Posted By
Csabo
on 2021-04-10
13:15:39
|  Re: Crackerball has been found! Check...
Well, the long search is over!  I'm going to go out on a limb and make an assertion that other than me, probably only Luca was interested in finding this old one, so... at least one person will be happy.
There's a bit of a but... here. The version we have not has been "restored". Huge thanks to MCG, after quite a bit of back and forth with him, he sent me two versions which were pretty much the original, but unfortunately both broken. So, using those two, plus the already existing "Cracker Ball 4", plus TBL's version, I recreated the original. Not a small task, but hopefully worth it.
Cracker Ball 4 was actually really close to it, but with a couple of cheats applied, and some bugs (due to randomly overwritten bytes, $FF28, etc.).
I will say that I'm confident our version is 99.9% the same as the "original". There was really only one small issue where I had to make an executive decision: the paddle's initial position is stored on zero page variable $21. This isn't being initialized by the game, and most of the cracks had some extra code tacked on which did that. Therefore that had to be added. Otherwise... this is pretty much it.
My final comment here will be to say that The Mad was a very, very clever guy (well, I'm guessing he still is)  One of the greats, really. This game is definitely rough around the edges, but... It was written in April of 1988, and just two months later he released the Invincible, which includes this code (in the knockout subgame). Then, in the same year he goes on to create Godzilla, then Mesél Az Erdő, and in '89 he drops Digital Ball. Talk about prolific coding... I wonder what would we have, if he didn't move on to Amiga, etc.
Thank you for reading my rant, Csabo out.
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