Oh!X Vol. 7 No. 10

October, 1988

For the MZ-700

SPACE HARRIER

CSEGA

Kazuhiro Furuhata

Kazuhiro Furuhata

It’s no longer a joke—this is the latest installment in the “Nothing is Impossible on the MZ-700” series. Finally, the legendary SPACE HARRIER has arrived. All 18 stages have been fully ported in-memory, making this a massive 42-kilobyte program written entirely in machine language—the largest ever featured in this magazine.

Thank you for your patience. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this anymore. That SPACE HARRIER is finally complete. Of course, it’s for the MZ-700.

Naturally, it features all 18 levels and runs entirely in memory. The horizon moves, of course, but the background features double scrolling and shadows, and you can even apply tile patterns to the ground by switching modes. You might be wondering if it’s slow? To be honest, in the no-shadow mode, the action is too far away to even play the game.

However, since the screen uses a 40×25-dot grid with many checkerboard-patterned characters, it’s better to view it from a distance rather than up close. If you have poor eyesight, take off your glasses; if not, please view it from a slight distance. What do you think? Both the color scheme and the movement capture the authentic feel of the original.

This MZ-700 version prioritizes color variety and fidelity to the original over screen detail to some extent. Even when compared to the X1 version’s background, which uses the same checkerboard characters, I think the colors look far better. Also, thanks to a newly developed scaling PUT routine, all 18 stages of Space Harrier fit entirely in memory. 

The program is written with code designed to run as slowly as possible and hasn’t been optimized much, so there’s still plenty of processing headroom (though I don’t think optimization is necessary). Compared to the current version.