7/21/2023 0 Comments Dave in dangerToday, this is all handled transparently for programmers using DirectX or OpenGL. When I was done drawing to that screen, I displayed it then began drawing the next frame on the first hi-res screen you were looking at. Basically, while you were looking at the screen, I was drawing the next frame of the game on the second hi-res screen. One of the cool things about the Apple II version of Dangerous Dave is that it used a graphic technique called "page-flipping" to make the animation flicker-free. Otherwise I would have coded a lot of unrolled loops for the drawing code. Hell, nothing did, but Dave was using GraBasic for all its drawing and I was limited by that. Now, Dangerous Dave didn't run at lightning speed on the Apple II. Ala Mario, I added secret areas if you could somehow get out of the level confines. Mario never had a gun or a jetpack but man, I was determined to put them in my game! I didn't want Dave to look exactly like Mario - I wanted it to have my own style and strangeness. I mean, the environmental hazards are called WeirdWeeds, FearsomeFire and WickedWater! Well, it was pretty natural back then seeing as all my time was spent creating crazy game stuff every day. The title screen says Episode 1, which means that I hoped this was just the start of several more years and several sequels to Dangerous Dave.Īfter playing Dave for a bit you might wonder how the hell I got the ideas for the monsters, dumb upside-down trees, the gun and the jetpack. The second installment of GraBasic included a version that ran at $D000 (language card area), a path editor and the game Neptune's Nasties that showed how to move monsters along a path created by the path editor.Īnd finally, the third installment had a 6502-only version of GraBasic for advanced coders, a font editor (GraBasic displayed bitmap fonts too) and a 6502-only game called Dangerous Dave! The first installment of GraBasic included a version that ran at $8000 in memory, a shape editor (shifted-shapes), and the simple game Wacky Wizard (in AppleSoft BASIC using GraBasic). So basically there would be 9 programs published in 3 months, three programs per month (a version of GraBasic, a utility and a game). Each installment would offer a different version of GraBasic with an accompanying article explaining (1) what's different about the version published, (2) a utility that created data for a feature of GraBasic (such as fonts, paths and shapes) and (3) a game that used GraBasic demonstrating some special feature. Jay Wilbur at UpTime really liked my GraBasic add-on and we decided to publish the entire thing in three installments. So, Dangerous Dave was a game I made to demonstrate how to use my GraBasic graphics language add-on! I still have my RBASIC manual and source code, in fact. GraBasic was the second generation Applesoft add-on library I had created, the first generation being called RBASIC which was never published. Nice!Īt the time, I was writing a series of articles for UpTime Disk Monthly and the articles all explained how to use my 6502 graphics library that I had created named GraBasic. Oh, and the second ad I did, I spelled Dyzzar with only one 'z'. For Birgan, I wanted to make up a name that sounded like a Godzilla movie monster, but Gremmin and Dyzzar were totally just pulled outta my ass. Mothra was named after Godzilla's nemesis, of course. Let's see, I named Byte after one of my favorite games, Snake Byte by Chuck Sommerville. I actually named all the monsters in Alien Attack when I drew my first game ad (see below) I didn't name these guys when I made the game - I just made the shapes and programmed them. Now the way that Dangerous Dave got published was kinda different. The original impetus behind making Dave was that I was a huge fan of Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo and I wanted to make a game like that for myself. At work I was busy porting the Apple II version of Might & Magic II to the Commodore 64. It was just after quitting Origin Systems and co-founding Inside-Out Software in June 1988 that I started working on Dangerous Dave at home in my spare time.
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