To write an entire program in assembly these days is almost unheard of, and I’m impressed that you took the time to do this now. Back around 1981 I taught myself to program the Z-80 (using what I thought was a pretty great book that Radio Shack put out, “TRS‑80 Assembly Language Programming”) and wrote a fair amount of code, but it was always short routines embedded in my Basic programs to speed up screen drawing or to create sound effects – things that were simply way too slow to do in Basic. I’m also incredibly impressed that this was written from scratch in assembly. That said, I ran this under emulation (I kick myself frequently for donating my old Model 1 to charity 25 years ago) so that refresh-effect may not even be a thing under emulation (sdltrs for Mac). This may be a side-effect of screen refresh, or it may also be by design, but it appears the next location of the ball is drawn before the old one is replaced which gives it a nice effect. I also like how the ball itself is drawn. It’s even a nice side-effect (whether by design or by accident) that if you switch directions while the paddle is accelerated, even the reverse motion is accelerated. With that out of the way, I have to say that I love how the paddle accelerates a bit when you hold the arrow down. ![]() That last brick on the first level took quite literally more than twice as long to hit as the previous 64 bricks put together and I nearly gave up. ![]() There were definitely times where that was frustratingly fun! I’d move the paddle in anticipation of where the ball was going, only to find out I was fooled! But it also made for a lot of not-so-fun frustration. Rather than most breakout-style games where you can control the direction (and speed of it) by where the ball hits the paddle, it appears the ball keeps going in the same direction as it was going about 90% of the time the other 10% of the time it changes direction and speed at random. What a fun blast from the past, thanks! As you said this is a work in progress, I do have a few comments!įirst of all, the one thing I admit that drove me a little bit crazy is the randomness of the ball direction. However, at this time, I am just too busy to go through the effort of creating the manual and tapes at the level of quality that I would require. This was how many TRS-80 games were sold back in the day. I originally wanted to release Breakdown as a real packaged software product, with a paper manual and pre-recorded cassette tape. It was developed using George Phillip’s zmac cross assembler.
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