Hi everyone.

As you know, the main Retro Software titles get fabby artwork and loading screens drawn by our very own DaveJ. Up until now, the freeware releases have gone without loading screens.

Well, DaveM has had me grafting away this week creating a configurable loader in the style of the old Micro Power games.

The results can be seen on the wiki here.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

I think that looks very stylish, and the wiki article to go with it is excellent too.

Can't thank you enough for this, Paul - the config program is just the ticket, as is the wiki write-up.

This will be used on:

- Sparse Invaders
- Hyper Viper
- Hard Hat Harry

... and hopefully Martin's promising 'Clowns' thing!

Thats really good, good write up too, I hate doing Wiki's just don't get along with them.

No, "Clowns" has got to be a blue label. I'd love Martin's masterpiece to have the works - loading screen etc. It features real physics and some clever screen interrupt gubbins after all.

Excellent work, very nice

I'd agree with DaveJ about Clowns - it's got a very nice feel to it, be nice to see it all done up proper, like

@ Daves x 3 : You are all very kind indeed especially given the far more impressive skills on display around here! Yes, it is still rolling along, just not as quickly as I'd hoped but little details like Tom starting a thread titled 'A game that will be finished' is surprisingly motivational

Dave, I haven't a clue what you mean but I trust your judgement implicitly and whatever you say goes

Now come on life, gimme a break and go and mither someone else. Can't you see I have important work to do here...

This is what blue label means : http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Prices.

Arcadian had this all sorted out before anyone had written a line of code.

Thanks Tom

I thought Dave J's comment was a compliment - something arty and to to with graphical things. It seems he was just observing that Clowns is clearly worth two quid less than Repton

But three quid more than Hard Hat Harry!

Yes, that does seem unfair when there's very little difference in the skillset between a builder and a clown

If you promise to program Clowns twice and sit on the first version for twenty years I'm sure it'll justify a white label - Dave doesn't give them out to just anyone.

Hmmm... fair enough Dave, I definitely don't want to program it twice. Still, I've made a good start on the 20 year criteria though

Aah, so that's why we're all being so slow getting our games finished! Shh, don't tell Dave

What do we call the games that don't quite make the grade then? Brown label?

BTW, thanks for all the kind words about the loader. I've already noticed a problem running the configure program on a Master, so will need to fix that. Version 2 will also have a program to merge the two loader files together. Much better than all that faffing about doing it manually.

Nice!

It'd be cool if we could get some actual cassette copies of the freeware games using this loader at some point. Or a compilation disc of some of them, perhaps called "Play it again sham"

I'd like to add my compliments to the loader program: it took about 5 minutes to knock something up that looked good and the instructions were easy to follow!

As my American friends would say: Good Job!