I hope you do keep the bug in place. The game works better with the challenge it gives. You just need to add some lore behind it,
*“Okay, Cadet, first rule is, Always shoot twice when you see an alien: Once to kill him and the second for his avenging ghost.”* *“Aww... don't scare the lad with that old starwife's tale. I'm telling you it's not ghosts. Them aliens got some sorta tech for cloaking or somesuch, wherewith one can hides behind the other. You can see 'em shimmer, if you look at 'em outta the corner o' your eye.”* *“Whatever the case, the important point is this: Never trust a dead alien to stay good and dead.”* —b9 P.S. Was the game designed for Virtual-T? Maybe I compiled it wrong, but Virtual-T seems to run almost twice as fast as my actual Tandy 200. For example, a FOR loop counting to 10,000 takes 32 seconds on my Tandy 200, but only 17 seconds on Virtual T. P.P.S. For extra fun, I've been playing OCTOSIEGE with `z=167` in line 0. On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 7:00 AM David Plass <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks! > > The overlapping aliens is a "known bug". I'm not sure I'll be able to fix > it, and keep the code within the 10 lines/120 chars per line limitation of > the BASIC 10-liner contest (https://www.homeputerium.de) > > > On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 12:37 AM B 9 <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Sweet! Great job on making another “Surprisingly Entertaining!”︎™︎ game! >> That was a clever way to decode the eight way input. Plus, you finally gave >> me a good reason to use the NUM key! I’d never tried it before and >> didn’t even know if it locked down or not. (It does, thank goodness.) >> >> At first I didn’t like that while a bullet was moving, pressing keys >> didn’t seem to do anything, but once I figured out that you can bundle up a >> bunch of shots in the keyboard buffer, I loved it. I don’t think I could >> see playing the game any other way now. I also noticed that sometimes two >> aliens will overlap and you can see them flashing between their different >> types. I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature, but it definitely makes >> the game harder. I think the only thing that would make it better would be >> if the Tandy 200 had a tactile bump on the center of the number pad so I >> don’t keep hitting the wrong numbers and getting eaten by aliens! >> >> —b9 >> >> P.S. Speaking of the NUM key, what do folks here think about NUM+GRPH? >> Has it ever been useful to you? I wonder if that TSR could be customized to >> do something else, like a hexadecimal converter. >> >> On Thu, Feb 5, 2026 at 6:45 PM David Plass <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> Announcing yet another 10-line BASIC game: OCTOSIEGE! It's a fast-based >>> video game for the T200 inspired by Space Invaders, Robotron 2048 and >>> Tempest. >>> >>> https://github.com/dplassgit/games/tree/trunk/t100/octo >>> >>> "Defend the center from the invading aliens! You can fire from the >>> center in all 8 directions using the numeric keypad. An alien can take up >>> to 3 hits before it dies - but watch out - if any of them reach you in the >>> middle they'll decrease your shields! >>> >>> You only get TWO smartbombs, which kills all aliens instantly. Use them >>> wisely!" >>> >>> For Tandy 200 only. >>> >>> As always, bugs/comments/feedback welcome. >>> >>
