Kurt_Woloch

After the success of my Gulasch demo and reading up on some other homebrew efforts such as Star Castle for the Atari 2600, I decided to do something more for the TI-99 in Assembler.

This is the first version for a game called "Taxi crossing". The objective of the game is to catch taxis on a crossing. However, none of the game is present. This first version only displays a somewhat crude title screen and puts out some speech. I'm not sure if that speech will make it to the next version, however... but there should be SOME speech in it, such as when the player gets hit by a car. :-)

There's something special about the way the title screen gets drawn... I've written a routine that's able to draw arbitrary rectangles in VDP RAM and fill them with a repeating string of an arbitrary number of bytes. The title screen definition actually consists of 6 such rectangles which get overlaid upon each other.

I've attached the first version as a DSK file. It should be used with the Editor/Assembler cartridge as follows:

Option 3: LOAD AND RUN
File name to load: TAXICROSSO
Program name to start: TAXI

 TAXICROSS 0.0.1.zip   8.19K   12 downloads

I decided to do a bit of TI-99 programming again in order to have something to show at the next meeting...

so I whipped together a small demo yesterday which creates a sound list in XBasic and plays it... without loading any assembler subroutines!

Now, how do I get the sound list into VDP RAM, you may ask? Well... just look at the code:

1000 CALL CHAR(128,"019F20" & "0390850509" & "028F0509" & "02870912" & "02870812" & "02850609" & "02810709" & "028E0B12")
1010 CALL CHAR(132, "028A0A12" & "02810709" & "028F0709" & "028A0C12" & "028A0A12" & "028F0724" & "019FA0" & "000700")

1190 CALL INIT
1200 CALL LOAD(-31796, 7, 0) ! SOUNDLIST STARTS AT VDP ADDRESS $0700 (CHARACTER 128)
1210 CALL PEEK(-31747,A) :: CALL LOAD(-31747,A OR 1)
1220 CALL LOAD(-31794,1)
1230 END

Sorry, you need a 32K expansion for this to work (basically because XBasic refuses to execute "Call Load" if "Call Init" hasn't been called, and refuses to execute "Call Init" without a RAM expansion, not because it would really be necessary for this demo).