First of all, what a fantastic site - some great stuff to be found here.
Secondly, the reason I am writing this posting. Until a few weeks ago, a RISC OS game my brother put together in 1996 was considered lost forever, due to many things - university, me stealing the RISC PC for university, then after graduating, never using it, putting backups onto Syquest cartridges, then not having any SCSI cards to connect them, as the RISC PC was sold off, and then, finally, discovering that said backups failed to work
Back at the end of February, I got all the contents of these cartridges extracted to a thumb drive, with the help of CJE Micros in Worthing, Sussex. Having still found that the RISC OS backup was lost, I came across some CD-ROMs that APDL produced for me, as it was them I sent the RISC PC to, so they could use it for spare parts. The CD-ROMs contained the contents of its original hard disc.
Buried deep in this CD-ROM, I came across my brother's long lost game, amongst a cache of other gems he wrote, all in BASIC V. Here's some screenshots:
It's a game along the lines of Orbital on the BBC/Electron (4th Dimension/Impact published it) where you are a bouncing crystal ball, collecting parts of your spaceship in order to escape. The monsters are what appear to be little toy cars, with flag like aerials. For a game written in BASIC, it's a pretty hefty piece of code, with multiple arrays, and level/path data to make your eyes water.
The last two of these screenshots are later shots, after I passed my brother his code. He had wanted this game for ages, and really had thought it was gone. He's now going through the code, and changing the graphics from old school mode 12, to a higher resolution. He's using Red Squirrel to code the game, while I have VirtualRPC-SE on my laptop to play it with.
What do you all think? Are we wasting our time, when I've got kids to feed, and my brother should be concentrating on flying passenger planes? I'd like to think we're not, and that we've got something others can enjoy
Kind Regards
Steve Scott
SAS Squad Multimedia
www.sassquad.com
