Pobtastic pobtastic

In what might be a bit of a surprising purchase for an 11 year old, I can remember going into the game shop in Romford and specifically asking to buy a “good” poker game. I can’t even remember why I was so attracted to poker but I can recall watching a lot of late-night poker on TV as a teenager so something must have triggered it in my childhood, and I guess I just wanted to give it a go myself.

Regardless, the guy offered me this and it’s pretty inappropriate for an 11 year old but the 80’s were just a different time! 😆

Quite a smart routine for a sleazy game! This is a print routine with a difference, instead of printing 8 bit x 8 bit characters it handles printing 4 bit x 8 bit characters (two letters per character block).

Probably the simplest of the room handlers, this routine takes care of making the floors disappear and reappear. It’s a good place to start before looking into the more complicated handlers.

Booty was probably one of the most successful budget games ever written. Let’s take a look at how the game handles taking a “snapshot” of room data, and how it populates the room data buffers and the (oddly empty) table which holds pointers to the room data buffers.

One of the best budget games ever written; “Booty” by Firebird).

When I was young I took on my older sisters paper round as she didn’t want to do it any more. I think I was maybe a little too young to be doing a paper round (I was 11 I guess, maybe even a little younger) and obviously it didn’t pay all that well - hence, a lot of the games I bought back then were “budget” games, like Booty.

They were a perfect price for paper round money!

My cousin introduced me to “Trashman”. It’s a fantastic quirky game and is very bright and colourful! I loved the humour in it too.

Bob Pape talks a little about how the monster AI was done in his book. A single routine which deals with fetching “random numbers” deals with a lot of how it works - and seeing what it actually does is fascinating!

There’s lots of elegant code in Rampage, here’s a neat example of how the monsters are printed to the screen using the same draw routine.

The code which prints the level names is pretty elegant and quite simple to follow. Let’s step through it.

I didn’t appreciate Rampage when I first bought it for my ZX Spectrum with my paper round money. I can tell you exactly why, it just isn’t especially fun when played with only one player.

It wasn’t until I bought an arcade machine that I thought I’d give it another go, and what I found surprised me. It’s incredible how much of the arcade game they managed to fit into a 48k ZX Spectrum. It’s a bright and colourful game and works great as a multiplayer.