Screen Testing

Test screens for my next project. Roads 3 PF wide, with 5 scan lines per PF block


Nope, road's too squished, let's try 3 PF wide, with 6 scan lines per PF block


Still squished, and not enough room for radar, score and lives remaining. Just for fun, 3 PF wide with 7 scan lines per PF block


Roads look OK, but no room for anything else.

Same test, roads 2 PF wide, 5 scan lines per PF block


2 PF wide, 6 scan lines per PF block


2 PF wide, 7 scan lines per PF block


Think we have a winner with roads 2PF wide, 7 scan lines per PF block.

If you haven't figured out what this is, turn your head sideways . I figured the radar will have to be wide instead of tall, so I rotated the maze.

I used to play Radar Rat Race all the time on my VIC 20. The VIC didn't have sprites, so they used customer character sets for everything. For Radar Rat Race everything was drawn using 4 characters arranged in a 2x2 format. Scrolling was very chuncky, with the mouse moving 1 complete character(8 pixels) at a time, but the game still played well. I was hoping a 3x? size would work for "better scrolling", but I think using 2x7 for the Atari will work just as well. It'll be easier to code for, plus use 10 bytes less of RAM to store the visible portion of the maze.

I'm also planning to make this resize for PAL, increase the scan lines per PF block and make the sprites taller.

Rally S is a tentative name - I may want to give this a different theme as I'm looking to use both Player1 and Missile1 to draw all the enemies so as to reduce flicker. This would limit what the graphics could be. Lock 'N' Chase and Dark Cavern come to mind as other games that did this.