The Southsider

Looks cool! I hope you are going to continue this to a final game.

If we're looking to get as close to the arcade as possible you're still gonna need to slow down the ship rotation even more. I count about 57-60 RPM on the arcade version. It's prolly 60, i just missed a count here and there.

 

This 2600 version is running about 2x or 3x that rate. Too fast to watch the clock and count rpms at the same time.

 

But this is looking real nice so far!

Given circles, the distance formula comes to mind for collision detection. That takes a bit of multiplication though. Are you willing to use ARM code?

I haven't studied the code yet, but I presume that you are using collision flags between the ship and the rings? And that doesn't work for bullets because they are too small?

 

Since you are not using the playfield, perhaps you could use the ball to make a black shadow that follows the bullet and is larger?

Zach - thanks for the suggestions. The real problem is determining which segment of the rings has been hit by the bullet. Each ring has 12 segments that can be individually removed.

 

I think I have now worked out a scheme using bounding boxes - it isn't pixel perfect but it should be close enough and fit in the available cycles.

 

I'm actually using the distance formula already to bounce the ship off the rings. The ship will bounce if x^2 + y^2 <= z^2, where x and y are the distance of the ship from the ring centre, and z is the radius of the outer ring. I'm planing to use this technique to determine which ring to test, then using bounding boxes around each segment.

So multiplying all the possibles values for the distance formula is more managable than I thought, eh? I'll need to look at your code sometime.