Parallax scrolling

1991

Most of my games and demos were kind of slow and I didn't really figure out why. So I thought I maybe should use interrupts to get the stuff faster - I obviously didn't get the idea of interrupts right (or you could put it the other way and say that I was way ahead of time, by thinking that interrupts actually were multitasking.) I had just read about interrupts in my CPC Assembler book and I was desperate to try this new knowledge out.

Interrupted parallax scrolling with test background
'Shadow of the Beast' was just out on Amiga and I liked the parallax scrolling they've had there. So I wanted to give it a try on the CPC with a parallax scrolling and some serious Space Fighting action. I figured that when I create an interrupt for the scrolling, one for the display and controlling of the space ship and a third for the movement of the shots the game should be really fast enough.

Well, it turned out, that interrupts weren't the solution to my speed problem. Even with interrupts for the parallax scrolling, for the starship and for the shots the animation turned out to be a little slow. And the parallax scrolling also didn't look the way I thought it would. It was meant to look like the space ship was flying over the ocean, but the waves on the water looked like everything else but waves.

The random ASCII characters in the background were just a test-screen to demonstrate that I could put in somebackground that wouldn't be overwritten by the space ship sprite. I often used a short basic routine that painted random ASCII characters in random colors on the screen to test some routines on them.

I discontinued working on this idea and switched over to one (or some) of my many other ideas for great games. And I left another open hole in the ground...

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last updated on Saturday, November 9. 2002 by Odiesoft

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