Star Wars Droids - probably bugged

General software. From trouble with the Banyan Tree to OCP Art Studio, post any general software chat here. Could include game challenges...
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Ralf
Rick Dangerous
Posts: 2279
Joined: Mon Nov 13, 2017 11:59 am
Location: Poland

Star Wars Droids - probably bugged

Post by Ralf »

Maybe it won't be interesting to anybody, but maybe it will... ;)

So there is a game called Star Wars Droids:

https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/index.p ... 96&id=4889
Image

It's a bad game but I wanted to record it for Rzx Archive and here problems began.
The game has some bug fixing poke present and even bugfixed version available but it seems to me that it's not enough.

In the game you have to walk around corridors, kill nasties and use lifts to travel up and down. To use a lift you have to solve some memory minigame. You start at lowest level and are supposed to get to the top, I guess. Levels have the same colours as Spectrum palette so the 1st lowest level is navy (INK=1), 2nd level is red (INK=2) and so on.

Unfortunately you are able only to get to level 4, I checked all paths. On level 4, you get to some area where you cannot go further. And where you try to go back, your lift door disappears.

I believe going between levels must be somehow bugged. Or maybe level data, containing lifts and where they take you is damaged/overwritten???

I include rzx recording showing problem with lift at level 4. In the recording I used immunity and "minigame puzzle always true" pokes.
https://www.sendspace.com/file/wj9hqc

I tried to do some debugging but my skill is too low to find bugfixes, I guess. I discovered that:

Level nr is stored at 35808
It is set to 0 at game start, at 32696, making player start at lowest level
Going up with lift is at 34273


You can alter level nr in debugger to get to higher levels but they seem totally bugged, all doors disappear when you solve the minigame.
See an example here:
https://www.sendspace.com/file/1stsn4

If someone liked to play with bugfixing, you are warmly welcomed ;)
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djnzx48
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Joined: Wed Dec 06, 2017 2:13 am
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Re: Star Wars Droids - probably bugged

Post by djnzx48 »

If it helps, I found the player position, which seems to be measured in pixels (it's two bytes at $7968 and changes by 24 every time you move). I'm not totally sure on how the doors and computers work in this game but I found some other addresses that may be useful:

$6d5b: interrupt routine
$7390: stored keypresses (bit 4 is action key)
$73b5: checks for keys
$960e: checks if you're near a door
$9621: entering door?
$9678: door data?
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