The Pharaoh's Tomb

[jgerrie]

This is an arcade game I originally developed on the TRS-80 MC-10. Based roughly on Tutankamen/Tut's Tomb type games. The key input is a little sticky in this Dragon port. Still, I hope you find it interesting.

[robcfg]

Hi Jim!

It's a pity that the keys are so unresponsive, otherwise it's quite a nice game.

Any chance you can fix that?

Regards,
Rob

[zephyr]

Try the attached copy. I have made a quick modification to help improve the keyboard response.

[jgerrie]

Cool. Thanks. What was that Poke you added in line 1?

I've made one more little change myself to help squeeze just a little more speed and hopefully responsiveness out of the code. Find it attached. Thanks to both of you for the comments. I will be uploading my game Ouranos aka Weather War shortly.

[zephyr]

What was that Poke you added in line 1?

It resets the Dragon's row state byte ($151) which temporarily forces a complete keyboard scan. Its not always very effective (depending on the game code) unless you put it in several lines. The best option for BASIC programs is to use a subroutine based on Steve Woolham's "SpeedKey" pokes.

I have modified your TOMB2 release with a subroutine which will continuously force a complete keyboard scan (like the CoCo keyboard routine). This means that the Dragon's keyboard response will be comparable to that of a CoCo 1, 2 or 3 during the entire run time of the game code. Because it only activates when the game is running on a Dragon 32 (or 64 in 32K mode); the routine is suitable for adding to all of your CoCo/Dragon ports. The routine is also compatible with all known versions of CoCo and Dragon DOS (Steve Woolham's original SpeedKey routine is not compatible with HDB-DOS).