The game consists of 20 arenas across 6 different sets and includes a shop where you can purchase all sorts of weapons and add-ons.
GAME REVIEW
There's an excellent and exhaustive review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GqP_A5sEwQ
SELECT AN ARENA
There's a secret easter egg for choosing any arena you like.
While on the main screen, hold down Delete and C keys. Then hold down Copy and tap a key from A to T (arenas 1 to 20)
CHOOSE DIFFERENT ARENA SET
While on the main screen, tap "L" and then choose a new set from A to F
You can get to try out all of Rowland Wright's screen creations
SCREEN DESIGNER
Ever wondered how the screens were so meticulously designed? I wrote a screen designer program for Rowland to use. Back in those days without email or internet, it required me to walk over there and give him a disk. Magically, a few days later, he'd give me a disk back that had another set of screens. The designer allowed him to move a cross hair around the screen and place blocks (including the invisible ones) and then load them as a set and playtest them.
LOADING SCREEN
The main loading screen, who some affectionately refer to as an attack on a Greek bowling alley, was not created by any art design program.
By creating a similar tool to the screen designer, I went around the screen with a crosshair, dropping pixels one by one. After all that work, Superior decided to change the colours to, IMHO, something far more garish for the cassette inlay!
WHAT DOES THE SCROLLING MESSAGE SAY?
In case it makes you dizzy, here's the full text. I make no apologies - i was a kid ok?
HELLO AND WELCOME TO HYPERBALL...DESIGNED AND PROGRAMMED BY STEPHEN PARKINSON. HI SCORE...010000 by SJP....... LOADSA FANKS GO TO ROWLAND FOR HIS AMAAAAZING SCREENS...TO DIANE FOR HER RIGOROUS PLAYTESTING AND TO DAVE FOR THE BEEB!!! PRESS SPACE TO START OR RETURN TO VIEW HISCORERS. PRESS L IF YOU'RE JUST BURSTING TO TRY OUT THE OTHER SCREENS!! IF YOU DO COMPLETE AN ARENA, YOU WILL BE THROWN ONTO THE BONUS LEVEL. PRESS SPACE WHEN THE BAT IS ON THE SCREEN TO EARN YOURSELF A BIG, FAT, JUICY 10000 EXTRA BONUS POINTS....IF YOU'RE GOOD ENOUGH! IF YOU HAVE ENOUGH POINTS...YOU CAN BUY YOURSELF ONE OF SIX GOODIES FROM THE SYSTEMS UPGRADE. THE MORE YOU SPEND THE MORE YOU GET! HIT SPACE TO START.......OH YES......#G#O#O#D# L#U#C#K....
GAME DEVELOPMENT
I wrote this game over two years, as that's how long it took to learn assembler using a raft of prototypes and tests. I was particularly obsessed with smoothness and attempted to get all the main loop executed before the next screen refresh, to prevent glitching (due to raster over-run etc).
*FX19 is the OSBYTE command to wait for vsync. For those interested, LDA #$13 then JSR &FFF4 is the assembler equivalent in case you want to search for that in the ROM.
The 8-ball multiplexer had to be the hardest part and could not be calculated fully in one screen refresh, hence why it always started off a little choppy.
For those of you who weren't even born, versions of the code had to be regularly saved to cassette taking about 15 minutes. I had heaps of cassettes lying around marked with different versions. Thanks to the B2 emulator, there's no need for all that now!