========================================= DISPLAY FILE HUNTER by Jim Waterman ========================================= A crap game for 16K Spectrum (and others) Written in one day, 9th October 2022 ========================================= Waffle and bunk --------------- "...We were only playing, mister!" For the most part, the Legend of Zelda series is a damn near flawless bunch of games - but occasionally, the programmers will drop a giant dog's egg into the mix, just to remind us they're only human after all. The mere mention of the words "Water Temple" will bring out Ocarina of Time's most fanatical devotees in a cold sweat - but for me, for the sheer screaming agony it brings, nothing quite tops the Fairies' Woods in Oracle of Ages (which is the chief reason why I favour Seasons out of the two Oracle games). It's one of those infuriating areas where all the screens are out of sequence, in which you're charged with hunting down the three fairies who are "just teasing, tee hee" (etc.), and all to the most nauseatingly twee soundtrack of the series' first 15 years. GODDAMN, THEY ARE ANNOYING. Seriously, Link, you're carrying a sword. Why didn't you just chop their heads off and then we wouldn't have had to go through that area a second time later in the game? Why did it have to be this way? Because... Japan. There's no other explanation. THIS is why you don't drop nuclear bombs. The people who are left behind go a bit strange. Are you paying attention, Mr Putin? Anyway... to this game. Pixie, Trixie and Dot were those three extremely annoying fairies who lived in the woods in Oracle of Ages. Tormented by years of that shrill tune reverberating in his pointy ears, Link went back to the woods with three jars and a fishing net (as he does), with bloody vengeance in his mind. He was too late to have his way with Trixie - she was impaled through the wing with a spear, clearly thrown so hard by an angry Moblin that it had jammed into a rock harder than the Master Sword. Undeterred, Link hunted down Pixie and Dot and captured them to be sent away to a fate worse than watching Trixie's corpse steadily decay. They were to be taken from the land of the Game Boy Colour and imprisoned in the display file of a ZX Spectrum... a bare-bones 16K model, no less. And there, they would play out their games of hide-and-seek... FOREVER, and with no annoying soundtrack either, just a few BEEPs and a couple of OUTs. Instructions ------------ I'll spare you the indignity of playing the role of Pixie. You are... YOU, the player, you see one solitary pixel in the PLOT area, and you must match your position to that of the target (which, if you're playing the cutesy "GODDAMN IT, JAPAN" version, is Dot). There is just one complication: rather than the familiar PLOT coordinates, you are given the display file address, and the bit value of that pixel within that address. You have three minutes (actually, 2:59.2 - that's when the second byte of FRAMES ticks over to 35) in which to hit as many targets as possible. More waffle and bunk -------------------- This is a CRAP GAME. What more were you expecting? It's 2.9K of BASIC plus 439 bytes of machine code, it's not going to give the programmers of R-Type or Castlevania: Spectral Interlude any sleepless nights. And I certainly wasn't going to give this one a loading screen. Although, actually, I did consider it, and it'd have involved another machine code routine... but really, what's the point when the screen is more than twice the length of the game? How it started is, I'd been writing a huge effort for this year's WOOT!, and it required a routine to calculate the display file address from the PLOT position. With a bit of help from Dilwyn Jones' "Beyond Simple BASIC" (written before the QL arrived to draw his attention), writing a machine code routine to do the calculation was easier than I'd expected. And from there, I thought of making a crap game with the basic premise of "find coordinates using the display file address rather than the PLOT or PRINT AT position". I set myself the target of making the entire game in a day. You can see the timestamps in the development log. I promise there was no cheating, and I had to do a few other things, like eat, have a shower, put the washing machine on, and make many mugs of tea. it wasn't entirely straightforward, but I got there. Also, writing this pile of mostly-irrelevant text was part of the challenge. Fear not about RUN clearing the variables and overwriting your high score. It's POKEd into the UDG area instead, so it's saved for as long as the game is running. There are no UDGs anyway, and I usually reserve UDGs T and U for such purposes anyway.