Porting

In September of 1979, I bought myself a Commodore PET. I paid $799 for this technological wonder, boasting a 1MHz 6502 CPU, the same as in my KIM-1, 4K of RAM, a tape cassette storage system, a keyboard, and a video monitor. The world was agog at the amount of power Commodore could deliver for so little money. (Corrected for inflation, the money I paid for the PET is now worth about $2000. Think of how much computer you can get for that nowadays.) The keyboard wasn't the real thing; it had tiny flat keys crammed together, and touch-typing was almost impossible. The video monitor wasn't a true bit-mapped monitor; it could display only 24 lines of 32 characters. But it was a huge advance over the single row of six characters on my KIM-1, or the two rows of eight characters on my tiny terminals. Moreover, it included a good implementation of BASIC in its ROM, making programming a much simpler task.

However, the PET could not support two-person play as my custom-built KIM-1 could; I would have to revert to the old single-player version of Tanktics on the IBM 1130. That was written in FORTRAN, but the PET required BASIC. My friend Dave Menconi offered to do the translation. Meanwhile, I converted some of the important routines from the KIM-1 to run on the PET; these would run much faster in machine language than in BASIC. After a few weeks, I integrated Dave's code with my own, and after a few weeks more, I managed to get everything running.

This version of Tanktics was still a pure text system: The player referred to a large printed map using coordinates from the computer. On-screen graphics were still out of the picture on personal computers.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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