3D Deathchase for MSX

What you have here is the Alpha version of 3D Deathchase for the MSX.

Alpha Notes

Alpha means that I am looking for people to report bugs.  The best place to do that is in the comments below.

The list of known issues/bugs for this release is:

1. Choice of Keyboard or Joystick is a throwback to the original Spectrum version and is unnecessary on MSX, which should poll keyboard and BOTH joysticks.
2. The MSX version is faster, so the effect of 'steering' the bullet is somewhat lost.  Consider slowing the bullet down.
3. If you crash during Night Patrol, you restart in daytime.
4. Wipe between screens looks shit.
5. Some of the audio appears to delay in starting (try crashing into a tree).
6. Debris animation wraps around to left of screen when source of explosion is on right.
7. Improve colors in debris animation.
8. Throttle SFX.
9. Helicopter animates only one blade.
10. The tanks colors are very 'creative'.
11. Final tuning of tree density TreePopulationLookup table.  There may be too many trees way too fast, or it's too easy.

MSX Improvements

• It has been optimized in terms of how it renders and I've taken advantage of that to present a game that is faster than the original ZX Spectrum version.
• Colored sprites.
• More audio effects have been added.

Why?

This was one of the first cassette games I purchase for the ZX Spectrum.  It's a classic for that computer.  The fact it is #1 on the Your Sinclair top 100 should inform you how people feel about this game.

I was fascinated by how such a playable title was put into a 16k game.  Having finally had time to look into that, what better way of paying homage to it than creating versions for new platforms.  I decided the MSX was first largely because I had never programmed for MSX prior and I felt I may be able to make slight improvements.

The MSX version is faster.  I originally developed a similar bitmap-based implementation but the game draws and overdraws quite a lot - for every 9 bytes of data (a character and its color) written to the screen on the Spectrum, required 16 bytes on MSX.  For the same CPU, same speed the MSX version was slower.  Therefore the only choice was to optimize it for MSX hardware and in doing so, I managed to keep all graphics intact AND still meet the original goal of a more colorful version.

What next?

As the Alpha issues are reported/fixed, this naturally has to go onto ColecoVision in some form or other.  I also want to put something onto Mattel Aquarius.  I'd also like to do a 6502 version.  Finally, the MSX bitmap version...while it was never finished I'd like to re-purpose that code for another bitmap-based format at some point.  Suggestions welcome.