fwd: Minigame compo 2004

[vic user]

Howdy all,

Basically, I never sent out an official email announcing the 2004
minigame
contest, so... here it is, a mere two months late.

Because I did such a lousy job of getting the word out I've extended
the
contest deadline by a month, to September 26. So, if this is the first
you've heard about the contest, there's still two months left.

Also, if the word hasn't yet gotten to whatever email lists/newsgroups
you
hang out on it would be most appreciated if you could let others there
know about the contest as well.

The minigame page is at http://www.ffd2.com/minigame.

Thanks all!

-The Management

[Ghislain]

Yesterday, I submitted a game called "Vicside Boxing" for the 4K category. It's a boxing simulation game for the unexapnded VIC. You can pit fighters from boxing history such as Rocky Marciano VS Mike Tyson. There's only 5 fighters in the database, but you can create your own fighters and face them off against each other.

Thanks to an email tip by Anders, I was able to put the ML and custom characters into a single-loading BASIC program. What's great about using this method is that you don't have to put POKE 52,2x:poke56,2x:CLR at the beginning of the program as you would have to do in other multi-loading situations.

It was a bit tricky to convert my multi-loading game into a single-loading file as I had to shift the addresses of the graphics and ML routines to the end of the BASIC program (I put about 2 bytes of space between the BASIC portion and ML/graphics portion). The ML/graphics part ends at address 7431 (because 7424-7431 is character 32 in POKE36869,255 mode and that's the space character) so when I finally SAVEd the master copy, I did a POKE 45,8:POKE 46,29 just before I saved it. I also had to make sure that my program used less than 248 bytes of RAM and therefore, I had to modify my program to look for BASIC RAM inefficiencies (such as redundant variables and strings, etc). The game runs very tight and has about 10 free bytes after running for a while (I like to leave about that much free memory space just to allow room for overflow).

Instead of waiting for the game to be displayed at the minigame site, you can download it here:

http://members.cybersurf.net/~gdeblois/vicside.zip

If you find any bugs, please let me know and I'll correct them and re-submit my game to the Minigame site (I've already playtested this game for several hours!)

[carlsson]

You're really into boxing, aren't you? I remember some 4-6 years ago when you were into EKO at the same time as VIC-20 and mentioned something about writing a boxing game yourself. Is this some fruit of those plans or a new project?

[Ghislain]

This is a brand new game that I started to work on a few weeks ago (albeit, based on other boxing games that I've done previously). Here's a brief history of boxing games that I've made for Commodore computers:

1996 Feature Bout Boxing - Commodore 64 (you can find it by searching Google)
1998 Ringside Boxing - Commodore 64 (you can find it by searching Google)
2000 Ringside Boxing - Unexpanded VIC-20 (it was on my old website, but that was taken down. I have it stored on a .D64 file on my old computer that's been put away in storage space. I think I should pull it out and plug it in just to get all of my old VIC games on my new computer). One neat feature of this game was that it had a bit-mapped graphic of Rocky Marciano punching Jersey Joe Walcott (I could only use about half of the screen since it was running on only 3.5K, and it was a multi-loader).

This current version is better than the 1996 and 2000 versions--but not the 1998 one. Of course, I had to make this game into a single-loader that fit into the unexpanded VIC.

This is probably my last stab at making a boxing game. I only made it for the minigame competition.

I'm thinking of making an Ultima-style RPG game for the unexpanded VIC as well, but I don't know if I have enough time. Last year I made a Dungeon-style game for the 2003 competition, this time I want to incorporate both dungeons and countryside exploration. I'm not quite as good a programmer as Robin (of Minima fame), but I think the VIC-20 screen is made perfectly for Ultima-type games (you only have to use 1 custom character instead of 4 as you would have to on the Commodore 64).

I remember EKO as well, I haven't played that game in a few months. I still go there (www.vivi.com) and lurk the message boards from time to time, however.

[vic user]

so you are the one that did Dunjon II?

cool!

[Ghislain]

I just submitted my Ultima-style fantasy RPG game "Realms of Quest II" to the minigame competition.

You can get a sneak peek of this game by downloading it from:

http://members.cybersurf.net/~gdeblois/realms2.zip