New Game Lucky Egg

 First post in quite a while. Not much time for retro so far this year!

Anyway, I started off playing with GET/PUT on the Dragon which allows you copy chunks of GFX around. The Dragon has no built-in sprites so this is the next best thing. There's quite a few optimisations and tricks you can use so keep things fast so I thought it would be fun to break away from SG4 (Text screen) for a while.

I chose PMODE0 which is the lowest of the high resolution GFX modes where 1byte = 8 pixels. I used POKE to create a stick man 8 pixels high on the screen. GET and PUT for such a small character is pretty fast. I added some movement controls and stick man was soon running about. The idea of catching something came to mind so why not eggs? It was much easier than expected to get a fast action game written in BASIC - albeit a very simple one.

After all that, it was just a case of tidying up and adding some polish like a title screen and a high score.

It is going to be interesting to try other modes and see how it affects the speed. There's definitely some spare cycles in the game and we have not even used the speed up poke or other tricks. It's better than a lot of type-ins I've tried - no flickering and it's fast. They often use PMODE4 which is probably too high resolution for most simple type-in games.

As always, the source is available on GitHub. Have fun! Watch out for another stick man game coming soon...