Lunar Porter, rung two: it lands, or it does not

The terrain is an array in Data Memory rather than something read back out
of the map, and that is the whole reason this is cheap: the ground under
the lander is one index into 128 bytes, where asking the screen would be a
transfer through the controller every frame.

The column is the world position over eight, masked to the moon's 128. The
surface is that column's row times eight - three turns left of the shift
register, since a row is at most 24 and 192 fits in the low half. The feet
are the lander's top plus its eight pixels.

WHAT DECIDES IS THE SPEED AT THE MOMENT IT ARRIVES. Both of them, and both
have to be gentle: three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of
one sideways. Sideways is the tighter on purpose, because a landing that
was soft downwards and sliding is a lander on its side - which is the
interesting half of the difficulty, and the half the drift bar was blind
about until it existed.

Two fixtures say it works, and they differ only in what was held: one
holds nothing and falls the whole way, the other pulses the thruster six
frames in sixteen and survives. Same terrain, same seed, same keys.

Also: the gamepad did nothing, and the reason is that the four direction
buttons are the D-PAD. A lot of controllers made this century have one
nobody uses - the thumb goes on the stick, which reports as an axis rather
than a button - so a pad that was plugged in and working correctly did
nothing at all. The stick counts as held past halfway now. Untested here,
because there is no controller in this environment and the suite runs
headless; Voyager also says at startup which controllers it can see, so a
pad that still does nothing can be told apart from one nothing noticed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-09-02 22:33:32 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent db0c26e13f
commit 8eb4e4d67e
20 changed files with 207 additions and 18 deletions
+138 -6
View File
@@ -77,6 +77,7 @@ everyFrame:
CALL fall
CALL move
CALL follow
CALL touchdown
CALL showLander
CALL showDrift
SETD.0 Flying
@@ -542,10 +543,15 @@ showLander:
;
; The whole of it is the sprite's target width, which the device stretches one tile into. The
; program does no drawing at all: it works out one number a frame and writes it.
showDrift:
; The magnitude, and which way. A two's complement pair is inverted and stepped, and the
; step's carry is what runs into the high half.
SETD.0 SpeedAcross
; ---- How big a signed pair is, without its sign ----
;
; DP0 names a two byte value, low half first. Leaves the size in DriftLow and DriftHigh and
; the sign in DriftLeftward, which is nought for a positive one.
;
; A two's complement pair is inverted and stepped, and the step's carry is what runs into the
; high half - the same carry that makes addWord work, used one instruction at a time because
; there is nothing to add.
magnitude:
LDA.0
SETD.1 DriftLow
STA.1
@@ -557,7 +563,7 @@ showDrift:
AND
SETD.1 DriftLeftward
STQ.1 ; The top bit of the high half, which is the sign.
BRQ driftSized
BRQ magnitudeDone
SETD.0 DriftLow
LDA.0
@@ -572,8 +578,12 @@ showDrift:
RSTB
ADD ; Plus the carry the step above left, which is the other half.
STQ.0
magnitudeDone:
RET
driftSized:
showDrift:
SETD.0 SpeedAcross
CALL magnitude
; ---- Clamped, because a bar wider than the screen says nothing a full one does not ----
;
; And because a target width is sixteen bits: an unclamped one would be asking the device to
@@ -661,6 +671,110 @@ driftAt:
OUTA 0xE9 ; And no depth.
RET
; ---- Has it arrived, and how hard ----
;
; The terrain is an array in Data Memory and not something read back out of the map, which is
; the whole reason this is cheap: the ground under the lander is one index into 128 bytes,
; where asking the screen would mean a transfer through the controller every frame.
;
; The column is the world position divided by eight, masked to the moon's 128. The surface is
; that column's row times eight, and the lander's feet are its top plus its eight pixels.
touchdown:
SETD.0 AcrossLow
CALL toPixels
SETD.0 PixelHigh
LDA.0
SETD.0 PixelLow
LDB.0
CALL eighth
MVQA
INIB 0x7F
AND ; The moon is 128 columns, so seven bits of it.
MVQA
SETD.1 Terrain
DPUA.1 ; Terrain plus the column, which is the row its surface is on.
LDA.1
; Times eight, into pixels. A is the high half of the shift register and B the low, so the
; row goes in B and three turns LEFT multiply it - and a row is at most 24, so 192 fits in
; the low half and the high one stays empty.
RSTB
CCF
ADD
MVQB ; The row, in the low half.
RSTA
SHL
SHL
SHL
RSTA
CCF
ADD
SETD.1 SurfaceAt
STQ.1
; The feet: where the lander's top is, plus the eight pixels of it.
SETD.0 DownLow
CALL toPixels
SETD.0 PixelHigh
LDA.0
BNA touchdownDone ; Above the screen entirely, so nowhere near the ground.
SETD.0 PixelLow
LDA.0
INIB 0d8
CCF
ADD
MVQA
SETD.1 SurfaceAt
LDB.1
CCF
SUB
BRC touchdownDone ; Borrowed: the feet are still above the surface.
; ---- Arrived. Now, how ----
;
; Both speeds, and both have to be gentle. A landing that was soft downwards and sliding
; sideways is a lander on its side, which is the interesting half of the difficulty: the
; drift bar is the thing that was blind about it until this rung.
SETD.0 SpeedDown
CALL magnitude
SETD.0 DriftHigh
LDA.0
BNA touchdownCrash ; Anything in the high half is far too fast to argue about.
SETD.0 DriftLow
LDA.0
SETD.1 GentleDown
LDB.1
CCF
SUB
BNC touchdownCrash ; No borrow, so it is at or past the limit.
SETD.0 SpeedAcross
CALL magnitude
SETD.0 DriftHigh
LDA.0
BNA touchdownCrash
SETD.0 DriftLow
LDA.0
SETD.1 GentleAcross
LDB.1
CCF
SUB
BNC touchdownCrash
SETD.0 LandedText
BRI touchdownStop
touchdownCrash:
SETD.0 CrashedText
touchdownStop:
SWI osPrintString
INIA 0x0A
OUTA 0x00
RSTA
SETD.1 Flying
STA.1 ; Which ends the loop, and the program tidies up as it always did.
touchdownDone:
RET
; ---- Sums ----
;
; DP0 names the two byte value being changed, low half first, and DP1 the one being added to
@@ -821,6 +935,19 @@ DriftAt:
0x00
DriftSize:
0x00
SurfaceAt:
0x00
; ---- What counts as gentle ----
;
; In sixteenths of a pixel a frame, so twelve is three quarters of a pixel a frame and eight
; is half of one. Sideways is the tighter of the two on purpose: a lander that arrives
; straight down at three quarters of a pixel is a landing, and one sliding at the same speed
; is a lander on its side.
GentleDown:
0d12
GentleAcross:
0d8
HalfScreen:
0xA0 0x00 ; 160 pixels, which is half of a forty column screen.
@@ -844,6 +971,11 @@ Flying:
Terrain:
#Reserve 0d128
LandedText:
"Down safely."
CrashedText:
"Crashed."
LanderArt:
0x00 0x00 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x00 0x00
0x00 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x01 0x00
+1 -1
View File
@@ -726,7 +726,7 @@ from every assembly file in it. Several are old programs written for the bare ma
| Break | Stops itself twice with SWI osBreak, so that the registers can be seen changing between one stop and the next. |
| Grid | The first program to use the screen as a screen. Redefines a tile above the font, fills all 128 map rows, and scrolls it diagonally a pixel at a time. |
| Sprite | Moves a ball across the shell's own text, writing not one byte of the map to do it. It leaves the sprite in the table on the way out, because clearing them is the system's job - see below. |
| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. |
| Lander | Lunar Porter, rung one: a lander over a moon that wraps. Flown with a controller if there is one - a held thruster burns every tick it is held for - and with the arrow keys if there is not, where one press is one burn and that is the most the console can say. A bar at the bottom is the sideways drift, drawn as a sprite stretched to the speed - a moon has no air, so a drift never stops by itself and stopping one means cancelling it exactly, which is hard to do blind. It lands or crashes on arrival, and what decides is the speed at the moment it touches: gentler than three quarters of a pixel a frame downwards and half of one sideways, or it is a lander on its side. |
| Depth | Four pillars at four distances and a ball walking past them, behind the near ones and in front of the far ones. The ball is sprite nought and every pillar is numbered after it, so table order puts it in front of all four - what actually decides is the depth buffer, asked a column at a time. |
| Flip | Draws a whole screen into the bank that is not being shown, waits, and then shows it in one byte out of one port. It writes nothing else at all - not a tile, not a colour - so it does not ask for the screen to be saved, and the line it printed is still there when it comes back. It deliberately does not put the displayed screen back either, because that is the system's to restore: a program that faulted while flipped could not have. |
| Edit | A line editor. |