Stumbling together through Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll - Part 1

[davidn]

As I felt I just didn't have enough video series in flight just now, kjorteo and I got together and revisited the game that started all of this in my life. Snake, Rattle 'n' Roll was a game that Kjorteo grew up with and mentioned to me when I was at work, in the context of the entire game being one continuous environment broken up into levels - and I wanted to do a playthrough of it and put up a video simply because doing a text one would have taken too long.

Getting the confidence to do that video was one of the best things that's ever happened to me - and though I didn't feel the gradual evolution over the last couple of years since I put that first one up, the difference in my voice between then and now is incredible... the original one is so timid!

Still, this time, Kjorteo was around to help - and through a surprisingly workable VirtuaNES netplay session, we bravely climbed the mountain towards the moon or whatever on earth is going on in this game. Our first chapter takes us halfway through the game by level count... but probably not by time spent or anger level. It's eighteen minutes, about five of which are spent on one screen.

http://youtu.be/8xhTttTVOiY

(Scrooge McDuck!)

Comments

[davidn]

Oh, you know what - I forgot about the DEBUG command! The PC magazines I used to get were full of them - that and EDLIN were used to make subtle changes to files and executables and alter the behaviour of games, though I'm still not sure what DEBUG actually did on a technical level - I'll have to go and look it up.

[premchaia_pre4]

Allowed you to load executable images into RAM and then edit memory and registers and view disassemblies and run parts and do single-stepping and such, usually. So that would be a nice and more to the point nicely similar way of doing it if it could load the files involved (I'd forgotten about it too). Might have a harder time with the more complex programs though.

(Also it was used for writing out COM files with tiny useful machine language programs from magazines, using simple hex input using mainly the e/r/w commands, IIRC; you'd use e starting at 100 hex, then set CX to the number of bytes to write using r, and then w with the filename, wasn't it… ?)