Retrocomputing - Mechwarrior for the Apple II

Another project that sat dormant for a while - almost 20 years in this case.

This is the basic core of an Apple II game based on Mechwarrior (giant fighting robot suits). It was probably inspired, more than anything, by the box art for a PC version of this game. I'm rather proud of the sprites!

I started when I was a teenager and got the basic image blitting and background rendering working and drew up lots of lovely sprites. But the whole thing was tied together with Applesoft BASIC code and was dog slow (like 0.1Hz). When I first (re)moved to San Francisco I spent some time rewriting the core of it in C using CC65 and making the blt engine a lot more flexible and speeding it up too. It's still pretty slow (2Hz or so) but there are plenty of optimizations that can be made: all sprites are 10 bytes wide, for example, and sprites are cached in aux memory which means a double copy when rendering.

This is way, way down on the priority list to finish.

(Correlate this with the "Halo Mobile" post from a few days ago and you'll see I'm into first-person visualization of sprites against a rolling landscape... and never finish these darned things!)