Seachess (Oric Atmos)

Seachess is one of the earliest games written by me for any platform I had touch with, back in the 1990ies. The concept and first working versions date back to 1995, when I used SAS C compiler from floppies. Being written in C made the game very portable. As being one of the first games written by me I decided to port Seachess to the first computer I ever owned. The first computer I used to own was the Bulgarian Oric Atmos clone - Pravetz-8D. The Seachess for Oric was kept to the Amiga original as close as possible, with taking into account the Oric video peculiarities and the 8 bit relatively weak CPU. Some modifications of the original graphics had to be made and some optimizations for speed in the source code, but the main game engine is intact.

For the pointer I had to develop my own software sprite engine, because the Oric have no hardware sprites. Another obstacle on the Oric are the attribute bytes which can not be overwritten by graphics data, but they are also considered by the sprite code, which means that the pointer does not simply disappear when passing over such special graphic bytes in the HIRES screen, which is used for the game board. On the Oric, usage of attribute bytes are required to make the computer display several different colors on single scanline. For compilation of the source code was used the freeware CC65 compiler and where speed was in need to be gained, directly inline 6502 assembly rows are added into the game program. The final tape image is packed with the exomizer utility, which made the file 2.5 times smaller, meaning that it loads 2.5 times faster, at the expense of one second decompression after the load of the game. The game is also available for Amiga.

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