Petscii Side-Scrolling Platformer by Jimbo | Hacker News Reader

Petscii Side-Scrolling Platformer by Jimbo

jimbo.itch.io

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Play it here in online emulation (PET 2001):

https://www.masswerk.at/pet/?prg=pssp&ram=32k&keyboard=games...

For some more PET games by Jim Orlando, ready to run in the emulator, see:

https://www.masswerk.at/pet/prgs/#jim_orlando

(BTW, if you are there, also check the star icon next to the help button on the top, for some amazing PETSCII demos.)

Edit: Maybe worth noting, the PET isn't only limited to it's built-in block character set, it originally came without sound, as well. However, it was soon figured out that there is a shift register connected to the user port and, if you connect a speaker to that pin, you can produce pulse audio at 1 MHz by this. (In "free running" mode, this shift register will rotate and its current LSB is exposed on that pin, each clock cycle. What's audible are the high/low state changes of that bit.) Commodore gladly adopted this scheme and added an internal piezo speaker in subsequent models. Still, every bit of sound coming out of the PET is a clever hack.

This is really cool. It's impressive how mario-like it can look and feel like using just petscii.

There's also 8 Bit Guy's Attack of the Petscii robots: https://www.the8bitguy.com/product/petscii-robots/

is Petscii/Pet seeing a little resurgence?

Digiloi is another cool Petscii platformer from a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UNMSeS5l4k#t=30s

That one might be the most impressive one yet.

Worth noting that while Digiloi is quite impressive (and definitely PETSCII!), it doesn't run on a PET so far as I can tell?

There may be some design issues with this. First, the graphics depend on color and don't lend themselves really well to a monochrome display. We may try to emulate another intermediate shade by flicker in order to overcome this, which should be possible on a 60Hz display. But, even we should solve this, the max RAM configuration for the PET is 32K (30K of this actually available to a program) and the game looks to be bigger than this. (Mind that the C64 has double the total memory. The file size of that program is actually 37.68 K. So we may have to strip some features or levels.)

Reminded me of one of my favourite text-art/PETSCII adjacent creators I follow - Mrmo - who creates satisfying retro stuff like this custom font/tileset: https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmotext

Not to be confused with "Attack of the Petscii Robots": https://www.the8bitguy.com/product/petscii-robots/

That's a top-down action/puzzle game, not a side-scrolling platformer.

Jim Orlando talking about five other PET games that he recently wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYJ-wKoGYgU

My first computer was the PET in 1978. Tape drive and all. I let my cousin use it when I went away, and he sold it. I'd love to get one for nostalgic reasons. I loved the ASCII character set on the keyboard. I programmed a horse racing game for my parents with betting and using the random function to increment the 6 horses on the screen. Just characters, not graphics like this one.

Incredible, all things considered. In color on the C64 would be interesting as well.

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