Space Combat - A simple Space War hack.

[cosmosiss]

Yay, time to spam the hack forums again.

 

So we know the colors on this great game are horrible, like most early games, and in B&W mode, the background is grey. Well, I think this set of colors looks better, and the ships have been somewhat vectorized.

 

So what to do with the B&W mode colors? Change them to the horrible colors in the Combat airplane levels. That should balance things out.

 

space_combat.bin

[Nukey Shay]

Given that virtually nobody uses B&W televisions anymore, most people use the switch to control some other function (like switching to the PAL color set, or pausing a game). To be compatable with all hardware, the program would need to keep track of the switch's old state on the previous frame (costing 1 bit of ram), as well as a bit set -only- on powerup that determines if the 7800 console is being used (another bit of ram). These adjustments can be easily added to Space War, because the original game did not use ram addresses $E0 to $FB for anything ($FC to $FF are used by the stack to keep track of JSR return addresses...the rest are not used - or even cleared on powerup). Also, the program is only 2k, so an additional 2k of romspace is added by pushing the values that exist at $F7FC-$F7FF to be at $FFFC-$FFFF instead. To do this, just add ORG $FFFC above the last 4 bytes.

 

A reverse-engineered disassembly of the game was made by Manuel Polik and posted at [stella] for your hacking convenience.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

I switch to B&W when playing Surround because that default color scheme makes me want to hurl.

[cosmosiss]

I believe Thomas changed them to make it ressemble a Tron cycles game.

 

 

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4K

 

A good coder could add neat variations like guided missiles and obstacles/mazes. Now that would trully be a Space Combat game.

 

Don't know much about the Stella list, but I believe the Stella Gets A New Brain CD has the archives.

 

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Yep, here it is. This bad boy is going to a cart!

 

Tron__Surround_Hack___2006___Thomas_Jentzsch_.bin

Edited April 29, 2008 by cosmosiss

[Impaler_26]

You can find the Space War disassembly here (plus alot more).

I also found this Space War 4K disassembly on my hard disk...

spacewar_4k.zip

[cosmosiss]

Thank you! Site has been raided.

[Rob Mitchell]

Thomas and I did a hack of Spacewar in 2005 .. called PDP Spacewar. Search for it here.

 

Rob Mitchell