lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (02/09/84)
Last night I bought a Commodore 1702 color monitor at TOYS-R-US for 260 dollars. The 1702 has been very hard to find around here (western suburbs of Chicago.) K-mart advertised them on sale, but they don't have them. (The clerk acted like we were crazy for thinking the adverisment implied they were in stock.) Anyway, it works real nice with my 8-pronged (v2, right?) c64. No wavy screen. By the way, I agree with the consensus of answers to my query on that problem that it is due to power supply ripple in the RF output. Also, I misstated the parameters of the "wave". The lateral movement of the characters is about 2 pixels, much less than the 1/2 character I had estimated. The frequency is more like 2 per second than 1 per 2 seconds. That's moot as far as I'm concerned now. Regarding the characters generated by the "port 1" joystick. (I think that's the one near the keyboard) , I don't think it "slows the machine down" as Ray Miller stated. I found that it didn't affect the FROGGER between-game display at all. Oh, I'm talking about the left position that generates the CNTL character. When I ran a sprite back and forth from BASIC, it moved slightly slower to the left than to the right, but this was nothing like the factor of ~10 times slower observed with print loops. Anyway, it is a royal pain! Is anybody else a GOBLIN fan out there. This is a simple public domain game that runs out of BASIC using characters. The player's character marches upward through a maze of blocks. The player controls the lateral movement with the "o" and "p" keys. The movement wraps around top to bottom and right to left (and left to right.) The object is to march over all 36 victim characters, which are scattered throughout the maze, without running into a block. Great fun. The maze is different every time so there is some variety. I programmed a MASTERMIND game (who hasn't?) which I like because of all the delicious colors I get to sit there and stare at. I also made a swordfight game. The two duelists move back and forth (fixed y) and thrust with the fire button. The sword stays out for 1 second, followed by 1/2 second of vulnerable "dead time". It's simple but amusing. My son and I designed the figures using a simple sprite editor I wrote. My daughter does show signs of "computer anxiety" or whatever, but she does play with it. She tends to defer to her brother if she thinks she can't outshine him as befits her superior age. I didn't have any problem using the collision detection, as somebody warned was the case with the v2, which I think I have. I avoided the CNTRL character by using up and down to move the sprites back and forth. So we're all having great fun. I just love the color! Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew