Player Missile Graphics ... manipulating strings

by John R.T. Brazier

 

Issue 11

Sep/Oct 84

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In issue 9 David Eaton showed how to use Player Missile Graphics with strings in a rather elegant way by making the computer do all the work. The method worked by dumping the Player Missile area into a string but in this article we will explore the alternative method of dumping the strings into the Player Missile area. This method saves memory as you need only dimension one string for each Player used. For a two-line resolution Player therefore only 128 bytes are used in the string.

In order to move strings we must fool around with the Variable Value Table (VVT) and the string/array area (STAR). The accompanying program demonstrates how to do this but we will also have a look at what else you can do with VVT and STAR. First though to the program.

AtariLister - requires Java

The program is called Turtle and once running, there will be a little joystick controlled animated turtle on the screen. It draws a line behind it which can have any of three colours chosen by the Option, Select or Start buttons. Pressing the fire button stops the line being drawn while the turtle moves and Shift-Clear will clear the screen.

The animation is done entirely by string manipulation. A$ is the turtle shell string, superimposed over the Player Missile Graphics area. B$ is the head and legs P/M string. C$ contains eight turtle shells, one for each direction, and two blanks. It is analogous to the character set in the computer except each 'character' is ten lines high (like Antic mode 3). D$ and E$ contain eight head and legs shapes, one for each direction, and are mirror images of each other.

The joystick direction, minus 4, is put into variable S1. This variable, via S2 and S3, selects the correct turtle shell and head and legs shapes to be transferred from the character strings into A$ and B$. With each step, the loop gets the head and legs shape from D$ and E$ alternately which gives a stepping motion. This occurs in lines 100-150 but otherwise all movement is as in David Eaton's article.

To get A$ and B$ up into the Player Missile area we have to look at STAR. This has a pointer telling you where it starts which is called STARP and is at decimal locations 140 (low) and 141 (high). It is important to get the variables into the table in the right order and therefore A$ and B$ must be the first variables typed. If not the method simply will not work. A$ is DIMensioned to 128 and therefore takes up the first 128 bytes of STAR. The first byte is where STARP points. B$ takes up the next 128 bytes and C$.follows with 100 bytes and so forth. Whilst strings take one byte for each character, arrays use six bytes for each number so DIM X(100) would use 600 bytes.

STAR is a passive area allocated by BASIC for the data in strings and arrays and so is controlled by a set of pointers and length definers which reside in the Variable Value Table. There is a pointer telling you where the VVT starts at decimal locations 134 and 135 (VVTP). The Variable Value Table contains three types of information:

a) It holds all simple variables directly. 

b) It holds the pointer and lengths of arrays.

c) It holds the pointer and lengths of strings.

Table 1 shows the VVT for a program that first DIMensioned a string, then an array and then had a normal variable. Each entry takes 8 bytes. Note that, once in, a variable is never deleted except by LISTing to storage and ENTERing. SAVEing or CSAVEing saves the VVT first and therefore it will remain the same even if you have unused and unwanted variables.

After this digression let's get back to the program. We need to manipulate the offsets as shown in Table 1. In Turtle, the first string - A$ - will have an offset from STARP of 0. Look at line 2030. ATAB gets the value of STARP, where STAR begins and also where A$ begins. In line 2000 we set I as the Player Missile base, in pages. In 2040 we find OFFS1, the difference between where the first Player should be (512 from PMBASE) and the start of STAR. This is calculated in bytes. Lines 2050 and 2060 break OFFS1 into low and high values and POKE these values into the offset pointer for A$ at VVTP+2 and VVTP+3. The process is exactly the same for B$ which via OFFS2 is 128 bytes higher up than A$. That's all there is to it! BASIC now thinks that the STAR for these two variables is in the P/M Graphics area.

Before we leave, let's take a look at what else you can do with the Variable Value Table. If you type in Program 2 you can see a demonstration of changing the DIMension of strings. A$ and B$ both grow from a length of 3 to 10. Here both the offset bytes and the DIMension bytes of VVT are being altered. As we are not moving the string contents around in STAR, however, this is a 'destructive' re-dimensioning and the strings will be full of garbage which needs to be cleared. If you wanted to keep the contents of the strings while making them larger you would need to move the string contents in STAR to the right places. I won't go through this program but I hope that I have given you enough information for you to work out what is going on.

AtariLister - requires Java

Table 1. Organisation of an example VVT

Bytes of Table 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
String 129 ID No. Offset from STARP Present Length DIM
ARRAY 65 ID No. Offset from STARP First DIM + 1 Second DIM + 1
Simple Variable 0 ID No. --- Six byte binary-coded decimal number ---

First byte gives type of variable (for a string or array this will be one less if undimensioned). Zero means a simple variable. All numbers are in decimal.

Second byte gives the number of the variable. The first entry is 0, the second is 1 and so on.

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