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So Long And Thanks For All The Chips!

A topic by cthutu created Jun 06, 2022 Views: 99 Replies: 1
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Yes, that is the title of the game I am writing!  In an attempt to get some basic routines working for an upcoming text adventure game I am writing, I've decided to do a little prequel for this Jam.  It's a 12 location adventure game with around 5 puzzles to solve.  So it's not big at all.

Today, I am dealing with text.  Specifically, printing it on screen, and compressing it so I can fit a reasonable amount of text (along with code) within 8K.  With the help of my father (who's a great writer), I've finished the location text and for those 12 locations it takes over 3K.  With compression is takes around 1.5K.  The compression scheme I am using is ZX0, written by Einar Saukas.  Perhaps a ZX0 compressor and decompressor might be an interesting project for the next DotJam!

I need to decompress it at start-up to a larger buffer, and write some routines that can word-wrap the text.  When this is done I will post some screenshots.  I am currently writing it within Odin itself.  I `ORG` the code to` $6000`, and decompress it to `$8000` onwards.  I also have the 768 bytes of the sinclair font compressed too and that comes to around 400 bytes.  When I want to create the .dot file, I will change the `ORG $6000`, to `ORG $6000,$2000` and add `SAVE "solong.dot",$6000,$-$2000` to create the dot file itself.  If I do that initially, I won't be able to run the game inside Odin as the addresses will be all wrong.

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This will be great to see as an example of Odin and DOT development looking forward to it.