Steve Davis Snooker was also an unofficial sequel to CDS Software's 1983 Pool simulator, called "Pool." "Steve Davis Snooker" allows players to play against themselves, or against a human opponent in either Snooker, or Pool. However, there is no opponent AI. The game could be controlled by either a Joypad or a Cursor and Keyboard control scheme. The game has two different modes, with a "short game" (a game of Ten-Red Snooker similar to power snooker), or "long game", a game of traditional fifteen-red Snooker. The Atari game's box art boasts that the game has a "trick shot edit mode", "accurate spin", and
Jimmy White's 'Whirlwind' Snooker table which existed at the time, and it could be used by a player to refine real-life snooker skills. The game took MacLean several years to complete; the billiard ball physics alone taking several months of programming. One of the reasons why the game runs as quickly as it does is the way in which each is played. The next shot is effectively pre-played while the is being – the position and movement of each ball being calculated frame-by-frame and kept in a list in memory. Each frame of the next shot is then displayed by rendering each ball from