The Playful World : How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination
As you read these words, the architects of the new virtual reality are inventing
a world you never imagined: call it the playful world. It's a world of
interactive Web-based toys that instantly collapse the gulf between wish
and existence, space and time, animate and inanimate. Sounds like hype,
but provides a good read!
Click on the book to find out more and order. |
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 The intro screens are pretty much unchanged.
See Badcode0 for more details on how they are built. I will retain these
basic startup screen for now.
However, at this point you may notice that I have implemented the Atari standard
key-presses, slightly adapted for our purposes. # and * together restart
the game, and # and * and OPTION together reset the game, (they'd normally
reset and clear the E2ROM to default settings), just as OPTION used to.
I also let the program have a little fun you may note, at start-up, guessing
if you have a BJL or Alpine, just by probing memory for write access. |
 The menu has not changed much this time,
but what has changed is that there is a scrolling star field in the background.
Actually, there are now 2 objects for the stars, scrolling at different rates,
so-called parallax scrolling. The little blue line isn't a bug, you'll find
out why later.
The other big thing is Option 5, reset, has gone. How do we reset? Read above,
just hold # and * and OPTION together, on pad 1 only at the moment. Pressing
just # and * jumps back to the intro code.
Try staring at/tracking just one option, to see a pleasing optical illusion
with stars moving sideways. |
 The options screen uses the same bouncing
menu technique as the main menu, it's important that you write code you can
re-use in different circumstances whenever you can, even in new games. That
doesn't mean everything has to look the same.
The options by default are 'A" Tramiel'd (for colours, and graphics) and
'B' Slow Text (as used on the text explanation screens, with text etched
character by character) and 'C' return to the main menu. Just pressing the
equivalen pad button toggles the options on and off. Normally the options
would be saved to E2ROM on the cartridge when you change an option and exit
the screen. |
 A static screen shot of the menus with
Minter'd colour scheme (Jeff "Yak" Minter, that is) does not really show
how psychedelic they appear. Of course, don't worry, there is lots more to
add.
The Fast Text option does not affect this screen but affects how the text
is written on the text information screens, so check out the difference. |
 Once again there are no significant changes
to these text explanation screens, see Badcode0 for details.
The only real difference is that the text on these pages is now written almost
instantly instead of etched, if you select 'Fast Text' from the options screen.
In Badcode3 I will tweak the text output routines to demonstrate how you
can make displaying text a bit more interesting, and also introduce the blitter
routines to demonstrate how much faster and smoother blitter scrolling is
that then M68K. |
 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. |
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