Thinking about games & core routines

I've spent some time thinking about how the games actually work, and as a consequence of this how the core routines should operate.

I am working on the premise that the games are like other games of the same name, where practical, looking at Atari hardware, 2600 games and similar LED games.

There is some description of games in the Atari Cosmos Patent (4,421,317), (though annoyingly its mostly about the hologram technology( and a bit more in the interview with Roger Hector.

I'm thinking along the following lines.

Basketball, Football and Space Invaders - Atari don't seem to have done LED versions of these, so these will use the Mattel games and Entex game respectively for ideas.

Asteroids - there are very few LED Asteroid games - unsurprisingly as its a vector graphic game, so I think this is more like the Intellivision game Astrosmash (the one LED game I could find was like this) e.g. Asteroids drop vertically and you shoot them.

Dodge'Em - a classic game where you have concentric squares in a maze and you go round dodging the bad guys. Presumably a similar game to the 2600 games.

Outlaw - a game where you shoot at each other - a gunfighter simulation, this too has a 2600 equivalent.

Road Runner - I can only find a 2600 game and a Tiger LCD game, this appears to be a sideways scrolling dodge and collect game.

Sea Battle - probably the best described game of the lot, as it is described in the Patent and by Roger Hector. However, not much actual mechanics information.

Superman - an original game based around collecting dragons.

Originally, I was going to do this as a "memory mapped screen", where there is an area of memory where bits are 1 and 0 for LEDs being on and off. This works fine, but having tried it and though about it it lacks a lot of flexibility.

So plan B is to have a list of LEDs that are turned on. These can be moved about by changing the coordinates which are stored in adjacent lists - so say making a bullet go up involves subtracting one from its vertical position and it 'automatically redraws' rather than bit twiddling memory which 4 bit processors aren't great at.

The "odd one out" is DodgeEm which has a "Pacman" sort of system - a maze where you collect the Dots. I might work round this by doing what Magnavox did with their Odyssey II Pacmans - having enough dots so you have to go round the whole maze, but not so many that it can handle the numbers. Or maybe I'll just do an overlay. To be decided :)