The Wall (simple BASIC65 game based on a Lazy Jones mini-game)

Hi there,

today I decided to code my first little BASIC65 game on the MEGA65. It was a great experience, because everything was done right on the MEGA, I tried to use the printed manual for everything (which was almost successful), and I saved my progress on a real 3.5" disk. It took me about 2-3 hours in total.

The chars are defined using CHARDEF, but I wrote a small routine that reads the pixel data from DATA lines, which is very handy if you prefer to design your chars directly inside your listing, instead of using chequered paper:

The game itself is pretty simple, you have to control a small arrow through a walled garden using the joystick in port 2 in order to build a wall, without hitting a plant or another obstacle (e.g. the outer wall or yourself):

What's really amusing is that the re-defined chars of course are visible in the listing as well (after running the game at least once of course), which led to my decision to create a cool walled REM comment at the top of my listing:

While the game itself is nothing special of course, it shows that you don't need a lot of code to create a small fun game in BASIC. Also, it served as a cool "retro experience" for me, because it almost felt like coding in the good old C64 days, but with a much more powerful BASIC / machine. Also, of course it helps to get a little bit into the MEGA, because after coding my first little program, this is now my second attempt at doing so, and I already felt a bit more "used" to the machine.

Also, I really enjoyed using the disk drive for saving my progress. I think it feels a bit more "direct" than using disk images and handling them, mounting them, using the freezer and stuff... instead, I have a 3.5" disk now for my BASIC programs and simply use it.

What I disliked so far was that there was no dedicated command for using 40 chars mode (I had to use PRINT CHR$(27);"4"), and reading chars from the screen RAM as well as reading or setting colors in the color RAM was only possible by using PEEK and POKE. It would have been even cooler if the listing would be 100% free of PEEKs and POKEs

I hope this game inspires somebody here to code something simple in BASIC as well and maybe submit something for the upcoming MEGAZINE - a type-in magazine for the MEGA65?

You can find the game in the filehost: THE WALL

btw this also runs quite okay in SPEED 3, so you can get a glimpse of what it would have been like on a real C65...

This should work (maybe there's a more elegant way though):

unofficial music edition: the-wall-music.prg

Here's a full picture of the source code, which is nice because it illustrates that there isn't much code necessary for a fun game. It's around 200 lines, and a huge part of the lines is used for graphics. Also, it shows that BASIC listings can look somewhat readable, especially when using spaces here and there (no need to cram everything together, because the interpreter is fast enough). Also, the syntax highlighting helps a lot

as game developers, Endurion and I of course ticked the "game charset keyboard" box during checkout