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avatar_Widukind

Alphajet (1988) & Airballs (1989)

Started by Widukind, 21:17, 17 June 18

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Widukind

Hallo CPC friends,

30 years ago I programmed my first little CPC game in assembler named Alpha-Jet, a hobby project inspired by Ultimate's (later Rare) great Jetman on ZX Spectrum. The German CPC Schneider/Amstrad International magazine published it in 1988 on their accompanying monthly disc.

I don't remember in which issue it got published, so I never found a copy of the disc on the Internet. Since over the decades and some relocations I forfeited my CPC and discs (sadly!), I never found Alpha-Jet on any CPC website, since there's a French commercial game with the same name overlaying mine.

Now on the large MAME collection on the Internet-archive I finally found my Alpha-Jet, after 30 years, so to say. It was just a young beginner's game or more of a sprite-demo, with no fine tuned game-play and with unwise coding decisions (*), but I'm still glad to have rediscovered it.
And so I would like to share it with you collectors of all CPC things. Please note that due to my green monitor only, the colours weren't fine-tuned either.


---
(*) For example I had observed that many commercial CPC games used to use an offset software video buffer with simpler line-below-line raster format. After being drawn to, this buffer gets transferred line-by-line to the hardware video screen in order to avoid flickering. I did that, too, but the copying costs many extra Z80 cycles. With my second CPC game Airballs I used two hardware screens which are being flipped by the video-chip. It's a bit more complicated to draw to, but much faster.

Thanks to all you administrators, moderators and contributors for keeping the good old CPC alive! It's a pleasure to see all this.

Widukind

A year later in 1989 the same German CPC Schneider/Amstrad International magazine published my second game Airballs inspired by the Arcade game Joust.
It avoided the slow offset software video buffer and uses two hardware screens flipped by the video-chip. Technically and gameplay-wise I'm a bit more happy with this second one in contrast to the first game, but both are real greenhorn games.

Now I dream of doing another game for the CPC one day, this time with actual game-play and smarter programming. Maybe one day... :-)

P.S. Airballs (and probably Alpha-Jet, to) has got a cheat mode, by pressing some keys in the title-screen. Unfortunately I forgot the keys...

GUNHED

Very nice! Any chance to find the German version of Gunship from Microprose?

http://futureos.de --> Get the revolutionary FutureOS (Update: 2023.11.30)
http://futureos.cpc-live.com/files/LambdaSpeak_RSX_by_TFM.zip --> Get the RSX-ROM for LambdaSpeak :-) (Updated: 2021.12.26)

Arnaud

Quote from: Widukind on 21:18, 17 June 18
Now I dream of doing another game for the CPC one day, this time with actual game-play and smarter programming. Maybe one day... :-)
You should take a look to cpctelera https://github.com/lronaldo/cpctelera

mr_lou

Looks awesome! I especially like the loading screen of Alpha-Jet. Very CPC-retro. But I've always had a thing for those MODE 1 screens.  :)

Sounds like you have a lot of interesting stories you could tell from back in the day. *Cough* 8-bit Memoirs;)

I actually tried Airballs a few years back, while downloading a lot of CPC games just to try them out. I remember Airballs because it stood out - and because I like those MODE 1 games. Very nicely done.

As for creating a CPC game nowadays, I'd also strongly recommend taking a look at CPCtelera.

Widukind

Thank you.

I'm glad you too like MODE 1 screens, because not only as a formerly green-monitor CPC user I liked it, but I still like it because its high resolution (high concerning 8 bit computers) with four colours per pixel and square pixels allow for aesthetically beautiful and crystal-clear images. Like for example Spindizzy or Head over Heels proved very well.

CPCtelera looks very promising. By just browsing its well-assorted documentation I think Spanish Mr. Ronaldo did a great job.

tastefulmrship


Widukind

#7
Quote from: mr_lou on 06:01, 20 June 18
Very CPC-retro. But I've always had a thing for those MODE 1 screens.

Well, I've to admit that reading (and writing) here on this great CPC-Wiki website including its very active forum is one delightful walking down memory lane.

As was (is) painting MODE 1 pictures. I still have strong memories of painting several such MODE 1 pictures for a German demo, after my little Airballs game. Oh yes, MODE 1 is it for me, too. Those were the days! Let's keep them alive.

villain

Quote from: Widukind on 19:24, 22 June 18
As was (is) painting MODE 1 pictures. I still have strong memories of painting several such MODE 1 pictures for a German Megademo (see attached picture please), after my little Airballs game. Oh yes, MODE 1 is it for me, too. Those were the days! Let's keep them alive.
Bescht demo from Oberschwaben ever. Odr so! 😁

mr_lou

Quote from: Widukind on 19:24, 22 June 18Oh yes, MODE 1 is it for me, too. Those were the days! Let's keep them alive.
That's what we're doing here.  :)

You're one of the few who seems to have managed to create games back in the day. A lot of us had the urge to create games, but never managed. So we create games now to fulfill that childhood dream.  ;)
My girlfriend and I created this (MODE 1) game:
www.cpc-power.com/index.php?page=detail&num=12497
:)

I'd love to make another game, but we have the same problem as everyone else: Not enough time. Family and job takes too much of it.
So it's the usual "lots of ideas - but no time" situation. It's already been 6 years since I posted about a MODE 1 game idea I had:
http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/general-discussion/mockups-for-mode-1-minimalistic-graphics-platformer
We haven't even started looking into that yet. (But I'm often thinking about it!)


Widukind

#10
Quote from: mr_lou on 05:27, 23 June 18A lot of us had the urge to create games, but never managed. So we create games now to fulfill that childhood dream.
It's a good motivation, and I too have childhood dream retro-games on my "mind shelve".

QuoteMy girlfriend and I created this (MODE 1) game:
A nice one. I always liked thruster games. You even got a nice title tune! Congratulations. I never managed to do this.

QuoteI'd love to make another game, but we have the same problem as everyone else: Not enough time. Family and job takes too much of it.
So it's the usual "lots of ideas - but no time" situation.
Very well put. And indeed it's such a pity.

This "not enough time" problem is one reason why today we retro hobbyists should focus on highly efficient development tools, like CPCtelera is probably. So that we can concentrate our little time on the actual game.

mr_lou

Quote from: Widukind on 10:50, 23 June 18A nice one. I always liked thruster games. You even got a nice title tune! Congratulations. I never managed to do this.
You gotta team up with other forum members.  :)
We all do that. I can do music (when I have the time), and some C code, but I suck at graphics and assembler code, so I always need help with those.

Quote from: Widukind on 10:50, 23 June 18What tends to hinder us often, is that we plan to realise too many ideas when time is always short.
Very true. We tend to make the projects too big. Then lose interest because lack of time makes it impossible to ever reach the goal. I try to make my projects small, although it's not always possible. My recent project "8-bit Memoirs" ended up taking 5 years - but I just insisted on completing it. Not sure I'll have that kind of persistence next time though.  :)
Quote from: Widukind on 10:50, 23 June 18Recently I examined the fat GIMP and noticed we can tell it to use X colours only in indexed picture mode, and define those colours with the RGB values of the CPC hardware colours. (You and others surely knew this already, but I'm new to modern bitmap applications like GIMP.)  So maybe it could be used as a CPC sprite editor?
GiMP is great. I've used it for many years. But what I'm after in this context, is something that'll let me play around with CPC graphics and level-designs while on-the-go. E.g. when I'm sitting on the bus and have nothing else to do anyway. Or in a waiting room, etc etc.
So that's why I'm pondering about looking into a Java-based sprite-editor for CPC graphics. Being Java based lets me run it on my phone and my pocket computer. But let's see if I manage to find the time.

Widukind

#12
Hello. I would like to use a cheat to finish playing Airballs. On the CPC-Power website some kind French person found a cheat (and it's also mentioned in the other thread here on Cpc-Wiki-forum). The cheat from CPC-Power says:

Airballs: poke
Vies:
poke &1923, nb

Niveau actuel:
poke &1924, nb

Vies infinies:
poke &00c3: le &3d in &00


Since it's a looong time ago when I did some Z80 assembler on the CPC: how to apply this cheat? The "Airballs.bas" loader says:10 MODE 1: CALL &BC0220 INK 0,0: INK 1,24: INK 2,18: INK 3,12: BORDER 18
30 MEMORY &1FFF
40 LOAD "Airballs.bin"
50 LOAD "Airballs.pic": CALL &8060
60 LOAD "Airballs.pgm": CALL &8015


How do we do this poke "&00c3 → 00", when the ".pgm" loads above &2000 (at &8000 it would seem) ? Also I would like to store the cheated ".bas" file, so that it can be load next time again. Many thanks.

Shining

Very nice those two games, I've read every issue of the CPCAI back then and played your later game Airballs quite some time.


If you would like to do some stuff with others together, we would be pleased.....
TGS is back

Download my productions at:
cpc.scifinet.org

Widukind

Thank you Shining for your delightful feedback "from the past". And for the offer. One day...

First however I need to finish playing Airballs, and since it's way too difficult :-) a cheat is due.

Shining



Had a little fun hacking....


Seems, that your ingame sourcecode is inverted on disk (copy protection?), so it was not so easy to patch but I figured it out a little bit.


Attached you find your dsk with a quick and dirty basic-loader called airpoke.


Lines 70 and 80 ensure that finally &00C3 gets patched to NOP.


Lines 100 to 200 should patch the initializer for level (and remove the initializer for lives cause i needed the space).
I hope this works always. Did not test for level=0. This could fail.


Have fun!
TGS is back

Download my productions at:
cpc.scifinet.org

Widukind

Vielen Dank for your little hacking. The pokes now work very well. Higher levels are getting really hard. I prefer when the wind blows from below...

Again I enjoy MODE 1 graphics with their nice 1:1 pixel ratio. On a CPC+ machine, MODE 1 sprites could have 16 colors, on top of the 4 colors of the standard MODE 1 background graphics. One day... ;-)

Quote from: Shining on 14:02, 10 August 20Seems, that your ingame sourcecode is inverted on disk (copy protection?)
I think to remember this was done to prevent kids from changing the ASCII texts inside the assembled binary file with a hex editor, like happened so many times.

GUNHED

I do remember Airballs too, a great game, here a review...



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gniwq3fahZo

http://futureos.de --> Get the revolutionary FutureOS (Update: 2023.11.30)
http://futureos.cpc-live.com/files/LambdaSpeak_RSX_by_TFM.zip --> Get the RSX-ROM for LambdaSpeak :-) (Updated: 2021.12.26)

Widukind

#18
Thanks, Gunhed, for the video link. Didn't know it! The author becomes skilled after a few minutes of playing but didn't notice the arrow signs on the bottom indicating where the wind blows from.

He gave 60% review score, which is fair I think, since Airballs was basically a highly-polished sprite-routine. We were so busy with sprite-plotting routines and hardware screen flipping in pure assembler and with holding all the Z80 source-code within the small RAM amount during development, that gameplay was put last unfortunately. Today people have better development tools. Would be nice if we could use them to do another game with a true focus on gameplay this time. Well, one day... :-)

GUNHED

It was one of the greatest games from CPCAI anyway. I love MODE 1 too (and Mode 2), but if people review a game in MODE 1 they never give well points. Maybe he couldn't read the German Manual  ;D


Would be awesome to see a game from you again.  :) :) :) :)
http://futureos.de --> Get the revolutionary FutureOS (Update: 2023.11.30)
http://futureos.cpc-live.com/files/LambdaSpeak_RSX_by_TFM.zip --> Get the RSX-ROM for LambdaSpeak :-) (Updated: 2021.12.26)

Widukind

Nicholas Campbell's (aka @Nich ) great website Cpc Game Reviews today featured two reviews by Piero Serra, including my 1st little hobby game Alphajet, published in 1988 on a CPC magazine's cover disc – see top of thread, please.

Well, Alphajet got a more-than-fair 6 points out of 10. And I am still sorry for the slow software off-screen buffer... :-) Next time it will be done correctly.

Many thanks Piero and Nich! Here's the links:

Quote14th February 2023
Piero Serra has reviewed two games:


Piero

Quote from: Widukind on 20:44, 14 February 23Well, Alphajet got a more-than-fair 6 points out of 10. And I am still sorry for the slow software off-screen buffer... :-) Next time it will be done correctly.

Many thanks Piero and Nich!
Sehr gerne, Eduard! I was a young programmer back in the day too but never managed to get beyond a few simple BASIC utilities, so I can only imagine the challenges you faced!
Most of the thanks should go to Nich for his amazing site of course, I'm just an occasional contributor.


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