Big Time Bugger

This game was created for The C64 'Cassette 50' Charity Competition and will not be released until the competition is over. You can still play it in a browser.

This competition is about creating a brand new compilation tape - with any proceeds to be donated to Special Effect Charity - featuring games by C64 developers of all levels of experience, focusing on great gameplay in a mini-game format while still retaining the look or feel of a Cassette 50 game, an infamous collection of games published by Cascade in 1983 and an early example of 'shovelware'.

The game supports PAL/NTSC/DREAN machines.

How to play

It's TIME to say a BIG no to all the bugs bugging around in the RAM and ROM memory of your very own computer, the Commodore 64. You have to find all 9 bugs hidden in $FFFF possible locations. Excuse me... If you don't know what $FFFF stands for, it's also a BIG chance to learn more about the computers, and hexadecimal values especially! It will definitely help you in your quest. So, as I said, you have to find all the 9 bugs which are hiding in 65535 possible locations!  Good these bugs don't have legs to run around!

What you need is paper and a pencil to keep track of bug and ladder locations (ladders take you from one area to another), and some patience to explore your computer's awesome mind palace.

As the main requirement of The C64 'Cassette 50' Charity Competition was that a game cannot write any code above $1000 (with some small exceptions for the $D000 area), this was my main inspiration to create a game that doesn't write but still reads data from the whole available memory area. This way you can actually see a graphical representation of BASIC, KERNAL, and $DD00 registers area. Enjoy the exploration!

Controls

Use joystick in port 2. Use the fire button to start a new game.

Screen

All values are represented as hexadecimal. This is how computers think!

The main part of the screen represents part of the memory visible, and it's all live data read from your computer.

Left sidebar:

• The current name of the area
• Absolute location in hex
• Location divided by X and Y coordinates

Right sidebar:

• Energy
• Bugs to find

Don't read this:

If computers could talk (yes, they do!), they would talk in hexadecimal! So much more efficient than bits! If you're used to decimals, it's time to break your habits and get familiar with these special values like $2a...

Let's be brief as there is no time for theory. So "$" indicates it's actually a hex value, not a decimal one. Right! What about "2" and "a" then? So, as hexadecimal values are going up to 15 (but including zero there are 16 of them), after "9" the next value is "a", followed by "b" and so on up to "f"!

Now, let's have a look at the "2". It's on the second position to the left, so is multiplied by 16 (here we go with the hex!). 2 multiplied by 16 gives 32. Then, adding the value on the first position, it's 32 + 10 = 42!

If only humans could talk in hex!

From author

This is my fourth game for this competition even though I promised I won't write another one. I was experimenting with this idea before creating other games (Red Is Blue and Asterocrash) and just in 3 more days, I managed to finish it right on time. As I'm writing this, there are only 6 hours left to the deadline of this competition. It was great fun to explore the memory areas in the game and find all the places where bugs were hidden. 

The main character has been taken from one of the original Cassette 50 compilation games. I wanted to re-use a ladder as well as some buggy creature, but there was no free space left to switch and use a custom character set.

Have good fun also with other games from The C64 'Cassette 50' Charity Competition.

Thanks to https://lvllvl.com/c64/ for great JS emulator embedding!

Check out www.commocore.com for more games and open source projects!