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180 has some really pro-level coding in it! For a budget game at £2.99, a lot of love and care went into the code. Garry Hughes I believe is the author, I really hope he does a talk about his experiences some day.
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Normally the games I disassemble tend to be a little older, and so I suppose their code is a little “early” in the grand scheme of things. So I caveat this by saying - I don’t know if anyone else did this first, but I tried my hand at disassembling 180 and I found it confusing … at first… And then finally, I realised it’s actually GENIUS!
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As I’ve mentioned before, I love a budget game, mostly for “budgetary reasons” I suppose… As paper round money doesn’t stretch far.
So, it was always exciting when a new budget game hit the shelves, I’m not entirely sure why younger me was drawn to 180 - I don’t know that I’d ever even played darts at that age. I can imagine I probably was swayed by the review in Crash magazine!
Anyways, this is such a great game! It is unfortunately possible to get quite accurate with where the darts land - but it’s still a very nice darts experience.
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In what might be a bit of a surprising purchase for an 11 year old, I can remember going into the game shop in Romford and specifically asking to buy a “good” poker game. I can’t even remember why I was so attracted to poker but I can recall watching a lot of late-night poker on TV as a teenager so something must have triggered it in my childhood, and I guess I just wanted to give it a go myself.
Regardless, the guy offered me this and it’s pretty inappropriate for an 11 year old but the 80’s were just a different time! 😆
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Quite a smart routine for a sleazy game! This is a print routine with a difference, instead of printing 8 bit x 8 bit characters it handles printing 4 bit x 8 bit characters (two letters per character block).
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Probably the simplest of the room handlers, this routine takes care of making the floors disappear and reappear. It’s a good place to start before looking into the more complicated handlers.
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Booty was probably one of the most successful budget games ever written. Let’s take a look at how the game handles taking a “snapshot” of room data, and how it populates the room data buffers and the (oddly empty) table which holds pointers to the room data buffers.
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One of the best budget games ever written; “Booty” by Firebird).
When I was young I took on my older sisters paper round as she didn’t want to do it any more. I think I was maybe a little too young to be doing a paper round (I was 11 I guess, maybe even a little younger) and obviously it didn’t pay all that well - hence, a lot of the games I bought back then were “budget” games, like Booty.
They were a perfect price for paper round money!
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My cousin introduced me to “Trashman”. It’s a fantastic quirky game and is very bright and colourful! I loved the humour in it too.
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Bob Pape talks a little about how the monster AI was done in his book. A single routine which deals with fetching “random numbers” deals with a lot of how it works - and seeing what it actually does is fascinating!
