2020-06-25

As with any good side project contended by pandemics, needing to work “real work”, fathers day and all the like, my Oh Mummy project is plodding along.

This last weekend saw music being generously written and composed by a member of a NextBASIC group called Richard Faulkner. With the spec of “something like The Streets of Cairo” (a bit of music from the mid-1800s that was used in the original Oh Mummy) he put together something that’s really great. Music is definitely my weak/no-skill-at-all spot.

So now the game has music (which you can turn on and off at your leisure).

I’ve also been tweaking some of the game play decisions, one in particular is that as you rescue each archaeologist and move to the next level, you get more baddies and so on until level 5 where you have the potential for up to 6 baddies (5 for 5 levels plus 1 hidden baddie in a tomb).

I also need to think about what points mean and whether a) I bother with points and whether survival is enough and b) if I keep points I’ll need a high score board.

There’s also a few minor bugs that need fixing (that my kids keep pointing out!), like the top right corner of the game doesn’t have any footprints when going in a specific direction. I’m trying to capture these as a I go along in my github repo - which makes me wonder how on earth developers in the 80s managed to code both on a single process system (i.e. no multi-tasking) and without any code control. Yoinks.

Here’s a demo of where the game is up to:

As further procrastination I’ve been looking at whether I can bundle all the game assets (currently 8 additional files excluding the main NextBASIC) into a single .TAP file. I’ve managed to create a tool that lets me bundle, but there’s some technical constraints on the machine the code is running on, specifically I can’t install the music player using this method, nor can I use any of the Next OS command line tools (dot commands).

But then, being told that it’s not possible has only spurred me on to new investigations, and this evening I’ve been looking at whether I can write my own assembly and trigger it directly from my NextBASIC to avoid using any of the OS commands… trippy.

So this is the code I’ve got at the moment, and yep, it’s pretty senseless!

DATA 17,40,41,33,0,1,205,0,192,195,6,192,201

It does something but instead of music, I get noise on the screen!

Back to the drawing board, eh?