You are on a hunting trip on the planet Zirmak, and with the help of an invisible goowak (a Zirmak dog) and a duo-disk blaster you shoot down as many Plukkers as you can. The game is played with a joystick or the keyboard: Q up, A down, O left, P right and SPACE to fire. Pressing EDIT (CAPS SHIFT and 1) resets the game.
Plukkers Hunt was written by Eric Boisvert and published on the November 1986 issue of the Byte Power tape magazine, where it is described as an arcade game with a loading time of 2 minutes 10 seconds. The screen REM reads “PLUKKERS HUNT ©1986 BYTE POWER written by Eric Boisvert”.
Program Analysis
The program is a single 24,725-byte BASIC block saved to auto-run at line 1. Nearly all of it is machine code and graphics data held in the REM of line 0; the visible BASIC is only a loader. Line 2 does CLEAR 51711 and starts the game with LET l=USR 45079, and when the game returns it resets the computer with RANDOMIZE USR 0. The machine code has not been disassembled, so the game is described here from the magazine.
Notable Techniques
- The whole game travels as one BASIC program, with the machine code embedded in a line-0 REM so that no separate CODE block is needed.
- 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. Line 3 does that listing.
Potential Issues
- None found in the BASIC; the machine code was not examined.
Image Gallery
Note: Type-in program listings on this website use ZMAKEBAS notation for graphics characters.