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"Ormen Slange", a small game I made back in '87

Started by the KING, 17:41, 26 July 18

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the KING


Years ago when I transferred all my CPC disks to PC I found a small basic game I made as a school project back in 1987. I then forgot about it, and have "rediscovered" it a few times and done some small changes to it along the road. The code is a mess, but it works and I remember getting top grades for it in school. One day I'll clean it up properly. I made it in GW-Basic on the school MS-DOS computers, and at home on my CPC464. I remember that the collision detection were done differently on the two versions, finding it much easier to do on the Amstrad as I could easily access the screen memory. I would compare the quality to those games you could find as type-ins in magazines.


The game is a simple snake game called "Ormen Slange", which is Norwegian and means something like "The Serpent Snake". The name is a word play on the name "Ormen Lange" (means "The Long Serpent") which is the name of a famous Norwegian viking ship.


The game is controlled by the keyboard arrow keys, and the object is to "eat" the numbers that appear. There were a few bugs where a number would disappear or a character that makes up the snake would disappear, and I remember calling those "features" and not bugs back when I made it  ;D  I blamed it on "sand" covering the "food" or parts of the snake. No fancy graphics, just standard CPC characters, but quite fun and playable. The speed increases from stage to stage, and from stage seven the duration of the stages increases. If you set a hiscore you can enter your initials, and it is saved.


The crash/screen garbage routine was something I found somewhere some years ago, but can't remember where. I just know that I didn't make that.


Well, here it is as a zipped DSK file.


Tom

mr_lou

I love that you created the game with GW-Basic on a PC - and then made an "enhanced version" on the CPC later.  8)

I also played a lot with GW-Basic after everyone else had lost interest in the CPC. All my CPC BASIC experience came in handy. Even used GW-Basic for a school project too, showing some 3D stuff with impressed the teachers a lot and gave me and my team a rather good grade.

the KING

#2
Yes, it was the first year the school had PC's in the computer lab. Before that there were only Olivetti(?) CP/M machines. I can't really remember what we learnt in those classes, but I don't think it was much, as the teacher was a drunk, and hardly ever was there. I do remember a classmate and me playing a prank on him that we had read about in a magazine. We made a new .bat file on his boot floppy, where it said there was detected moisture in the CPU, and it needed a couple of minutes to dry up. Then we had the PC write and read a file over and over to/from the floppy, making a lot of blinking and noise, and a progress bar on the screen that counted up towards 100%. At 95% it stopped with the message "Water reservoir full, please drain it safely", or something like that. He ended up calling the dealer about where that reservoir was located, as he couldn't find anything in the manual  ;D  When he got back, we had of course deleted every trace of those files, and his PC was working fine again. I think he understood who had pranked him, but he never said anything and both of us got top grades  8)


I never really did much real programming on the 464, besides cracking tape games to get them on disk. The classmate I mentioned earlier had a Spectrum, so we helped each other disassembling the various copy protections as both had Z80 CPU's. He later bought a CPC6128. I remember us sitting on the floor in the hallway studying several meters of tractor printed assembler listings. I didn't buy a PC until many years later, as the CPC with Tasword and a printer was all I needed at the time. I remember I had to file an application with the school to be allowed to hand in printed assignments instead of handwritten papers.



mr_lou

When I reached the age where "computer class" was introduced, I'd already been spending my sparetime infront of the CPC for many years. So I was looking forward to these classes. But man what a disappointment. All we really did in those classes, was to work as the teacher's secretary. Because he had "invented" a filing system that he obviously thought would make him rich or something. But he needed a lot of data to be inputted - and for this he used the students. We were just given classified information about other students on paper, to input into the system - and sometimes that was all we did for those classes.


Then one day these fancy men in suits came for a visit, and the teacher demonstrated his "fantastic" system. But it didn't seem like he impressed anyone.

I learned that, you will learn the most by self-education.  ;)

My CPC sessions at home was my own education that cleared the path for my career later - nothing the school did helped me there.

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