My Commented 2600 Source Code Released


As promised many years ago, I have released my commented River Raid 2600 source code, now that v1 of River Raid Squadron is done.  I considered holding it until the 7800 port was done... but... well... now's a fair time since the reality of a 7800 port is unknown at the moment.

My comments are an expansion of the commenting work started by Thomas Jentzsch.  I added about 150 hours of work to his work (yes, much of that lost on just catching up to his work).  Much has been expanded, some things changed, and much still left to do.  I didn't do this for the sheer fun of it.  I did it out of necessity to understand what I was porting so that I could precisely port it.  Hence, why I tackled some parts much more in depth than others -- the parts that can't be derived by simply playing the game.

Of note to non-programmers (historians, specifically) is that I identified 15 instructions that, in my opinion, were written by someone other than the one who wrote much of the rest.  This shows either collaboration between the engineers at Activision (as would be expected) or code stealing (also typical).  Mostly, however, I'm just curious who wrote that algorithm just for curiosity's sake, if it was not Carol Shaw.  Remember, this was back in the day when we were not yet treating video-game production like film production, and recording all involved in a title.  Info some of us would like to know.  Anyhow, the 15 instructions are in the jagged-level generation code, specifically the part dealing with sloping from one bank width to another (assuming I recall the details correctly).

Files

RiverRaid2600AssemblerSourceCode.7z 32 kB
20 days ago

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