On Oct 10 22:57 93, Paul Edwards of 3:711/934{at}fidonet wrote:

 PE> It has always been a great mystery to me how people can 
 PE> possibly write arcade games, e.g. Space Invaders.  I would 
 PE> have thought that when the bullets blasted the shield, you 
 PE> virtually needed artificial intelligence to draw the 
 PE> result.  Also, knowing that a bullet has hit a target, when 
 PE> there's so many bullets and so many targets.  I would have 
 PE> thought we would have had a situation a bit like the 
 PE> travelling salesman problem.  And travelling over the 
 PE> background, needing to redraw that again?  I would have 
 PE> thought that it would take so long to do all this, that the 
 PE> arcade games would have become batch jobs.  Instead of 
 PE> this, people manage to write them in about 10k of object 
 PE> code (on the Commodore 64 anyway), and they are as good as 
 PE> the arcade parlour.  What is the secret?  Thanks + bye.

In the case of the C-64, the secret was sprites :-).  These were supported
to some extent in hardware :-).

Regards, Andrew.

--- Msgedsq 2.2e