SHACK ATTACK ON THE 64: FORTY SHOPPERS AND ONE JOYSTICK
Two days ago we put Shack Attack on the PC and said the Commodore 64 version was next. It's on the workbench now, and it's a long way along: all ten days can be played on a real 64, from Black Friday to Christmas Eve.
The same job, with a joystick
It's Black Friday, 1985. You work at the Shack, the electronics store at the edge of the mall parking lot, and the whole town is outside. The manager has left you a velvet rope and a rule: five shoppers get past you, and you're fired.
The shoppers come down five lanes, and you set the stock out on the lot to send them home. Battery Racks make the batteries you spend. A Boombox turned all the way up clears its own lane. Nobody gets hurt. They just decide the mall sounds better.
The PC version needs a mouse. The 64 version needs one joystick in port 2, and nothing else. A yellow frame moves a square at a time. Push up from the top lane and it's on the shelf: fire takes a card, fire again sets the gear down. Move onto a battery to pick it up. That's the whole game in one hand.
Forty shoppers on eight sprites
A Commodore 64 has eight sprites. Black Friday has rather more shoppers than that.
The answer is in the shape of the street. Each lane is 32 lines tall and a sprite is 21, so there's a gap above every lane. In that gap the game hands all eight sprites to the lane below. Five lanes, eight shoppers each: forty on the lot at once, and none of them flicker.
When a ninth turns up for a lane, and the doll-craze mob sees to that, they wait in the parking lot just off the screen and walk on as room comes.
Everything that isn't a shopper is drawn in characters: the gear, the shots, the rope, the cursor's frame, the snow and the rain. The fog is characters too, and the shoppers walk behind them, so on a foggy day you really can't see who's coming until they're five squares out.
The same day on every 64
Our own 64s are NTSC, where the screen is drawn sixty times a second. A PAL machine draws it fifty times. A game that counts frames runs at the wrong speed on one of them.
Six NTSC frames and five PAL frames are both exactly a tenth of a second. So Shack Attack's rules tick ten times a second on either machine, from the same tables, and a day plays the same wherever your 64 was sold.
The numbers in those tables are the PC game's own: what gear costs, how long a card takes to come back, how many hits a shopping cart soaks up.
The front of the house
Press fire on the title page and you're at the time clock. Clock in on any day you've reached, read the story, or look through the catalogue.
Before each day there's a card: the date and the hour, what the weather is going to do to you, who's new on the street, what the manager has put on your shelf, and a memo from the man himself.
The catalogue has a page for all twelve pieces of gear and every kind of shopper, with the numbers. Anything you haven't met yet is a question mark.
Win a day and the game saves to the disk: the days you've won, and the fewest shoppers you've let in on each. Get through Christmas Eve, sign your name with the stick, and it goes on the Employee of the Month plaque. That's on the disk as well.
Ten days, twelve pieces of gear
Everything in the PC game is here. The night shifts, when your gear can't reach as far. Snow, rain, ice and fog. The mom with the stroller, the coupon lady, the mall walkers, the dad with the camcorder, the returns guy walking in backwards.
From the seventh day the stock room holds more than the shelf does, so you pick your eight before the doors open.
And on Christmas Eve, five minutes before closing, there's one last customer in a red suit.
Where it is
It runs on any Commodore 64, PAL or NTSC, with no expansion, from one disk image. Nothing loads while you play.
What it doesn't have yet is a sound. That's next: the effects first, then the music. On the PC the carols are other people's SID arrangements, and very good ones. For the 64 we're arranging the same carols again ourselves, more simply, so the tunes leave a voice free for the sound effects.
After that it gets played from Black Friday to Christmas Eve on a real 64, and we fix what turns up. Then it's ready, and the Shack Attack page will say how to get it.
Until then, the PC version is free.