The Strategic Map

The overarching goal of the game was for the player to unify Britain, initially under the rule of 15 other kings. For this portion of the game, I designed two fairly conventional subgames. The first was a strategic game showing a huge scrolling map of England. This in itself was no big deal; I had done scrolling maps in two previous games, and there were no important innovations here.

One minor technological problem arose from our memory requirements. Even with a fully loaded Atari 800, the game simply wouldn't fit into RAM. I had expected this and developed a system for swapping different modules in and out of RAM from the floppy disk. Nowadays this kind of thing is routine, but I didn't have modern memory managers; I had to ...

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