Lunar Lander Feedback

[MICHAEL GARDI]

The latest source code for my Lunar Lander for the PDP-1 game has been posted to Hackaday. To get it running all you need to do is assemble lunar_lander.txt with macro1_1 and load the resulting rim file. Here are the instructions for playing the game. 

1. Boot up the game.
2. From the Attract Mode NEW GAME screen press a button on the game controller. Gameplay starts.
3. Attempt to make as many Good Landings on high value target sites as fuel allows to increase your score.
4. When you run out of fuel you will probably crash one last time (for 5 points ;-) unless you were lucky to be very close to a soft landing.
5. From the GAME OVER screen observe your score then press a button to go back to 2.

Out of the box the game is setup to use the controllers but you can switch to front panel switches by changing the START 4 at the end of the code to START 5.

Anyway I'm hoping that I can convince a few of you all to give it a try. Obviously this is the only group that I can approach to get some feedback from.  I can get the ball rolling by saying that I think the gameplay is a little slow. It takes too much time for the LEM to get close to the surface.  

Mike

[Bill E]

I've downloaded the latest. Looking thru the code, I see you are using dpy, iohs the way they should be.. do some computing while the display is wasting 35usec to draw a dot.  Nice.

I still haven't gotten around to building my controllers, so that kind of limits my playing experience. :) I'll get to it eventually.

Anyway, congrats on some impressive work,

Bill

[MICHAEL GARDI]

I should have mentioned that a good or soft landing is defined as one where the LEM:

1. Is upright.
2. Lands inside a target zone.
3. Has a vertical velocity is less than 100.     
4. Has a horizontal velocity is less than 50. 

Mike

[sunnyboy010101]

I just downloaded your game. As this was my first time playing with PDP1 assembler on the PiDP-1, I had a short learning curve before I could play the game. I followed Oscar's documentation on assembly and used the cross-compile tools (macro1_1 on the raspberry pi under /opt/pidp1/bin) and it all worked. The only step that caused me a short issue was that I thought I had to convert your text file into something (encode) before assembling, but that led to lots of errors. I then tried just assembling the text file as downloaded from your provided location, and that worked perfectly. The rim loaded and ran first time.

The game itself is excellent! Again, worked first time with my controllers and was totally playable. I managed to crash every time so far, but it all really, really well done. Awesome work!

(I'm also amazed at how long the actual program is. It's really quite complex code. Again, awesome work!)

-R

[MICHAEL GARDI]

Thank you Bill, and thank you -R for your perseverance in getting the game running on your system. I hope you keep trying to nail the landing, it's tricky at first. I suggest getting the horizontal position directly above a landing zone with minimal horizontal velocity (say 4 or less) then concentrate on keeping the vertical velocity under 100 as you approach the ground. I appreciate both of you for your kind words. 

Some of the code, like to emit letters and numbers for instance, is "generated" so it tends to pad out the length a bit. If you are interested in more of the details I have posted a project blog up on Hackaday.

If you have any suggestions or thoughts on gameplay please feel free to share.

Mike