for those of you who don't know (for shame ) Blaster Master is an NES game in which Jason, an average young teen, loses Fred, his pet frog, in a freak accident involving some radioactive waste in his backyard and has to travel deep underground in order to find him. in doing so, he discovers SOPHIA The 3rd, an alien battle tank, Eve, an alien woman, and a swarm of more different alien mutants whom she was attempting to defeat. this swarm, lead by the Plutonium Boss, is boring holes in the earths crust which will eventually cause it to collapse in upon itself. faced with the destruction of earth, the plight of a beautiful young woman, and (most importantly) the loss of his beloved pet, Jason takes the only course of action available to a healthy teen boy, the single-handed obliteration of the mutants.

gameplay

here is a slightly older version of the basic physics engine, running at 6mhz(i have some variable length list for enemies/extended physics stuff done as well but want to make sure this is as fast as possible before continuing. the speed is decent, but i'm still a bit concerned that multiple enemies/projectiles will slow things down too much even at 15mhz.)

right now there is nothing preventing one from running off the side of the map and falling through the RAM  . mad props to magic banana for those tank sprites he made forever ago and i only just now decided to actually put to use. the wheel rotation animations are a bit off at the moment, but that is not an issue with the engine itself. rather, i made some slight mistakes while drawing out all the sprites, inverting them and erasing the bits i did not need for masking, re-arranging them bitwise in a single 8*1280 bitmap, cutting that into 20 8*64 piece chunks for running through sourcecoder, pasting all the hex into a text file, converting that to an .8xp, sending it to my calculator, and recalling the program into another program and now i'm going to have to do it all over again
oh, and there is both vertical and horizontal acceleration. to prove it, try standing on the leftmost edge of the bottom and jumping and then moving over towards the floating tile. the tank will fall short. if you build up some momentum, however, you can make it.
like i said before, i'm a bit concerned about speed and there is one part of the code in particular which i know could be optimised, but which i have not yet figured out. this is a for(loop in the tile-scrolling portions which could be made into a faster while loop. also, this engine is hard-coded for 20 tile wide maps, but the end product will work with variable widths. here is a package containing this program compiled and it's source as well as a few sprites.

Looks promising, nice!

@squidget: i know how the while loops work. the trouble is that it decrements a var every time it loops, rather than incrementing, meaning i would need to reverse the order of a tightly packed piece of code

thanks for showing enthusiasm, peoples! i have a lot of other things to be doing, what with this being senior year and all, but i'll definitely be putting more time into this.

What you had looks good...I remember playing the original on the NES, cant wait to see what you do.

I never played this game back in the day... but I do remember it.

Your version looks outstanding.

I love your comment about falling through RAM.

My only single piece of criticism is that I think when you are in the air, the wheels should move down instead of the hull moving up.  Other than that however, this is looking undeniably epic!  *Especially* the sprites

Also, an idea.  Since the calc screen is somewhat limited, would it be possible to have the camera not focus on the player itself, but the area in front of the player?

Ah yeah that would be tricky, well its definitely looking awesome so far