Pobtastic pobtastic

Walking down the rabbit hole…

Keep uncovering new CALL routines.

How to display fonts as images.

Starting with the Game Entry Point.

Scripting a new game skeleton.

Continuing on with 180 having some really pro-level coding, it also has speech in it!! Incredible given it’s a budget game and that the speech works on the 48K Spectrum beeper!

I’d love to know how they achieved this cheaply enough for it to not be a full priced game.

180 has some really pro-level coding in it! For a budget game at £2.99, a lot of love and care went into the code. Garry Hughes I believe is the author, I really hope he does a talk about his experiences some day.

Normally the games I disassemble tend to be a little older, and so I suppose their code is a little “early” in the grand scheme of things. So I caveat this by saying - I don’t know if anyone else did this first, but I tried my hand at disassembling 180 and I found it confusing … at first… And then finally, I realised it’s actually GENIUS!

As I’ve mentioned before, I love a budget game, mostly for “budgetary reasons” I suppose… As paper round money doesn’t stretch far.

So, it was always exciting when a new budget game hit the shelves, I’m not entirely sure why younger me was drawn to 180 - I don’t know that I’d ever even played darts at that age. I can imagine I probably was swayed by the review in Crash magazine!

Anyways, this is such a great game! It is unfortunately possible to get quite accurate with where the darts land - but it’s still a very nice darts experience.

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! 😆