Pangram verdict · v3.3
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01 · The city in lines Let's fly: the city of Targ, one building at a time To keep rendering under control, the game keeps only one building in memory at a time. The square you're in dictates which building is live. Click the view, then ← → turn, ↓ ↑ nose up and down, W S forward and back, R F climb and descend, Q E roll. Go to Fly Speed 160 × 136 multicolour pixels, drawn by the page with the game's view code, ported routine by routine. Exhaustively verified as byte accurate. The square's building is loaded only when the high byte of your X or Y changes ($94FE-$952F), and drawn only while you are low enough (height is under 65536). So buildings 'pop in' only when you enter their square. From higher up, you see the roads: they are drawn from height 2048 up, as lines between the centres of the squares they join. At height $200000 a fixed picture of 13 roads replaces them ($902A). 02 · Bug Bug: stand on one patch of grass at the start and E takes you into the Colony Craft You crash-land at 08-08, and the Colony Craft hangs straight above you at altitude 64,997. There is no lift on the ground here.
But one invisible patch of grass – 1,024 units a side and about 14 seconds' walk from where you land – answers the E key as if it were the lift on the Colony Craft's deck.
The ride 'down' goes into the Colony Craft's hangar; and pressing E again brings you up on its deck! Click anywhere to stand there and press E. Square 08-08 from above: runway marks, the spinning pyramid, the Dominion Dart.
One grid step is 256 units, 1/256 of the whole square. The Colony Craft sits over 08-08, so its deck and the grass underneath share one X and one Y. Only the height tells them apart.
Its lift is entry 8 in the table of lift squares at $B4B6/$B4BE, and the E key's test checks the square and the middle bytes of X and Y. It never reads the height. So the patch under the deck's lift works exactly like the lift. TestOn the deckOn the ground The E key's test, one instruction group at a time, with the values it reads on the Colony Craft's deck and on the grass under it. The ride 'down' ends in room 8, the Colony Craft's hangar. Taking the elevator up again from room 8 works as expected: it starts in the room, and once it reaches the surface side, $A312 adds $40FF00 to your height, so it ends on the deck. The underground has no height of its own: a room is a separate box, and no room lies below any point of the city. E on the grass: down into room 8, the Colony Craft's hangar. E again: up on the deck, ALT 64997. Walk off the pad: you tumble all the way down. It doesn't break the game as much as you'd expect! Hangar 8's three doors are all locked, with object 23 – so at game start, the hangar and deck are as far as you get. Pretty much your only option is to leave by the 'express elevator' – that is, walk off the roof of the Colony Craft. Try it yourself Let the opening play to the end. Touch nothing until you stand at LOC 08-08 and Benson has finished "CRASH LANDED ON TARG". You face south. Turn right three-eighths of a turn, to face north-west. The COMP dial turns red as you pass west; north-west is the middle of the red quarter. Walk forward for about 14 seconds, about 100 steps, and stop. Press E. If nothing happens you are off the patch, which is about 2.5 seconds of walking across. On the patch, facing north-west. Nothing on the screen marks it. The foolproof way is to manually place yourself there. Open the VICE monitor and enter > 73 72 then > 79 72 to set your X, Y coordinates, then x to resume – placing you exactly in the middle of the patch at 08-08. Then press E. 03 · Outside the city Exotic destinations: all the places outside the city The city of Targ is 16 squares a side, in a world of 256. The game puts four things out in the wasteland: two lifts down to hangars, a pyramid and a mast. The whole world from above, north up, to scale: 256 squares a side, each 65,536 units.
Squares are numbered as the LOC readout numbers them, from −128 to 127, X growing east and Y south. Inside the dashed line LOC shows the square, negatives in reversed figures; beyond it LOC prints ** and no roads are drawn ($B64C). Click a place to find it in the table. PlaceLOCX, YFrom where you landWhat is there Walking times are at the walk's measured pace, about 100 steps of 80 units in 14 seconds, in a straight line from where you land at 08-08. No building is ever drawn outside the city: the game loads a model only for squares 0 to 15 on both axes ($952B). So the two lifts out here are objects instead, 61 and 62, each a cage of four stacked squares 1,024 units across, standing on the patch where the E key works, the middle bytes $70 to $73 of X and Y ($B40C). Below them are two hangar complexes of their own. Hangar 6 has three rooms. Hangar 7 has seven, and object 3, the jet, starts there. The three models from their bytes ($2800/$2840), seen from the side, each to its own scale: a model's coordinates are signed bytes in steps of 16 units. All three objects are fixed (bit 4 of $29C0), so T takes one only while the Kitchen Sink is carried ($980B). The pyramid is object 56. When carried, the D key can drop an object in mid-air, where the object stays at your height ($98FE). The mast is object 50. It has no name to print, and nothing in the code refers to it by address. What it is for is unknown. 04 · The other craft Secret: the brother-in-law's new ship laps the city at ALT 500, for ever One craft flies on its own from the moment the game starts. It belongs to the Palyar commander's brother-in-law, it has the Dart's shape, and it flies south down the west edge of the city, 32,769 units up, wrapping from the south edge back to the north. Two more craft come only when something calls them: the attack ship and the ship you hire. Time since you landed 0.0 min Spent The ship's step ($85C5): one surface pass adds 256 to its Y, 1/256 of a square southward, and the square number is ANDed with 15, so after row 15 comes row 0. A lap is 4,096 passes. How long that takes depends on how long each pass takes to draw, which depends on where you are: the frames a pass are the game's own, measured in the simulator over a whole lap from each place. Underground the step does not run, and the ship waits. The ship is object 0, with the Dart's model ($3B25). Its X is always $006F41, 4,287 units west of column 00's centre line, and its height is always 32,769 units, which the panel would show as ALT 00500. Only the Y moves. When you land it is over 00-09. You can see it from anywhere in the city. The object routine ($9728) draws a whole model only within 65,536 units on every axis; farther away it plots one pixel, and it does that at any distance for an object above you ($9787). On foot, turned to face column 00, look for a pixel above the horizon. On the Play tab, just after the landing, turn left a little less than a quarter of a turn: it is in the middle of the view, just above the horizon. The map above shows where it has got to since. Nobody can fly it. B boards a craft only when you are on foot within 512 units of it ($985D), and nowhere 32,769 units up can you stand. Yet it has a motion record of its own, record 0, and it is the fastest in the game: a top speed of 11,475, which the SPEED readout would print as **75. The fastest craft you can fly, the CHEESE and the Dart with the Poweramp, reach 9,900.
Shooting it starts script 27 ($8797): YOU HAVE JUST DESTROYED, THE PALYAR COMMANDER'S BROTHER-IN-LAWS NEW SHIP, then PALYAR SHIP ATTACKING.