Planet Bob - Uncovering a map on the VCS

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Hi there!

 

I've been playing some Gateway to Apshai lately, trying to see if I can get into it to give me some motivation continuing with a 2600 port.

 

BTW and just for the record, I cannot recommend buying a C64 DTV for this at all: It's not playable. There's some severe bug with teleport traps, which'll not only teleport you into nirvana, but also corrupt the game as such. I think 5 out of 6 games I played ended with a deadly teleport. After Super Cycle and Championship Wrestling that's by now the third game that I'd consider too messed up to consider playing on the DTV...

 

Well, back to GtA.

 

What one does not notice at first, is how essential an element it is, that you have to uncover your surroundings bit by bit in this game. With every step forward you make, you never know what is hidden underneath the next corridor bit until you enter it. Be it some kind of treasures, equipment, potions, or any other goodies, be it some dangerous'n'deadly enemy lurking there waiting to kill you.

 

I've been trying to find a solution for this, but I can't think of any really elegant way of realizing this "feature" on the VCS.

 

One can replicate most of the game, even with 128 bytes of RAM. Instead of generating the dungeons live out of a seed, one can pre-render a certain number of labyrinths and put them into ROM. Same goes with monster and item positions, even doors - considering one finds a way to display them.

 

But, giving the player this original "explorational suspense", I have no really good idea of how to achieve this effect. I think to do it properly and effective, it'd require the RAM buffering of a whole dungeon, just like the original does, requiring at least some 2K.

 

One could possibly define a list of "uncover" squares for a whole dungeon, then just storing single bits wether that square was already uncovered or not.

 

Then, making it a superchip solution: Considering the display would consist of 4 PF1/PF2 columns, 32 byte high each. One could then ROM->RAM copy the actual screen window each frame, and possibly render the then visible parts of still to-be-uncovered squares back into "void" in a second pass.

 

That might work. Maybe.

 

Greetings,

Manuel

 

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