Posted By
cobbpg
on 2023-08-14
14:20:05
|  Re: Stunt Car Racer
> I wanted to ask you if you're using the first 2k of memory for your game.
Oh yes, this game really stretches as far as the RAM goes. In standard Geoff Crammond fashion, it needs to rearrange things in memory whenever switching between the menu and gameplay modes just to fit in 64K. It also keeps things nicely compressed and unpacked on the fly when needed. For instance, it has the most impressive perspective projection logic I've ever seen in 8-bit land, and among other things it involves an arctangent table that's queried in its compressed form thanks to the really clever way the data is represented.
> It's nice to see a newcomer who wasn't told this would be impossible.
Heh, I never thought this game would be particularly difficult to port, since it doesn't make particularly heavy use of sprites. Most of the meat is in the 3D renderer that works in bitmap mode, and that was the easiest part. In fact, getting the few places where sprites were used translated was by far the most involved part of the work. Expanding colour RAM usage to chroma+luma was a bit tricky, but still more straightforward.
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