Firstly, thankyou for providing and letting me join this forum. My mother recently moved house and I re-aquired my old Oric-1 from her attic.
This awakened a desire to see if I could still remember things from way back when.
I had always wanted to create a sideways scrolling shoot-em-up like harrier attack or scramble but I could only program in Basic at the time, so it was impractical.
Forward to now - could I learn assembler? Well it turns out I had no immediate need to, since the OSDK kindly let me code in C. I am not ruling out the possibility of dabbling later.
In a couple of hours I created a rudimentary text-mode scroller with a ship (if ships are shaped like the letter 'A') with movement (A,Z,K,L keys).
The code is probably very ugly, but it works. However, I do have a couple of questions.
1) The generate_terrain/next_mountain routines use a 'for' loop to plot blocks in columns in a screen buffer.
bufferstart is the memory location of a slice of ram I use to store a copy of screen data. This is updated and a memcopy is used to transfer that data to the screen ram.
Code: Select all
hgt =26- lastheight; // height of mountain
for (n=26;n>27-maxheight;n--)
{
if (n>hgt)
{
poke(bufferstart+39+n*40,128); // add block characters to end column
}
else
{
poke(bufferstart+39+n*40,32); // add blank characters to end column
}
}
}
2) I would like to add in-game music as well as SFX at some point. Is this practical or would I be asking too much of the Oric.
GitHub repository here for source code and tap files etc
https://github.com/BadgeOric/Sideways
Thanks for reading and I hope I can do something with this just for my own satisfaction and pleasure.
Badger.