[HN Gopher] The challenges of porting Shufflepuck Cafe to the 8 ...
___________________________________________________________________
The challenges of porting Shufflepuck Cafe to the 8 bits Apple II
Author : homarp
Score : 18 points
Date : 2026-02-23 20:53 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.colino.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.colino.net)
| homarp wrote:
| and
| https://gamesfromtheblackhole.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/shuff...
| narrates the pleasure of playing Shufflepuck Cafe
| metadat wrote:
| Fantastic article, this really sums it up nicely.
|
| I remember playing a black and white version of ShufflePuck
| Cafe on a Mac LC3 around 1992 or so. Great game, still
| fascinated by how the exotic characters make the game far more
| engaging than Pong could ever be.
|
| I think there was a guy, Biff, he was really tough, seemingly
| impossible to beat (for my 10 year old self, anyhow).
|
| I miss those days!
| tl2do wrote:
| I was developing games on MSX/MSX2 about 40 years ago. It was
| already a fight with hardware resources, but the Apple II was an
| even stricter environment. Impressive work. Below is a quick
| comparison for those unfamiliar with the specs: Macintosh (1989):
| 16-40MHz 68000, 1-4MB RAM, hardware acceleration, QuickDraw, non-
| blocking sound Apple II (1979): 1MHz 6502, 64KB RAM, no hardware
| multiply/divide, race against CRT beam (4550 cycles), blocking
| sound only * 10-year age gap, 16-40x slower CPU, 16-64x less RAM
| StilesCrisis wrote:
| Shufflepuck Cafe ran on the original Macs, which were 8MHz and
| had between 128K and 512k of RAM. (I never had access to a 128K
| machine and don't know if Shufflepuck worked on those.) This is
| still an incredible achievement of course! But the types of
| Macs that ran at 16MHz with 1MB RAM were probably incompatible
| with the original Shufflepuck as it was coded with the original
| Mac screen resolution firmly embedded into the design.
| strangegecko wrote:
| I have nothing smart to say, but it's one of those games I played
| as a kid and I feel nostalgic seeing its title pop up here more
| than 3 decades later. For some reason, somewhat boring seeming
| games were among my favorites.
|
| I'm still proud of figuring out that one of the hardest players
| had a tell that let you predict which corner he was going to
| target, thereby making him easy to defeat (that was on the Amiga
| version, I'm not sure if it was universal).
| coldcode wrote:
| While I enjoyed writing assembly on the 6502 Apple II back then,
| I would hate doing it today, 42 years later.
|
| Good job, though! Hard to comprehend how limited the hardware was
| back then, and how much cleverness it took to get things to work.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Shufflepuck Cafe got easier with the introduction of optical
| mice, ironically. A large part of the difficulty was your dirty
| ball mouse not dealing with rapid changes in direction well.
|
| (The Amiga port is really good.)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-02-23 23:00 UTC)