Monster Muncher (VIC 20) - Matthew Smith's long lost game has been recovered after 41 years!

Matthew Smith's long lost #VIC20 game Monster Muncher has finally been saved! (missing 41 years) After losing out on a recent auction, it was miraculously spotted in the Retro Computer Museum and has now been preserved by Games That Weren't.
Read more:
www.gamesthatw...

[@SidneyJamesXBL]

Amazing, I love finds like this!

[@IsaacKuo]

Ooh, I just noticed a slick little optimization ... the warp tunnel doesn't line up horizontally. Instead, it goes down one line. This means that you don't need any special code to handle going across the warp tunnel. Instead of storing and dealing with both X and Y coordinates, you just have a single XY coordinate pointing to the location on the screen. Warping left/right while going up/down a line just happens naturally without any extra code.

[@retrotap]

Another great find 🤩

[@thefurthestmanfromhome1148]

Fantastic

[@TwinOpinion]

Great find!

[@AndyHewco]

The game has got some speed to it for basic.

[@IsaacKuo]

WOW. Okay, this is a really cool Pac-Man game for being in BASIC, but it is also in BAD BASIC. The counterintuitive thing about Commodore BASIC is that operations with integer variables are actually slower and less efficient than operations with floats. All math is done by first converting all numbers to floats, and if assigning to an integer variable, converting back to integer for storage. As such, the only reason you'd ever use integer variables is if you had a big array and you needed the bytes more than you needed the speed. (If it's not an array, you'd never save bytes since each "%" in the code costs a byte.) Now, this is never explained in the VIC-20 manual, so you'd only know about it if you read about it in a magazine, or someone told you, or you wrote your own test benchmarks to figure out what was and wasn't faster. But why would you even think to test whether or not integers were faster or slower than floats? It's obvious ... integers should be faster, right? Back in the day, I got used to using integer variables only because the Blitz BASIC compiler (for the C64) actually was more efficient when using integer variables. Blitz was compatible with normal BASIC, so you could code and debug your program in normal mode, and only use Blitz to create a faster version of your BASIC program. In that case, the fact that using integer variables was slower in normal mode wasn't a problem. You were just testing/debugging to make sure the program worked correctly.