![]() ![]() ![]() Today, 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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