Sir Arthur Wellesley's Machine Code Skirmish

Post date: 01-Jun-2016 22:17:05

Game by: GReW

Reviewed by: Simon Ferré (they're all going to say this now, so should I bother writing that?)

Welcome to the longest titled entry of the competition so far. It's a mouthful right enough, and the loading screen is most interesting. GReW has managed to split the screen into two sections, namely the bitmap and the attributes, and has saved each section on its own and loaded them out of sequence. By that I mean that the attributes load first. I don't think I've ever seen that before. Anyway, onto the rather pretty loading screen:

GReW has done something quite clever here. As the next part of the game loads it doesn't display the name of the program on the screen (that's another few marks off the score). Nothing fills me with less joy than Z80 machine code. Back in the day I never studied it, and have never done so since. This sets me up to fail big time.

Onto the hand written notes provided by GReW:

The object of the game is to help Sir Arthur Wellesley construct a valid Z80 machine code program to increase the morale of his troops.

An "X" flag will cause the opcodes in the program enclosure to be poked into RAM at $C300 and executed - the signed 16-bit contents of register pair BC are added to the player's morale on return.

Controls:

Q-T open gate to let redcoat add flag to program.

A-G close gate to make redcoat discard the current flag, every discarded flag decreases the resolve of the troops.

Loading:

48k = Load ""

128k = Use (Tape) Loader option

It may be useful to have a Z80 datasheet or Appendix A of the Spectrum manual to hand when playing the game.

Yes, it's that last line that had me. I have neither to hand. I suppose I should be grateful I have hands, but in this instance they are pretty useless.

After not too long really, the program has loaded. I'm not sure if it is in machine code or basic (I've not looked) but it's a pretty good effort. The game starts with an intro which is displayed word for word in a quite nice font. As this is the crap games competition, that font loses you points already due to it being readable.

I do feel the poor Field Marshall should go to the doctors. He's definitely a bit off colour. There are some quite nice graphics all told, and I'm beginning to like the overall feel of the game. It seems a bit too polished for a crap game competition.

So, on to the game proper. Well, a poor chap with a flag starts walking across the screen. What strikes me is the rather lovely beepy tune that accompanies him. As the tune plays a quick bit the chap starts shuffling along faster, and goes slower when the notes are longer. This makes him skit and stutter like he has had his fair share of the local alcoholic beverage. Not at all the best marching I've ever seen. On said flag is a hexadecimal digit (or more frequently an X). If you want to use this digit as the next one in your program you have to open the door to let it in. My first program consisted of the opcode DE (whatever that is) as I couldn't be bothered waiting for the poor chaps to turn up with anything other than an X. For some reason, this machine code program ran and I received some morale points. Pure and utter fluke I must say. My next program wasn't so successful, and then something odd happened:

As you can see, the poor chap who marches along is now stuck at the bottom right (or the old one is still there) but now the screen is filling up with just flags with an X on them. I left it running for a while, but decided it best to quit once they nearly reached the bottom of the screen. What happens once they start overwriting code (which may or may not happen) is something I didn't fancy finding out about.

My lack of Z80 Machine Code experience left me a bit lost in this game, which does seem like it should work well. I'd be interested to find out if anyone who reads these reviews and who plays the games gets anywhere with it, and if the game has an ending different to the one I managed to achieve.

This game scores NOP out of Z80.