Sunday 1 March 2009

Enter the cheetah!

1st March 2009

I read my emails and one of the messages was from Kenz, about the new front end for The Last Amazon that I sent him yesterday. There were a few things missing. I had forgotten to credit him for the logo and also I did not add the Last Amazon's eyes to the end of the fading text. So I worked on the front end a little more and added the missing elements. Now I tested the front end. All was okay, apart from the eyes. So instead of using the !SCR command, I used the !BYTE command, and set values for the eyes chars and .... it worked!

Now the front end (as far as I know) was finished, it was then time for me to add a game over routine for after the last life of the player is lost. Kenz came up with a great idea for the game over sequence, which is to have the Last Amazon running across the screen, and then have some cheetahs chasing after her (Din-dins for the cheetahs). So I ripped some sprites from the game, and stored those to $6c00-$6d00 and imported them into the game over source. I then programmed the game over screen in ACME cross assembler, making new interrupts and sprite expansion routines. Once I did all the programming for the end screen, I bolted it to the SEUCK game and tested it. The game over sequence works nicely.

For the final stage of this game, I programmed a small end screen, which shows just yellow text, using the 1x1 charset and linked the ending to where the SEUCK game scroller loop routine was. For the final test, I played the whole game in cheat mode to see if anything was wrong. It seems that everything was fine. Hopefully another Last Amazon front end finally finished. Finger crossed!

Now that was done, I dug out some tunes for The Last Amazon 2 (I will be doing a new front end and enhancements for this game when the first Last Amazon game has been given the OK), and relocated those. Then I loaded up the Last Amazon 2 SEUCK game and added the music to the game, and compressed it with Exomizer, disabling the effect when uncompressing the file and then I put both Last Amazon games on to the .D64 and sent it to Kenz.

I also could not resist playing The Last Amazon 2. It is another of Alf's memorable classic SEUCK games. Alf made many excellent SEUCK games with the great SEUCK editor. I have played many of Alf's classic SEUCK games in my time. I used to love games that were in the Cops series, and also Archetype was one of my all time favorites.

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