I've just been reading Retro Gamer issue 140 and there's an article on the classic Zorgon's Revenge on pages 76/77, possibly the best game written for that short-lived machine (the history of the Oric-1 was beset with misfortune (Retro Gamer 29)).
It was the second game in the Xenon trilogy and apparently all three were developed on a BBC with Torch disk drive and then
cross-assembled to the Oric.
It would be fantastic if any of these games could be back-cross-assembled to the BBC.
Anyone interested in a new game writing project ?
No doubt someone will pooh-pooh the idea by saying that all three utilised the Oric's 48k of ram.
I live in hope..
Or I could just play it on Oricutron 1.2 which works on Windows 10.
Oric 1's Zorgon's Revenge
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FourthStone
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Re: Oric 1's Zorgon's Revenge
Love that it has lots of game elements going on, not sure about back assembling to beeb but would be a nice porting or rewriting project to work on, will be watching this thread to see if you get any bites.
The graphics might have to take a compromise as it appears to use 8 colours in a screen resolution similar to mode 1. 8 background colours are also used which don't appear to be affected by sprites changing colours to the main character colours if they are on the same scanline, interesting graphics effect.
Would love to take it on myself but I am only just getting reacquainted with writing asm routines so maybe it could be something I could look at in the future after I churn through some of my current slow moving coding projects. Initially thinking mode 1 with a reduced screen size (256x256) to allow more ram for game code and sprites. Obviously the colours would be reduced to 4 (including black!), mode 2 I think would be too chunky and change the look and game, maybe a few mock up screens could be done to compare mode 1 vs mode 2. The other thing with mode 2 is that you'd want to use the whole 160 horizontal pixels to pack in as much detail as possible so screen memory needed would be the max 20k.
The graphics might have to take a compromise as it appears to use 8 colours in a screen resolution similar to mode 1. 8 background colours are also used which don't appear to be affected by sprites changing colours to the main character colours if they are on the same scanline, interesting graphics effect.
Would love to take it on myself but I am only just getting reacquainted with writing asm routines so maybe it could be something I could look at in the future after I churn through some of my current slow moving coding projects. Initially thinking mode 1 with a reduced screen size (256x256) to allow more ram for game code and sprites. Obviously the colours would be reduced to 4 (including black!), mode 2 I think would be too chunky and change the look and game, maybe a few mock up screens could be done to compare mode 1 vs mode 2. The other thing with mode 2 is that you'd want to use the whole 160 horizontal pixels to pack in as much detail as possible so screen memory needed would be the max 20k.
Re: Oric 1's Zorgon's Revenge
I've attached a copy of the article about Zorgon's Revenge from Retro Gamer issue 140.
Hopefully it will whet someone's appetite. I can also upload the article about the Oric's history if anyone's interested.
Hopefully it will whet someone's appetite. I can also upload the article about the Oric's history if anyone's interested.
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- RG140 p76to77 Zorgons Revenge.pdf
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