[torontocbm] Re: Paradroid.
- From: "Robin Harbron" <macbeth@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: torontocbm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Feb 2005 09:31:10 -0500
On Wed, 2 Feb 2005 22:36:42 -0500
David Evans <dfevans@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Did you garner enough info about the guts of Paradroid to cheat and
>check?
The version of Paradroid on the NTSC DTV is pretty much untouched,
so no, I didn't really learn anything about it's inner workings.
For the PAL version, I was asked to clean up some of the info
text that scrolls by in demo mode, as there are references that
just don't apply to the DTV (keyboard, port #2, stuff like that).
So I had to decipher the fairly convoluted routine that displays
the text so I could change things - that's as far as I got into
the guts of Paradroid.
It's pretty interesting diving into the code of some of these games,
seeing the wide variety in coding styles - some of them are very
close to my own so they made sense quickly, some of them just seemed
bizarre until I spent several hours in them. Many times I was
thinking "why did they do it *that* way??".
Probably the most confusing keyboard routine was the one in Cybernoid.
Thankfully, once I understood it, it was much easier to work on
Cybernoid 2 and Exolon, which all had the same programmer.
I wonder if some of these guys were Z80 (Spectrum) coders first.
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