Re: Wall Defence game for Apple II

[winston19842005 <bjjlyates@NOSPAMbellsouth.net>]

On 4/25/10 12:32 PM, in article
dfb72c7d-4b57-4df7-ac72-d477adc1ad09@b6g2000yqi.googlegroups.com, "drHirudo"
<drhirudo@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 24 пїЅпїЅпїЅ, 08:58, eriknoc <erik...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I like the idea of porting games to the Apple II series. пїЅNice work,
>> except it's very difficult to aim & control because he keeps moving,
>> and fast, and having to press another direction or key to make him
>> stop takes some of the fun away from playing the game IMHO.
> 
> I know about this issue, but as mentioned on other posts, on the Apple
> II you can read single keypress, but you can not check if the key is
> released or not. I think this is an issue in the keyboard controller
> of the Apple II.You can not read more keypresses from the same key, or
> not until the repeat process starts, where you receive keypresses even
> if you clear the strobe. But this introduces keyboard response lag,
> which in fast games like Wall Defence it is unacceptable. That's why
> there is the joystick control implemented, where you can read the
> joystick position anytime, and even different position for the
> directions - half and full right for example. I believe this keyboard
> problems were the reason some Apple II games where joystick only.
> These games were the reason I had Joystick with my Apple 2 clone. On
> the other hand I saw some Joystick only games hacked to work with
> keyboard, but this was rare.

Ah, I'm starting to catch on a little here.

The TI has a lag time between pressing a key and auto-repeat. But this
doesn't present itself in the key read routine, it is part of the Basic
routines to read input.

And some of the early emulator writers emulated this in both modes, so
game-play was really messed up on those.