Pobtastic pobtastic

Pheenix contains a surprising number of visual elements from the arcade game, especially given it’s only a 16K game.

This article looks at the “transition effect” which I guess is a little like the ship going into hyperspace to move onto the next phase/ level.

I played this one quite late on, probably as a magazine cover tape. Strange too, as I’m a HUGE fan of the arcade version - and this is a fantastic conversion!

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.

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! 😆

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.