Games Pitfall! - how to make a big map using very little data

Now and then in the forum we see questions on how to build maps for games. The advice in those threads seem great to me, but I stumbled on something really different and interesting and thought I'd share. I played the game Pitfall! lots of times on my C64, and I had heard something about how the developer used some smart solution on how to store such a massive map.

This morning I, for the first time, saw an article explaining how the developer built the map solution. It's absolutely brilliant for the time. Probably not entirely relevant by today's standards, but might still be inspiration, I imagine. And how much memory did the map occupy? One byte. Obviously there's more to the solution than this, read the article:


And here's what the game looked like (on the Atari 2600):

I love these sort of videos. Optimising games code has become a bit of a lost artform. I know mobile phones have better specs now than most desktops of only five years ago, but you're still working with limited resources and making best use of those is important.

common stuff for those who did some coding on 8-bit platforms.

a lot of my apps still use these tricks just to gain a lot of space on data files.

why waste 100 bytes on a 10x10 grid when you can fit it in 12.x, 24 with extra solution bit or even less

another benefit is that those who look at the data don't have a clue what they are looking at so they need to write or extract the depacker code for it.


a data optimization challenge on this forum would be fun once in a year or so as you can learn a lot of it.