New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

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Symoon
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New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

Post by Symoon »

Thanks to Steve that provided the tape recording and manual scans, here is a new TAP file: Oric Golf by Kieron P. Smith.
This is not the Oric Golf you might already know, this new one was sent to OUM in March 1994.
oricgolf_screen05.png
oricgolf_screen05.png (2.96 KiB) Viewed 3729 times
I tried to put it on Oric.org, but the fact that another game has the same name requires manual modifications that only Jede can do, which he did once but it still doesn't work, and I suspect real life keeps him busy these days. We'll see when he's back!

I'm not sure the game was ever released (Steve?). It's very well presented with manual and so on, and is close to Leader Board, for those that played it. But it suffers from a major problem: the drawing is extremely SLOW. It can take up to 2.5 minutes to draw the (calculated) scenery before you can take your shot. The ball movement is SLOW, too.
The author was of course aware of this and was hoping the program, in Basic, could be compiled. As far as I know this never happened.

I tried to make several improvements:
- adding coulour to sand (yellow) and water (dark blue), which are in the program figured respectivley by an empty square, or a black square
- making things faster (scenery and ball)

I failed at both. 1st because the filling is done by an undocumented assembler routine (and other instructions in the code according to the situation), and adding colours might have side effects (masking the ball drawing). 2nd because I forgot most of my mathematics and the drawing is based on sinus, cosinus and so on.
I also tried to compile the program with Ray McLaughlin's basic compiler, but it failed. I suspect the program is too big (and it would require re-writing as it's using unsupported commands).
Lack of luck, time and knowledge: I gave up.

But this is a challenge for the Oric community. I'm quite sure experienced programmers can sort this out, providing of course they have time for this ;)
Playing the game at accelerated speed with Euphoric is quite pleasant IMHO.
It's up to you!
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Steve M
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Re: New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

Post by Steve M »

Excellent - well done!

Yes, I think the Compiler problem stopped it from being released. Maybe someone can find a way to improve the speed?
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coco.oric
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Re: New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

Post by coco.oric »

Maybe someone can find a way to improve the speed
Too easy ... just translate basic into asm :)
coco.oric as DidierV, CEO Member
Historic owner of Oric, Apple II, Atari ST, Amiga
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Symoon
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Re: New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

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Symoon wrote: Tue Nov 05, 2019 11:35 pm the filling is done by an undocumented assembler routine
Thanks to Omelette scans, I found the routine published in OUM #79. It was actually initially published in Your Computer from December 1984.
Sadly none of the magazines detail the program, they only publish the opcodes list (with a little more detail in Your Computer about the stack size that can be parametered with the ST variable).
So no real progress here, apart from knowing we won't learn more from those sources.
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Re: New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith

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