Comment by dannyobrien
9 hours ago
I just wanted to add how much in awe I am at you creating this game in '93 in assembly. Around the same time I was trying to write a game on the Atari ST, and the dedication to the project -- especially when documentation was so thin on the ground, pre-Internet -- is extraordinary. Do you have any stories from debugging the game? I always found that the most dispiriting part, after the endless hope of handcrafting the code that I was sure would work first time...
Thank you for sharing your experience. It can be hard to remember all the details of debugging in assembly, but the main aspect I recall was managing game performance to ensure all rendering and processing stayed within 1/50 of a second. My technique was drawing a white line using the Amiga Copper, starting at the beginning of the top vertical blanking period. As I added more game objects, logic, and rendering, I had to make sure the line does not drop below the beginning of the active display area. If it went below that point, a frame would be dropped, resulting the game to flicker. I had to use many techniques to split the processing of the game objects in batches across multiple frames. Fun time.