Unpublished Italian game: SATURN CAVES arcade adventure

[orion70]

Hi all, here I am as promised with the second previously unpublished game coming from the roaring years of the VIC in Italy - back when it was almost dead everywhere else . This time, after a flight simulator, I propose to your attention a wonderful arcade adventure, where you have to explore nothing less than the caves underneath Saturn, in search of the remains of the previous mission, mysteriously disappeared.

And hey, the two missions are called Orion, so nothing new to me .

You can find everything, including the game and the English manual (quickly translated from the original Italian magazine, so please forgive me once again), HERE. This program also uses a convolute way of loading into memory, so a fix would be most welcome .

Have fun!

[vicist]

A one-file version below...

saturn caves.zip

(6.7 KiB) Downloaded 117 times

...but you will miss out on the loading graphics.

[orion70]

Thank you very much for this Vicist, it will be useful in our SD2IEC collection

Modified the release thread accordingly.

[Noizer]

Thank you very much for this Vicist, it will be useful in our SD2IEC collection

Modified the release thread accordingly.

Hi Orion, I think it's a very interessant game, even though in basic language.
Did you noticed the pixel errors in the background grafics, as well as in the left and right tentacles from main character? Perhaps some typos in the datas....
It's a long sort of debugging, but some pokes I found out cleans up for a bettter view.
Press "runstop & restore", then in direct mode type in:
POKE6671,0:POKE6783,0:POKE6799,0:RUN

[orion70]

Yep, I thought it was some sort of game aesthetics TBH .

This is not precisely my genre as far as computer games are concerned, so I didn't play tested it. Thanks for pointing the bugs out and for the patch .

Wonder if these pokes can be implemented in the program, so that I can put a correct version to download.

[Mike]

Those graphical errors are likely the result of typos in the DATA lines. An extra comma between DATA items, for example, shifts all definitions by one byte, and this lets graphical data straddle across char boundaries, but would not lead to a tell-tale ?OUT OF DATA error. In the screenshot above, not only the blank character contains that unwanted 'spot', also the checkerboard pattern of the blocks is crooked and the "X" tiles show a one-pixel horizontal gap between them that surely isn't supposed to be there.

Instead of haphazardly adding the suggested POKEs, I'd recommend a more detailed check of the DATA lines.

Similar typos within a block of machine code DATA would inevitably cause a crash and be more easily noticed.

[vicist]

AFAICT the data looks correct - the listing is hard to read.
I have changed some of the graphics. Does this look better?

Give it a try and see if anything looks messed up.

saturn caves(b).zip

(6.95 KiB) Downloaded 121 times

[orion70]

Now it does look perfect! Thanks so much for this correction . Download link corrected in the Releases thread.

[necronom]

I've been playing this and enjoying it. I mapped it and got to the end, though it seems to kill me and says something like "that's what happened to the original ship". There are 10 rings to collect, though it actually has 11, and one is at the bottom right where you can't get in. Screen 7 has 2 rings, so the door opens to get to the end.
Looking at https://archive.org/details/Videogiochi ... 1/mode/2up it looks like you should be able to get to the one on screen 10, and it shouldn't have that bit that looks like an exit.
When I finish the game it also says I only had 8 rings and not 10.
It's hard to read the scan and I haven't found the end game part in the listing, so maybe that is how it ends.
Here is the map (with SPOILERS), if anyone wants it.

[Vic20-Ian]

There are 2 rogue speech marks on line 3691.

If you change these to left arrows the screen should print correctly.

[necronom]

For some reason (probably distracted watching the Revision demo party), I didn't think this was listable and didn't try. It seemed like it would be an sys if I tried. Even finding the listing document didn't make me try

Thanks, Ian. That looks much better. I'll stick a video up in the next couple of days.

[necronom]

Elixir is spelt wrong on line 425, too.

[vicist]

Fixed line 425 'elixir'.
Fixed line 3691 graphics.

Hope this all works OK now.

saturn_caves.zip

(6.95 KiB) Downloaded 147 times

[orion70]

Huge work guys, the map is tempting - I'll try a long play on my green monitor

[Vic20-Ian]

I think there is still something wrong with the graphics.

1. The ring looks like the bottom row of the shape is repeated. It should perhaps be zeros?

2. The laser pistol seems to have a line on the bottom, should line be zero?

3. The item on the last screen design it could be 5 on top of the building structure in which case the graphic data seems corrupted.

Or it could be S which is the cross

I cannot tell from the listing.

I tried Runstop restore and editing line 3009 to display 5 S and $ on screen 1 for debugging.

5 does weird things with the claw.

Having played it through on Vice picking up the last object on the last screen when it was a 5 caused an unexpected ending. Looking at the listing I think this is the point though.