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The Secret Behind 80's Donkey Kong Jr. C-64 Demo Game

Posted: Sun Sep 11, 2022 4:23 pm
by RJBowman
A hilarious video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL5Nxew ... howAndTell

Video takes a little monger than it should to get to the point but the payoff is worth it.

Spoiler space:
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This was a supposed "leaked" demo that was distributed by software pirates in the 1980's. It displays a very authentic splash screen, followed by a very authentic looking first level, then the player is asked for a password. No one ever guessed the password.

And it was a fake. Some novice assembly programmer with talent for 8-bit graphic design wrote just enough code to display the splash screen followed by the level 1 screen. Atrociously written code provides just enough sprite animation to make it look authentic.

Re: The Secret Behind 80's Donkey Kong Jr. C-64 Demo Game

Posted: Tue Sep 13, 2022 11:44 am
by chysn
Reminds me of ML code I wrote for C64 when I was a kid. I wanted to move some ship sprites on-screen, but I needed to do it in more than one part of the game. So I just repeated the code over and over, rather than writing a subroutine. As far as I recall, it never even occurred to me to write a subroutine.