The game

Dunk Shot is three-on-three basketball seen from the stands: a court almost twice as wide as the screen, two teams of three players on court (from a roster of eight) and a match in two halves of 5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes.

The menus

Space takes you from the title to the first menu: SET-UP, LEFT TEAM, RIGHT TEAM and TRADE. Left alone, after 1,500 frames (0x405E) the demo starts.

The two team screens have MAKE TEAM (a three-letter name and eight players of eight letters), LOAD DATA, READY-MADE, COMPUTER (the eight computer teams) and EDIT TEAM, with STARTERS to pick the three starters and SAVE DATA and VERIFY for the tape. TRADE swaps players between the two teams.

SET-UP has PLAY, STARTERS, CHANGE SIDES, COLOR OF WEAR, LENGTH OF HALF (5, 10, 15 or 20 minutes: 0x73A3 multiplies by 300 seconds) and COLOR OF COURT, the three courts. At start-up both teams belong to the computer: with PLAY the match plays itself.

The teams

A player takes 29 bytes (0x7E2E returns the field asked for): eight letters of name, the look (0-31, one of the 32 skin-and-hair pairs at 0x80E4) and the skills, which the statistics screen labels S, J and R. A team is 0xEC bytes: three letters, the level, the colour and the eight players.

The eight computer teams, ELM, JNR, HIG, COL, YUG, ESP, USA and PRO, are levels 1 to 8: 0x72CA generates their players with 30, 20 and 25 points plus 30 for each level above the first, and a random look. That 0xEC-byte block is what SAVE DATA writes to tape and what TRADE swaps (0x8201).

The match

Six players on court, each with their two fixed team-mates (0xBF1E), the ball and the net. The whole court is 56 columns (0xB69E); the screen shows 32 and jumps one column at a time (0x5F33, 0x5E7C). At the top, the scoreboard: names, team fouls (TF), points, time and half.

A basket is worth 2 inside the key and from mid-range, 3 from forty or more away from the basket and 1 for a free throw (0x772E); three seconds in the key (210 frames, 0x76EA) is 3 SECOND.

The fouls and violations the game calls are the twelve at 0x796F: TRAVELLING, 3, 5, 10 and 30 SECOND, CHARGING, HACKING, HOLDING, PUSHING and BLOCKING, plus the two counter labels. The statistics screen carries FOULS and FATIGUE per player. At the break, HALF TIME; at the end, GAME OVER and PUSH ANY KEY (0x8BF3, 0x8C21).

The controls

Read from the code (0xB9C3 and 0xBA16): the human team on the left uses joystick 1 or, failing that, the cursor keys with [ to shoot and RETURN to pass; the one on the right, joystick 2 or four keys from rows 3 and 5 of the keyboard matrix with TAB and CTRL. Button 2 of the team with the ball in the opponent's half changes the play; the one of the team without the ball changes the controlled defender (0x622A, 0x627F). The menus take the cursor keys, space and ESC.