ROTABB

I enjoyed writing Ball Dozer very much and was soon thinking about what I could produce next. John Foster of Kouga Software was also keen to see what else I might come up with and he kindly gave me his ALLDREAM cartridge to help the process along.

This was so much better than using the cassette version of the assembler. Sure, you still had to load in your source code, but the system was ready to do work as soon as the power was on. And because the assembler was no longer resident in RAM, there was more room for the project. It was a more productive environment.

As Time Pilot '84 was my favourite arcade game, I decided to have a go at making my own version. It was ambitious but I knew all the machine code instructions, I could program anything. Right? Wrong...

I ran into trouble straight away with the scrolling background. It was really slow. Vertical scrolling is relatively easy: It boils down to copying data from one place to another as quickly as possible. Horizontal scrolling at a pixel level required multiple shift operations on two source bytes just to produce one screen byte. I couldn't figure out how to make it anywhere near fast enough for a game.

I didn't want to abandon the game though, and came up with the idea of having a scrolling grid to give the impression of movement. This is something that can be drawn very quickly and the Criss Crossy Lines Dimension was born. This lent itself nicely to the cliché ridden B movie plot provided by my talented friend Simon Harrison.

Title Screen. Colour had still not been invented.

Simon and I decided that the story and level names would be completely absurd, partly for fun, but also to send up games that had arbitrary story lines with little relevance. What can I say? - we were young and subversive. In your face, games industry!

Oh I'm afraid the rhubarb will be quite
operational when your friends arrive.

I was really pleased with the end result. The controls were a bit clunky and the sound effects could have been better but I felt that I had produced a good game to the best of my ability.

Game Over

The game was finished in time for a show, and it attracted favourable reviews, but the Dragon scene was looking very unhealthy at this point. Dragon User magazine had stopped publication due to declining readership and software publishers were calling it a day.

It was fun while it lasted. I drifted away from the Dragon and moved on to other things, thinking that was that. I would never have guessed the Dragon would still have an enthusiastic following nearly 30 years in the future...



Just another day in the Criss Crossy Lines Dimension.