New old Oric game: Oric Golf by K. Smith
Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 11:35 pm
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.
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!
This is not the Oric Golf you might already know, this new one was sent to OUM in March 1994.
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!