/8bitcode

A bunch of projects for the computers of the 8 bit era, mostly MSX 1 and CoCo 2.

Primary LanguageAssembly

8 Bit Code

A bunch of projects for the computers of the 8 bit era, mostly MSX 1 and CoCo 2.

Yet Another Yet Another Snake Game!
MSX CoCo

It occurred to me the Snake Games are the Hello World! of game design and I've never done one so I took this opportunity to explore not only the programming of this kind go game, trying for the fastest speed I can achieve (while keeping the code readable), but also to explore some mythical (to me) characteristics of the computers involved, the "undocumented" graphic modes.

A Screen 1 drawing program in Assembly
Screen 1.51 coming soon.
MSX

I always bragged that I knew Assembly but I've never coded anything more than a few small helper routines for may Basic programs. No more. I decided to make a complete and "useful" program in Assembly to call my own. Also I wanted to explore the undocumented Screen 1.5 mode on the MSX and do something nice with it.

A Semigraphics 24 drawing program with a touch of animation
CoCo

The elusive and criminally underused Semigraphics modes on the CoCo always fascinated me. I had as given that you needed Assembly to access them but when I studied a little more and found out that they were perfectly accessible and usable in Basic this little exploration program came out.

Edit game graphics
MSX

Back in the olden days I managed to edit the graphics on commercial MSX games by the way of three very small Basic programs that could live in memory along them, one at a time, without conflict. They worked but the whole thing was a mess. Recently I decided to know how far I could go remaking it. It also served as a tool to test and debug my Basic Dignified and Sublime Tools projects.


Acknowledgments

Most of the Basic programs were made using MSX Basic Dignified or CoCo Basic Dignified (.bad) and these are the commented version but there are of course .asc and .bas versions as well. There are .dsk and/or .cas files available on the Releases section for most of the programs.

References

[1] Screen 1.5 is how I'm calling the Screen 1 hack to color the characters per pattern byte instead of blocks of 8 characters. Here I need to send ANOTHER thank you to Giovanni Nunes for pointing me in the right direction.