bonus game

OVERFLOW

Only your plumber's helper can save you!

By ERIC and ROBERT ANSCHUETZ and JOHN WEISGERBER

Discover the thrills and excitement of being a Sanitary Engineer (plumber) as you enter a maze of killer pipes. This BASIC program works on all Atari computers of any memory size, with disk or cassette. Just type in Listing 1, check it with TYPO II and SAVE a copy before you RUN.

Dear Miss Goodmanners:

   Is there a correct way to stem a rising tide of bathroom back-ups while entertaining distinguished guests in my 49-room mansion?

Concerned

Dear Concerned:

   Miss Goodmanners prefers the term water closet... Sadly, overflow problems are part of our modern age and must be dealt with firmly and quickly. Miss Goodmanners would never commit the faux pas of embarassing guests during a sumptuous banquet by confronting them with a mass of raw sewage.
   Miss Goodmanners would award you credit for decisively hurling your plumber's helper at each of the overflowing water closets, while tactfully running between pipelines without scaring the guests. Of course, sewage problems tend to get worse as a party wears on-especially if guests discover that the duck pate has disagreed with them.

   With apologies to our favorite etiquette columnist, this program uses players for the plumber, plunger and central pipe. All vertical motion is produced using a string printed at the correct place in memory. The main graphics mode is ANTIC 5.
   An unusual technique here is the use of basically the same memory address for every line of the playfield graphics. Each line has its own LMS and the high byte on every one is set to the same page. The water is moved back and forth by incrementing the low byte on each LMS. The increment for each line is held in a one-dimensional array If a column of sewage is hit by the plunger, the increment's sign is simply reversed.

Members of the noted Antic game programming team of Anschuetz, Anschuetz, and Weisgerber tell us that they are currently attending Eastern Michigan University and would like jobs as programmers when they graduate.

Listing 1  OVERFLOW.BAS Download