Posted By
Luca
on 2011-12-20
19:41:41
 |  The Easter Eggs & Weird Stuff topic
The last days, you probably have seen it, I spent some spare time to rummage into some games'code in order to find useful cheats and have new game endings to add to our newborn Game Endings page.
Sometimes, when looking at the disassembled code, I've run up against notable stuff which should have to be reported. Just to say some: several hidden text in Skoro's games (some very old words, not to care about their reason nowadays), a hidden note in the Chicken's version of Atomino, some unused Ern0's jingles because the coder didn't know about'em like in Tronix Demo II, some game's lost levels like in Puzzle 4 and last but absolutely not least the weird feature in Death Or Glory which allows to drive your ship under the blocks.
No doubt in affirming that the most weird stuff can be found in the games coded by John P. Shay. Please check any single game's page to read longer descriptions about that, and to have a look to graphics when needed. Let's see some:
- Suicide Run, Cruncher, Knock Out, Mission Mars, Quick Draw contain the graphics related to the 3D Quasars'player ship in the same memory location;
- Alien Attack has it too, and it also contains debris which look to be the mountain background of Monkey Magic;
- Winnie Witch's Superbroom not only plays and looks like a hack of Monkey Magic, it also physically includes several graphic leftovers from it, titles text included!
In other games coded by John P. Shay, there also can be found unused or hacked graphics:
- Monkey Magic has what looks like an unused oriental themed final boss, in the shape of a dragon, bidirectionally framed;
- 3D Quasars has other foes ready to be shown, and all have two positional frames in order to better move on the screen, feature which hasn't been used for the basic UFO foe; also, there are some other bits of graphics, and a zooming bigger UFO;
- Invasion 2000 AD wins over all the others as the weirdest one, because I've found pieces of the sprite from C64 game "Falcon Patrol II", an animated UFO with its explosion, and a whole set to build up something similar to a volcanic backdrop in pure Dropzone-like style!
Rüdiger told me his opinion, and I've found it very interesting:
some of the C16 games are conversions from the original VIC20 ones coded by the same author. This nervy hypothesis finds further establishment if you consider some weird limits in the game display (Suicide Run), if you also consider that in the games'code, several areas have been deliberately erased and sometimes there's some unused code, finally if you consider that some of these games have been early released on c16 in a weird version which covers memory $1001-$3000 that is very close to ViC20's 5K RAM!
Rüdiger says, if I got it, that most of these games may have been released in 3 versions:
- early, $1001-$3000
- normal, $1001-$4000
- triple decker
The triple decker version of these games should have been cleaned of the weird graphic debris. Side note: I posted this some days ago because I remember a version of Winnie Witch's Superbroom with a little animated witch's face, just like the very similar Monkey Magic. So, Triple Decker version? May the normal version differ from the triple decker one?
If that's true, we need to sort out these games' versions and place'em in the right pages.
End note: feel free to report any alien stuff you find in the old code, we'll add to its page.
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