TRON Light Cycles

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Mike
Herr VC
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Joined: Wed Dec 01, 2004 1:57 pm
Location: Munich, Germany
Occupation: electrical engineer

TRON Light Cycles

Post by Mike »

I know, there must be hundreds of these around on the net, at least for other computers.

This one has a short story to it: The original had been published in a German computer magazine (called CPU, around Spring '84) as printed listing - and the game got me hooked to the VIC literally for weeks. I couldn't find a trace of it anywhere, I wanted to play it again, so I re-wrote it ... here's the result: TRON (download)

Image Image

The instructions are in German, but shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

Greetings,

Michael
Last edited by Mike on Thu Feb 20, 2014 4:13 pm, edited 4 times in total.
Mobsie
Vic 20 Drifter
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Joined: Mon Apr 26, 2004 7:51 am
Location: Germany

Post by Mobsie »

Hi,

very nice.

Hallo,

sehr schönes kleines Spiel. Ich spielte es früher auch sehr gerne.
Was machst Du sonst so mit deinem VC-20?

Gruß
Mobsie
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Mike
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Joined: Wed Dec 01, 2004 1:57 pm
Location: Munich, Germany
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Re: TRON Light Cycles

Post by Mike »

Hallo Mobsie,

schön, daß es auch noch andere VC User in Deutschland gibt!

Ich habe nur noch den Rechner selbst, mit RF-Modulator, +3K Speichererweiterung und das Anleitungsbuch. Die Datasette hatte ich Anfang der 90'er zusammen mit einem 128er verkauft. Wenn ich ein Programm für den VC schreibe und auf diesem auch testen möchte, geht das also nur recht mühsam, halt über die Tastatur und nach dem Ausschalten... . Ich habe in letzter Zeit auch Programme geschrieben, die bis zu +24K Zusatzspeicher benötigen. Die kann ich aber nur in einem Emulator ausführen.

Thanks for the positive reply! Did you already manage to beat my high score? :) I'd also like to know if you think the game play is balanced, i.e. you get an extra life roughly as often as you lose one in a crash.

Greetings,

Michael
Boray
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Post by Boray »

Nice game!
PRG Starter - a VICE helper / Vic Software (Boray Gammon, SD2IEC music player, Vic Disk Menu, Tribbles, Mega Omega, How Many 8K etc.)
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Mike
Herr VC
Posts: 4816
Joined: Wed Dec 01, 2004 1:57 pm
Location: Munich, Germany
Occupation: electrical engineer

Re: TRON Light Cycles

Post by Mike »

This comment really deserves an ultra-necro-bump:
in another thread, chysn wrote:It’s a fun game. The placement of the controls drove me nuts, but I figured that was part of the “cycle” experience. I found that I could get higher scores by crossing my hands so that my left hand was using the function keys.
:shock:

Over all that time, I have had heard quite some complaints about the control scheme used in the game. It appears to me many people have their difficulties with bi-handed control even though they'd never need to move a finger away from one of the four directional keys. This is the first time however I heard someone actually plays TRON with crossed hands.

For MG Snake, the control scheme is quite similar: "X", "C", "/" and ";" on the VIC-20 keyboard, which is more suitable on the PC in emulation (especially, when [RETURN] is added as fire button). For this kind of games, I still find the mapping preferable to, say, WASD - where I tend to 'knot' my fingers. :?

In any case, in TRON the keys are defined in the lines 10 to 13, and you can always adapt them to another control scheme. Line 37 also appreciates a corresponding change. :wink:

Greetings,

Michael
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