_____            .__                             _____                    __   .__     
  /  _  \    _____  |__|  ____ _____               /     \    ____    ____ _/  |_ |  |__  
 /  /_\  \  /     \ |  | / ___\\__  \    ______   /  \ /  \  /  _ \  /    \\   __\|  |  \ 
/    |    \|  Y Y  \|  |/ /_/  >/ __ \_ /_____/  /    Y    \(  <_> )|   |  \|  |  |   Y  \
\____|__  /|__|_|  /|__|\___  /(____  /          \____|__  / \____/ |___|  /|__|  |___|  /
        \/       \/    /_____/      \/                   \/              \/            \/
June 24th, 2017


[Gauntlet 3]


After playing Gauntlet 2 for a while, I thought I would give the sequel a try, Gauntlet 3, This picture above has text contained within the scroll, it is an older way developers used to try to avoid piracy. It would ask you questions that could only be found in the manual. You don't see it in the above capture, probably because the text is located somewhere else in memory.

[Gauntlet 3]


Here we are at the Character select screen, so far everything is going along okay, I'm able to grab a screenshot, woohoo! The text looks off on the top, but when the game is running, the colors scroll through the top text, hence, in still frame you see a few different colors.

[Gauntlet 3]


And, well, there we go! I can see the character bar, which is at the bottom, but everything is out of whack. Where did the rest of the screen go off to?

[Gauntlet 3]
It took a little bit, but I found it, sort of. I can even see my character (I think) but that is the location I was at. This portion was no where near the character bar, so I'm assuming the game puts together the image in real time, whereas the games that I can get a perfect screen shot are using page buffering. Mind you, this is speculation, do not take my word on it :)

I fiddled a bit more, looking through memory and found a bunch of sprites, and I remembered a long long long time ago, when I was developing a game in Qbasic, the tutorial I was following loaded the sprites into memory first, in fact you could see all of the sprites, and pictures being drawn in the upper right of the screen before the game ran. It did use page flipping, at least as far as I recall it did. But, perhaps there is another way of creating a game? I dunno, I'm not a developer, just a hobbyist.



[Gauntlet 3]


Well, I couldn't get the picture I wanted, but here is one I grabbed from Emu Paradise, it is the same location I was in, and if you look at the previous picture you can make it out. The game itself is fun, but outside of the first level, I have not gotten far. I'm more of a Gauntlet 2 person myself, this has the same feel, but of course is enhanced. Once I started to run into trouble with getting a screen shot, I became a little distracted from the game, and looking around in the memory for images.



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