A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

This reminded me of a game programming hack I did back in highschool. I had just started a school course on Pascal and decided to code a small game of snake, just for fun. I knew very little about actual programming, I was a real novice. The game was very simple, it was running in a windows console (cmd) without any graphics, the actual assets were ASCII art. The grid of the game was represented with asterisks and the snake…

If you like that, you should read Bob Pape's free book about the making of R-Type on the Spectrum. I think it was one of the most technically accomplished games on the Spectrum, which is no small feat - there were lots of other talented programmers trying their hardest to achieve the impossible on that platform. The amazing part of the story is how poorly the industry treated Bob and yet an excellent game still made it to the shops…

Man, the 6809 was an incredibly fun processor to write for. I'll let you know you were in good company. At Williams (pinball/video game company, later became Midway) that exact same hack was used in almost every game that used the 6809. We definitely used it in all the dot-matrix pinball machines to blit large pieces of data in RAM.

Way back in the day (mid high-school), I wrote a Tetris game in Pascal and Z80 assembly for the TRS-80. At some point I realized that since what was displayed on the screen was just a representation of an area of memory, I could keep track of the "cup" and all of the pieces that had already fallen into it directly in video memory instead of variables. I also optimized the code for drawing the "cup" so all three sides…