[Coco] Jeweled game done

[Roger Taylor]

At 08:31 PM 5/7/2008, you wrote:
>Roger,
>
>It's a great little game as it is, the puzzle feature
>was not a must for me. Maybe there is a way to get it
>done that will come to you in a few weeks or months. I
>do plan to support this product by purchasing my own
>copy. I'm new here, but I understand it takes lots of
>time and dedication to complete even basic projects.
>Cheers to the final release!
>
>Ben


All I need is a routine that sets up a scrambled board of gems in a 
way that each move leads to another possible move or moves (and 
collapse of certain sets of gems) so that the last move clears the 
board.  I can't find any algorithms for this on the web even though 
there's tons of Bejeweled knock-offs with source code to come.  I 
think most don't have a puzzle mode like the one in Bejeweled 
2.  It's not like scrambling a 3-D color cube.  I'm probably going to 
have to build the board from the bottom rows up, swapping two gems 
vertically or horizontally as I insert a vertical or horizontal set 
or sets.  I've tried different approaches and the boards always come 
out where a 2 year old could solve them.

Jeweled is also a stepping stone to great CoCo 3 projects to 
come.  The latest updates to my CCASM assembler make it possible to 
EASILY merge or embed any kind of files and source code into a single 
contiguous (or segmented) CoCo 3 program up to the size of RAM.  The 
assembled program will LOADM right into RAM like it should, not just 
a small ~24-28k area of the 64k CPU space.  We've been crippled for 
years with limits like that and I feel that the CoCo 3 could have 
seen even better glory days if all programmers had a simple way of 
doing what I'm able to do now.  The entire game is in one single .bin 
file, ready to run the second it's finished loading.  The alternate 
way of doing this would be to have stuff saved as separate files that 
the game shell loads, which would take longer and requires dealing 
with whatever DOS the user might be using.