The Missing Link + Extended BASIC

[JamesD]

 

It's like Hyper Racer, makes good screenshots, but gameplay will let you down. Still, TML made it easy to make it look good.

 

I kinda laughed at TMNT when I saw the fight begin. It reminded me of something I wrote as a kid.

 

 

Yes, unlocking the power of bitmap graphics for the XB programmer is awesome, particularly backgrounds. That said, in the early days, creating such backgrounds was very labor intensive, which may have discouraged users from taking full advantage of TML. Nowadays, particularly with Tursi's image conversion tool, it's a snap

Looking back, I could easily have programmed my Chaos Musings program in XB under TML rather than painfully in assembly and the speed of calculations would have been pretty similar. Take foot, kick butt...

I remember drawing trees on my CoCo with a DRAW command and they looked more like mushrooms. And that was after drawing it out on graph paper and then painstakingly converting it to strings. UGH!

When I finally got a decent drawing program for graphics I could suddenly take advantage of color artifacts with ease and backgrounds actually looked cool.

Sadly I didn't have as much time for my CoCo by then and the last thing I did was a large Sylvester the cat hopping across a drawn background as a test.

That animation did land me a job though.

[senior_falcon]

Here's a quickie demo showing how to use a polyspiral with the pen set to PR (penreverse) to encrypt and then unencrypt text on the screen.

10 CALL LINK("CIRCLE",96,120,43)
20 CALL LINK("PRINT",84,111,"THE"):: CALL LINK("PRINT",92,99,"MISSING"):: CALL LINK("PRINT",100,108,"LINK")
30 CALL LINK("PR"):: CALL LINK("PUTPEN",96,120,0):: FOR I=1 TO 80 :: CALL LINK("FWD",I,201):: NEXT I
40 CALL KEY(0,K,S):: IF S<1 THEN 40 ELSE 30

[Opry99er]

Wowza! That is coooooool!

[Tursi]

That is a /really/ cute idea. I like it!

[+mizapf]

There's XOR behind, right? This is in fact some kind of encryption, considering that symmetric ciphers like DES also use a sequence of XOR and permutation, both of which are reversible. Here, the secret key is the starting point of the drawing.

[senior_falcon]

There's XOR behind, right? This is in fact some kind of encryption, considering that symmetric ciphers like DES also use a sequence of XOR and permutation, both of which are reversible. Here, the secret key is the starting point of the drawing.

Yes, each pixel touched when drawing a line is XORed with 1. A 1 becomes a 0 and a 0 becomes a 1. At startup you can change:

Row (1 to 192)

Column (1 to 240)

Pen angle (0 to 359)

The angle the pen is turned (does not have to be an integer; XB will round as needed)

The step for I which controls how far the pen travels (does not have to be an integer)

You can even start offscreen which gives even more possibilities.