Re: Cinematronics history followup

On Wed, 26 May 99 22:17:51 -0500, James Hague <jhague@dadgum.com> wrote:

>As for Sundance, I can never remember the size of the grid because the
>original design was 4x4. (and horizontal.) In high school my friends and I
>would play 4x4 and 4x4x4 tic-tac-toe to make it interesting. I really
>should
>remember that I would have had to change it given the limitations on line
>count.

And the number of fingers on a hand? ;^)

Just for the record, in order write the emulator I needed an array to store the
vectors in, so I ran each game and kept track of the maximum number of vectors
on the display at one time (a "star" or "point" is counted as a single vector),
in order to allocate an array that would work for all games.

Sundance came in well above the other games at 457 vectors. Sundance consists
of a background of exploding stars, along with "Suns" and "Novas" that are very
vector intensive.

War of the Worlds comes in at 289 and Star Castle 235.

> Side note on this. I have video tape of a 4D version of
>tic-tac-toe I
>programmed on the Poly 88, the machine that got me designing games. The
>fourth dimension came from the fact that you could score a line though
>past
>moves. Very complicated, very buggy.

You should have done something simple, oh like, redesigning strands of DNA into
the shapes of characters in the Peanuts cartoon strip, while retaining their
current functionality, you know, something simple like that! Past moves? Man.

>It's been fun running through this stuff, and I haven't even told anyone
>the
>really good stories. (Okay, James knows one about Tailgunner.) The giant
>list is so much fun because those stories are the ones everybody remembers
>because they've been told over and over again.

Cool, I'm listening!

-Zonn
Received on Thu May 27 01:35:21 1999