Download BadCode4C (Compressed) Demo
|
 Trigger
Happy : Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution
Videogames first came on the market thirty years ago as a marginal technological
curiosity. Now they are virtually everywhere. Videogame sales have equaled
movie sales. They are played by more adults than children, and game design
can even be studied in college. Yet videogames are still often viewed as
a minor form of entertainment, at best shallow, or at worst harmful.
Click on the book to find out more, and
order. |
Please DO NOT copy this file on any other site, add only a link to download
this file from this page or my index. Please do add links to my site along
with screenshots. Please also leave comments. |
 When
you load BadCode4 you will not see much difference from BadCode4. The same
sort of title screen, the same sort of text. What was significant, especially
for JUGS users, was that the binary loaded a lot more quickly simply because
it is a lot smaller. Each graphic is stored in compressed format, and expanded
into a buffer before it is displayed. This looks no different, but requires
some thought on the part of the programmer to work right. |
 Once
you get to the menu you will realise that most of the difference between
4 and 4C are internal, but some bugs are fixed too such as being able to
silence the "beat" by pressing 0, and a tiny colour bug in the No-TV
Easter Egg is also corrected too.
There is no new Easter-Egg in this code, as it was just an attempt
to keep JUGS users sane, and demonstrate what a difference compression makes
to size. The internal changes are described next. |
 The
menus and bouncing objects look no different, but as you change an option
rather than change a pointer to the image the image is decompressed
from the binary, at present by the M68000. The compression is lossless, to
maintain crisp images and colour, important on menus.
JPEG is lossy, so graphics may become blurry, something I wanted to
avoid. A background image such as a picture of people or a Jaguar controller
is OK lossy. |
 The text
explanations of the game tell you some more about the demo, but since it
was written to help you understand what the implications of compression are
some text has been changed in this binary too.
The principal issue is that more Jaguar RAM is used for re-usable buffers,
and only compressed images in the binary. Space is always tight. Using images
from RAM rather than slow ROM also improves system performance. |
 After some comments from
people who said that they found the Jaguar to be just too good an opponent,
I tweaked the handicap which I gave the Jaguar player so that it reacts
less quickly. Principally it plays so well just because it never makes
any stupid mistakes like tracking the wrong ball which I find humans
do often. However, a game-over screen is still likely to meet you more
often than a victory one. |
Read about BadCode Easter Eggs
BadCoder has included a number of Easter Eggs in his code, and this page
gives details of them, along with some background information on how Easter
Eggs originated.
Click here or on the picture to find out
more. |
 Download
this binary for Atari Jaguar subject to my terms and conditions shown on
my homepage. If you have not read them, do not download this file. Note that
this .ZIP file must be decompressed using a tool such as Unzip or Pkzip,
before use. |
|
