Pixel Prophecy 🇵🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺Dec 22, 2022
With procedural generation you can save a lot of space for content but did you know that Pitfall! on the Atari 2600 uses one byte (!) to describe a room? Here's the link to an article describing how that works:
https://evoniuk.github.io/posts/pitfall.html
#gamedev #procgen #retro
How Pitfall Builds its World

Show threadRaymond RussellDec 22, 2022
@PixelProphecy
I almost understood half of that ;-)
Show threadPixel Prophecy 🇵🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺
@raymierussell Enough to appreciate the engineering genius that went into the game, I hope 😅
Dec 23, 2022 at 12:27amWeb
Show threadRaymond RussellDec 23, 2022
@PixelProphecy
Absolutely. Makes me feel like a lazy programmer.
Each level of my #ZXSpectrum puzzle game is 12 x 10 blocks. Each block is represented by 1 byte so each level is 120 bytes (+1 timer byte). There are 50 levels so 121 x 50 = 6050. On a 48k machine that is not a problem.
Show threadPixel Prophecy 🇵🇸🇺🇦🇪🇺Dec 23, 2022
@raymierussell So much space to work with ... compared to the 2600 😉 I'm certain you had lots of your very own intricate coding issues to solve on that one, developing for old platforms is anything but lazy. Cause here I am, copy/pasting regularly from StackOverflow 😅
Show threadRaymond RussellDec 23, 2022
@PixelProphecy
Lol, yes old systems can be eccentric. The Speccy has many eccentricities. The screen layout always gives grief to the noob. The thing that is a mind melter is the way the interrupts were implemented. The hardware was built on the cheap and the (user serviceable) interrupts were not implemented to proper Z80 specs so you have to bend over backwards & use 257 bytes of space to get them to work. A software 'hack' on the 48k machine can save the 257 bytes but crashes 128k machines