Day and Night

Each level has a day and night cycle, which is stored in $4BA with 0x0 for night and 0x1 for day.

Day Cycle

The Sun God has 4 animation frames

During the day cycle, guardians can be shot, and the energy ($4B4) increases until it reaches the maximum – at which point the guardian is sent to Pandaemonium for a short period, before it respawns again. Good portals can produce good spores during the day cycle.

Night Cycle

The Beast has 8 animation frames

Guardians cannot be injured during the night cycle. Evil portals produce evil spores during the night cycle.

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Interview with Paul Norris in Freeze64 Issue 77

There is a new interview with Paul Norris in the current issue of Freeze64. Whilst the issue predominantly features the game Zoids (an earlier Commodore 64 game that he wrote), the interview does include a section devoted to Wicked. You can get the issue from https://freeze64.com/freeze64-issue-77/

Sound effects event system

Previously, I thought a way to uncover what was happening in the code in Wicked was to look at the sound effects and tie the sounds to when they were triggered. I was left looking at where the value of D0 was set, and this led me into discovering the event signalling mechanism in Wicked. […]

Manhattan Distance

The way growth spreads in Wicked has always fascinated me. Ever since I read that the four types of growth have different ‘intelligences’ in the player’s guides, I’ve wanted to figure out exactly how it works. Now, after digging into the game’s code, I’ve tracked down the growth routine, and with some help from Aira […]

Disassembling with AI

It’s been a busy couple of weeks at work, and so I’ve not been able to spend much time with the disassembly. I decided to experiment with ChatGPT to see if that could give me a speed boost. Obviously, the dream would be to outsource all the effort to a tool that could quickly and […]

Using sound effects to identify routines

My next idea for identifying blocks of code comes from the idea that when an event happens in the game, a sound effect is usually played – for example, when shooting, there is a “shooting” sound effect. If I can figure out the addresses of the sound effects, it might be a clue as to […]