Type-In : Dragon User : Fault Line Graphics

Introduction

I was leafing through a Dragon User PDF and a program listing jumped out at me. It was a real nostalgia trip - I spent a lot of time playing around with that program. It was not too long to type in and the article explained how it worked very clearly. It too a while but produced some pretty cool solid 3d graphics.

So I typed into my PC and fired it into my emulator of choice XROAR (it is a Dragon specific type-in for now) and had fun fixing all my typos and making some cool pictures. It was also fun to use the emulated floppies to load and save the data. The program takes some time even with the speed up poke but hitting F12 on XROAR can make the time fly by!

The version from Dragon user is available here - named FLGORIG.BAS and a Dragon vdk disk image too. If anyone wants to have a go at optimising the basic, please do but keep in mind there's not much memory left over. There's probably a quick win of just using one graphics screen to free up 4k or so.

What Next?

I am hoping to port to the Coco 3 - shouldn't be a great deal of changes. At the higher clock rate things should be turbo charged! There's a few features I would like to add too - such as validating the generated data (it can crash at present if height values get too high), a progress bar and maybe play with some of the higher resolutions on the GIME.

Happy quaking!