mlynn1974 wrote:...
Automation made a right mess of Rainbow Islands - 1 Meg only, ages to depack.
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Yes, so you admit yourself it's a bit "special" and "different". The game was written by one of my favourite programmers Dominic Robinson with his 68000 "development system", which seemed to allow the games developers to write the game some sort of intermediate language that generates 68000 which is probably why the code is so weird. And why does it use Timer D interrupts all over the shop? I haven't spent too long trying to figure it out myself. Oh well.
By the way, the game engine can handle about 60 sprites at 25Hz which is pretty good.
I'm probably also one of the few people that typed in Dominic Robinson's Rainbow Processor in Your Sinclair (Aug 1987). That fried my brain.
Well, Automation did what usually did: went on packing it. And because couldn't extract separated files, they simply packed whole second floppy (or side B), what is 400KB. It is unpacked in high half Mega of RAM, that's why need 1MB RAM. But there are at least 2-3 different cracks where side B is untouched. Ages to depack - yes, depacking 400 KB with slow ICE or whatever is long. But not so rare case. Still loaded faster than Dungeon Master
I meant that crack is not special. Game is it indeed. Surely was coded very well. Considered as one of the best arcade conversions.
However, since I needed to play it thoroughly, so I played all levels, I was little disappointed with how hard game is . I died probably some 200 times during it - of course used trainer. One of main reasons for so much dies lies in laggy response on controls - just couldn't escape enough fast from all those nasties on later levels.
I don't think that floppy code is weird because intermediate language. It is done so intentionally, to make it hard for hackers. I did not look are care for other parts, so really can not say about. But it is hard to believe that generated 68000 code can do so fast sprite draw. That's done for sure in ASM. Maybe game logic is what is done in intermediate - and that's again something done by others too, often .

Famous Schrodinger's cat hypothetical experiment says that cat is dead or alive until we open box and see condition of poor animal, which deserved better logic. Cat is always in some certain state - regardless from is observer able or not to see what the state is.