Thought it would be time to make a statement about Death Derby...

I just moved from California back to New England. Still waiting for the truck with my stuff so I can set my Atari back up again. I'm on a minimalistic Mac Mini system right now. Anyway, right before I moved I loaded my Death Race cab up and brought it up to Chris Wilkson's place. That was the California Extreme weekend. The deal there is that Chris gets the machine in exchange for redesigning the CyberTech A/V mod and letting me distribute it. I also am counting on him to repair the machine (which I never got around to having done). Once it is up and running, I need him to get a high quality A/V dump of the gameplay and a commitment to bring it to the next California Extreme. I have an old VHS recording taken from a camera pointed at the monitor that was done by Rob Mitchell. It's better than nothing but not a great document of what the game is like. Once we have a high quality video source then we can get it online somewhere. Since this game can not be emulated, seeing it at a convention or downloading/streaming the video dump is the only way to experience it.

Committing to doing the port way back when was an outgrowth of a need I had as the "digital archaeologist" to document this game that otherwise only has a few very low quality images of the gameplay online. So even if Death Derby remains vaporware, hopefully that aspect of documenting Death Race will get done. And it will certainly help out anyone who may be interested in porting it to other platforms. For instance, someone was working on a flash game version, and there was a version that was done on Ms. Pac Man hardware. It's important for people not to attempt to port this game out of a vague idea of what the gameplay was like. It's easy to assume how it plays but when you see the gameplay for real you'll realize how quirky it is. The devil's in the details.

As far as coding goes, I was permitted to reuse the physics code from Grandma's Revenge. That game is already kind of a simplified version of Death Race. Not quite the same, though. So if I do get back to coding, I may try a hybrid assembly/bBasic approach to carry it to the finish line. So that probably means the game will bloom to 8K or beyond, which is kind of pathetic. I was kind of set on the game sticking firmly to 4K or even scrunching to 2K. I would prefer someone who really knows how to code to volunteer to finish this up. I have asked around and nobody has been willing to come forward. With all this talk recently about there being a lull in homebrews, maybe one of the senior coders who has been inactive of late will take up the gauntlet?? I have lots of accumulated gameplay ideas to make the game much more than the sum of its parts. I think that's really more of what I have to offer, rather than the raw coding aspect.