matt sephton @gingerbeardman.com · 16d Replies
Bet a Bendix G15 programmer could do it in less!
I was so good at that.
One of many games I was awful at
I had the final high score on the Space Invaders machine I used to play on. The morning after I set the score they pulled in and brought in the original sit down version of Pac Man.
Does it warp at the screen edges?? Did that take extra doing???
This was my game back in the day - clear the screen except for a good rock, kill the ships til I got bored, lather, rinse, repeat
that compact is the part that hits, honestly
Used to play that in the bars when I was much younger. Neither my hands nor my eyes work well enough anymore. I know the modern generation will Snicker at that LOL
I remember it. What struck me was this on a "Vector Scan" monitor rather than "Raster Scan" www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6r9...
Had to watch that video to see what you were doing with the extra minute and 27 seconds. I didn't know a game of asteroids could last that long.
i keep staring at the 475 lines like it cheated a bit lol
I remember the ZX81 had a one that fitted into the 1K memory space :D
I was expert at Asteroids 1980-82, but I recall an earlier similar arcade/pub game in maybe 1978 that was 2-player with possibly identical chevron ships, you could toggle gravity around the centre of the screen, do various other variants of the standard game. Anyone remember what that was called?
If only Star Trek and Star Wars were 1/10th as realistic as Asteroids.
I once wrote something like that in BASIC, but it was way too slow, obviously.
475 lines? Of what? Coke? Yeah that sounds right. It was the 1980s.
And still hard by todays standards.
Loved this game and also Battle Zone
Trust me, it's a lot longer in Assembly Language... 🙂
475 lines?? Did they make an asteroids library for python? ;-D
My childhood! 😍
Use the source, Luke. Show those 475 lines, Luke.
it's perfect zen instantiated as code.
Compiled assembly instruction count is a better metric than LOC
Spent hours in the arcade as a teenager playing this game...
This is the arcade game that I picked up new words on. Later there was a color version and the arcade we played at, it was broken. You could play on it all day for 25c.😈
I first played that on a minicomputer at a Glasgow trade fair in about 1970. I won.
"Don't shoot the last asteroid, wait for the flying saucers." The inspiration for Gamer magazines.
I did a slightly fancier asteroids game in about 1300 lines of python: github.com/jcupitt/argh... Ancient arcade games are fun programming exercises!
It's even got the bent screen as though it's on a CRT
Gaming haș come a long way, but it just goes to show you, it's all about the gameplay.
And so, so many quarters!!