orion70 wrote:I noticed that the stairs are thinner in the original version of the game... is there a reason why in this VIC version they are wider? (not saying that you should modify them of course!)
It's a quite simple reason. Many screen elements you are looking at in this implementation of Pitfall
do not exist at all.
I'm serious.
The orange tree trunks against the light green forest, the (changing) pits and ponds, the small pits, the floor(s) and the ladder are drawn by changing the background colour register of the VIC chip alone, as the electron beam traces the screen. The fastest rate at which this can be done is every 4 CPU cycles, which corresponds to a width of 2 characters, or 16 pixels. This is the lower horizontal size limit of this kind of objects. Though they can be shifted in whole to the left or right in 1 cycle steps, i.e. 4 pixels.
...
Speaking of which, I'd like to ask whether it might be feasible to change the jump width a bit. At the moment it looks like it is ~18 pixels, which allows to jump across the smaller pits (albeit barely), but gives a lot of problems when jumping over the crocodiles. Even though one can stand on their heads when their mouth is open, after a jump you come out 'misaligned'. Is that the same behaviour on a 2600? Maybe it would be nice, if the jump width could be set to 16 pixels instead, with an extra pixel of tolerance allowed at both sides of the small pits (after all, you still stand with one foot on the edge
).
On real hardware, changes of the background register happen one pixel late with regard to (half-)character boundaries. Newer versions of VICE honour this, did you also take this into account for the 'collision' detection?
I could argue that starting the game at $1200 instead of $1201 was being thrifty, but in truth it's due to my Commodore 64 days - load"*",8,1 for everything..
When the directory is loaded this way, on a C64, it is written to the screen. That might have served as clue that something might be wrong with 'loading everything with ,8,1'.
Mike, that image is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for
The caption, the green border and some other parts of the picture could be tidied up a bit, though. I'll have a look into this over the next days.