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.
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(*) 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.