Freeway (C64)

Why did the chicken cross the road? 

To score more points than the other one. This is a port of the Atari 2600 game, done in a day or so while I get geared up for a second pass at Galaga. I think it'll be a nice game to play with my daughter on her TheC64.

It's a testament to the skill of the original programmer David Crane, as what took a day on the C64 with its character graphics, hardware sprites and raster interrupts would doubtless have taken several months on the 2600. I've read and watched a lot about how to program the TIA and I still wouldn't really know where to start!

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The Game

You have 136 seconds to get your chicken across the road as many times as possible. When there are less than 8 seconds left the scores will flash.

There are various levels to play with different amounts and speeds of traffic, and two difficulty settings. On 'easy', being hit by a vehicle will only knock back your chicken a lane and a half. On 'hard', every hit returns your chicken to the start! The difficulty can be set for each player to give an advantage to a child or lesser-skilled player.

I've added a rudimentary AI as this was purely a 2-player game on the 2600. 

There is also a 9th level that isn't in the original game, featuring a maximum number of vehicles and wildly variable speeds.

I admit the sounds aren't great, I used this program to generate random sounds and then tweaked them. https://csdb.dk/release/?id=121491

If anyone can get closer to the frankly excellent horn and engine sounds from the 2600 version please get in touch!

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Pre-game Controls 

(Port 2 = left player, Port 1 = right player)

• Up/Down - select level number 1-9
• Left - switch between easy (red) and hard (blue)
• Right - switch between human or CPU second player (black = CPU)
• Fire - start game

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In-game Controls

• Up/Down - move chicken