Games

Games are my love – I don’t mean playing games, but writing games. And it’s also not about writing games that have already been made – but inventing games that haven’t been made yet. At least for a platform like Atari or iPhone (well for now in my dreams, but who knows?)

Atari 8-bit

It so happened, that in the ’90s chasing after a fortune I found myself in the company Mirage. As a freelancer I wrote several games for them for Atari:

  • Johnny’s Problem (Action!)
  • Super Fortuna (Action!)
  • Super Fortuna Editor (Action!)
  • StarBall (Action!)

Whereas already in “today’s times” I wrote some more games:

  • Snake256 (assembler)
  • Speedmaza (Action!)
  • conversion of Amaurote (Amaurote+, Amaurote 128) to 2x faster version (assembler)
  • River Raid conversion to kayak version (assembler)
  • Little 15 (four days of development, atalan)
  • HangMan in 5 lines in Atari Basic

Did I forget something?

Why Action!? The language is very clever, the resulting code is really fast, and it’s not far behind today’s leading cross-platform compilers (CC65, MadPascal, atalan(RIP)).

I’ll post descriptions of these games and screenshots soon (at some unspecified time)

Meanwhile you can listen to music from these (and other) games here

Commodore Amiga

For Amiga I’ve sported one and only game of my authorship – Starball – from 8-bit Atari . It was written in E (similar to Action!, where StarBall – Atari version – was written in original). Unfortunately, the game hasn’t been found (yet, I hope) in my archives. There was a floppy disk version assembled. There was only music left to listen to.

I had problems with this game, because Amiga doesn’t have text mode, so the animations on the screen took much CPU time (several frames, while they should be one). I ended up animating only what you can see, and also with multiplexing every 4th column of the board. I still used a blitter, and animated one block with the blitter, and the next block directly with the CPU. – This allowed to get smooth animation on Amiga 500.

I’m very sad that the game was lost, but not all is lost yet – somewhere I had a video cassette with VBS (video backup system) with recorded data from hard drive. Maybe it will be found. Then, unless I find a floppy disk version, I’ll try to edit the game again and make it available to the public.

Keep your fingers crossed!