Working with the assembly code for Pitfall is like getting to examine the brushstrokes of a Van Gogh up close. (1/4)pic.twitter.com/jCLePYQZdc
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Consider how
@PitfallCreator tracked the player’s lives as a bitmap. The Atari would display a dot or a line, if the binary representation of a number in a bitmap contained a 1 and not a 0. When the player has 2 lives, 0b10100000 is stored in memory as the life counter. (2/4)Pokaż ten wątek
I only vaguely remember that trick (from 40 years ago), but necessity drove many innovations. Sometimes it was all you could do to free up one byte of the 128 bytes of RAM for a game feature. Using one byte of RAM as both counter and display made sense with that limitation.
