indexed.

 

And the collision routine would skip the position-checking sequence by asking the same question.

 

Besides that, normally the eggs in Joust would have two states: moving and non-moving. That's an extra routine that could be dropped to save memory.

[Godzilla]

(Note to Godzilla:  The "it" in that last sentence refers to the 2600 version of Joust. )

 

I'm glad to see you are taking the time to discover how the written english language works, I am SO proud of you!!