Pobtastic pobtastic

I did a thing!

I don’t tend to do talks anymore, and certainly never about Skoolkit and disassembly! So this is very much a first for me.

Walking down the rabbit hole…

Keep uncovering new CALL routines and trying to gain context for what they’re doing.

How to display fonts as images.

Starting with configuring the logo, and then moving onto the Game Entry Point for the first routine to disassemble. This will give you some insights, as generally it will do some “set-up”, clear the screen, and display a menu.

Scripting a new game skeleton. Why walk when you can run!

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.