Pobtastic pobtastic

Continuing on with 180 having some really pro-level coding, it also has speech in it!! Incredible given it’s a budget game and that the speech works on the 48K Spectrum beeper!

I’d love to know how they achieved this cheaply enough for it to not be a full priced game.

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.

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!

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.

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! 😆

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).

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.

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.

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!

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.