Stevie Strow, host of CoCoTalk (among other things), and I chatted on Discord yesterday. The conversation shifted to BASIC optimizations related to the 'Why is BASIC so Slow' segment on his show. This lead to him asking me if I could look at the code for his COSMIC ALIENS game to see what optimizations could be made. A couple hours later, he recorded this video showing the latest version of his game. There is still room for optimization, but it is already quite playable and it would have certainly been published in a magazine back in the day. Not a bad little Demon Attack type of game.
If you were to do this on the Atari, you'd need to use an assembly subroutine to draw the sprites, or you'd have to overlay multiple player/missiles to get that many colors for the sprites.
If you were to do this on the Atari, you'd need to use an assembly subroutine to draw the sprites, or you'd have to overlay multiple player/missiles to get that many colors for the sprites.
You can visit Stevie's development page to compare it to previous versions. The improvement in the speed is subtle but definitely visible.
Stevie's COSMIC ALIENS page:
http://cosmicaliens.com
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