Pick up as many crystals as you can while avoiding energy-sucking plants and the Electric Bubloid. Energy rings give 100 units of energy and each crystal is worth 100 points. In the air you must use your rocket, or you fall. The game is played with a joystick or the keyboard: Q up, A down, O left, P right, and SPACE or the fire button for the rocket.
Bubloid was written by Kristian Boisvert and published on the November 1986 issue of the Byte Power tape magazine, where it is listed as an arcade game with a loading time of 1 minute 30 seconds.
Program Analysis
The program is a single 16,541-byte BASIC block that auto-runs at line 1. Line 2 enters the machine code with RANDOMIZE USR 32506 and resets the computer with PRINT USR 0 when the game exits. The game code and graphics are in the REM of line 0 and were not disassembled; the description comes from the magazine.
Notable Techniques
- The whole game is embedded in a line-0 REM.
- Like the other Byte Power programs, it checks the system variable at 23681 on start-up: the magazine told readers to
POKE 23681,0before loading so that the program would stop and list line 9999, which saves a personal backup copy.
Image Gallery
Note: Type-in program listings on this website use ZMAKEBAS notation for graphics characters.