Over the weekend I played the original Laser Squad on the Commodore 64 emulator. It has been over 20 years since I’ve played it like crazy, before and after the school clases, on my real C64. Nice to see that single colored tiles and units again and catch some of the original sounds.

I was trying to figure out how all the stats are calculated on each new turn, and how they depend on each other. I took the first scenario, and equipped all units with different kinds of armor and later weapons. Some of the calculations are described in the users manual, but not all of them. I searched the internet also for some detailed descriptions; actually there were some people who tried to make a remake of the game by reverse-engineering the old ZX81 assembly code. It’s not only that you have to analyse the formulas, you must also find a way to parse all the units initial stats for each scenario – not knowing the scenario and unit data models. I don’t know if I may use the informations which I found in these articles, which, again, are totally incomplete. So, I decided to gather all these calculations in just one method and do them by my own, following pure logic and the way I see things in the real world.

Here are some screenshots how I tried to figure it all out with different equipment combinations.