c=a*2-1; f00(c);

Try:

f00(c=a*2-1);

INTS ARE SHORTER AND FASTER THAN STRINGS

If you need to compare a string to a list of other strings several times in your code, do the compare once and set an enum to the string's number and substitute the number compare. This also allows you to use switch() to delegate the different tasks instead of a series of !strcmp()'s.

AVOID UNNECESSARY ERROR-CHECKING

If a

FOOTNOTE

I am glad you looked at this document. Please, tell me what you think! If
you find this document to be helpful, e-mail me. If you have any
suggestions, complaints or comments, e-mail me. If you have any additions, post them on the cc65 contribs site.

My e-mail address is

rose.joseph12@yahoo.com.



*************************************
INTERVIEW WITH DANE BILLS
Panicman Vic20 Creator
By Commodore Free
*************************************

Name: Panicman
Authors: Dane Bills,
Jeff Messner
Released: March 2, 2014
Requirements: VIC20 with +3k or +8k,
joystick
(developed on NTSC)

Description: A maze game clone of a well known 80s game written in
assembly

Video of first test: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKnd8T4pi18

Both versions should load and you can type 'run' from the basic prompt
after loading. e.g.:

load "panicman3k.prg",8

There is no difference between the 3k and 8k version other than a splash
screen to show the authors on the 8k. I just thought it might be nice to
have the 8k executable for someone to run on the real iron if they didn't
have a 3k cartridge. The 3K has received the most testing on real
hardware.

+3k version: drive.google.com/file/d/0B0VOPYWAvrJHZjJBQW1uVWVYcDg/edit?usp=sharing

+8k version: drive.google.com/file/d/0B0VOPYWAvrJHSHhBd0hJbHg5RE0/edit?usp=sharing

discussion thread: sleepingelephant.com/ipw-web/bulletin/bb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6870

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In Commodore Free issue 79 I reviewed a new release for the VIC 20 called Panicman, the game received a very high score not just for the game play
and sounds but for its accuracy in the conversion to the VIC, I took some
time out to chat to the coder, and find out more about the games creation.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. Hi. Can you introduce yourself to the Commodore Free readers?

A. Hello Nigel.

First, let me say I'm honoured to say a few words on Commodore FREE about
my tiny contribution to the amazing stuff coming out of the retro-computing community. If it wasn't for all the people creating projects and content
this wouldn't be near as much fun as it is.

I'm one of the generations of kids from the 70s and 80s whose lives were
really touched by the introduction of the personal computer. A friend from church had shown me an Apple II some time around 1980. I remember looking
for a computer of my own. The KIM and AIM65 were the only products even remotely affordable back then. Finally, I saw the "Wonder Computer" at a
local Hamfest. It really was a wonder for its time. At under $300, I was
able to successfully beg the parents for a VIC that Christmas. I found a picture of my first original VIC. I did a lot of programming in BASIC
during those years. I made Gorf and Asteroids, both with custom character sets. They were dreadfully slow of course, being written in BASIC.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. Noted in the Credits is Jeff. Are your musical skills lacking? I see
Jeff helped with play testing as well as the music. How did you go about testing the game?

A. I played in elementary school band for what that's worth - not much I reckon. I first started out by dumping the sounds from the arcade into a spectrum analyzer and trying to reverse engineer them. That wasn't a whole
lot of fun. Jeff has perfect pitch - he hears notes like I see colour. He took over designing sound effects and music. After his initial distaste at
the VIC's out-of-tune scales, he got down to the business of carefully
picking notes. He managed to hand compress the Pacman song into an
incredible small number of bytes, as I didn't leave him very much room -
ever, to put the sound and music in. I was too busy eating up all the
memory with beginner 6502 code.

We had some soft "defines" in the code where you could become invincible,
or have the level end after X points, and have a second player control one
of the ghosts to set up scenarios for the AI. Early on most of the testing
was done in WinVICE. Later, with much excitement, I procured some real hardware from eBay to try the game out on. That was its own sort of
adventure. We had to find an old Pentium computer to run 64HDD on for file transfer. I had to solder up some transfer cables. That's when I realized this was truly fun, as you could allow the project to take you into any
sort of weird area you wanted to wander into. The big test was a
self-imposed deadline from Jeff. We had to complete the game in time for a retro gaming party. We loaded the game on a real VIC and let it run for 5 hours alone with strangers and a joystick.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. The credits say "developed on NTSC." Now I know its PAL-compatible as I played it on a PAL machine. I presume testing was conducted on PAL
machines, and apart from the speed, are there any other differences between playing on a PAL or NTSC machine?

A. Yes, I guess there shouldn't be much difference, save for the speed. I could tell I was new at this because it never occurred to me to try to run
the game in PAL mode on an emulator. I was worried when one of the UK
members, Beamrider on Denial, played the game and it behaved strangely. I
had not bothered to lock the frame rate down. With the extra time per
frame that PAL offers, occasionally the game loop would finish in one frame instead of two. This made it jerky. I made a patch to lock to 1/2 frame
rate so the speed would be constant on PAL.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. I see in the forums you were trying to make a tape version of the game.
Do you intend to distribute this (obviously there will be some copyright issues)?

A. I never did manage to get a tape made. Jeff thought the retro game
party might be amazed to see a game load from cassette tape. Many of them
had perhaps only been familiar with cartridge based systems such as the
2600. That was everyone except for his uncle, who I understand had given
Jeff some computer tapes for his C64 when he was a kid. The tapes were so
tiny in size, Jeff thought his uncle had been unduly cheap with him. He
later realized they were data cassettes and much more expensive than
regular audio cassettes. I can't say I ever had any data cassettes back in
the day; it was always a re-purposed audio cassette. The Commodore tape
drive never failed me though, unlike the Atari.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. Why didn't you just release the 8k version of the game and maybe spice
it up with a splash screen?

A. One of the nostalgia requirements for the project to me was that it had
run on the same hardware I had in 1982. I was enamored with the PLOT and
DRAW statements of the Apple II back then, so I had scraped enough pennies together to buy a "Super Expander 3K" memory expansion cartridge which had
the additional basic commands built-in. This was the target; it had to run within a 3K VIC.

- - - - - - - - - -

Q. I did comment that the ghosts were a bit dim in my review. You
mentioned you tried to copy the AI as close as possible. Was this from the original arcade game?

A. Yes. I was going to try to verify the correctness of the ghost AI by demonstrating that the same patterns that would work on the arcade machine would work on this version, but that did get out of scope quickly. I would like to point your readers to the brilliant Pacman dossier by Jamey
Pittman: home.comcast.net/~jpittman2/ pacman/pacmandossier.html . It
contains detailed descriptions of the arcade ghost AI I tried to co

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