Have we fallen asleep at the wheel, this year?
No ... well ... only those of us who are meant to be tending to the website.
In the meantime, Atom-meister Kees van Oss has been blazing away as usual and has a slew of Acorn Atom ports ready to go!
Up first is a cracking port of Galaforce, the classic shoot-'em-up from 1986 originally released on the BBC Micro and Electron by Superior Software. Coded by legendary Acorn programmer Kevin Edwards, we were lucky enough to run into Kevin and ask him if he might still have the source lying around. A short search later, and he generously shared the code of the original BBC Micro version with us, for Kees to have a play with.
Despite missing a few source files, Kees has managed to perform his awesome magic once again and re-written the game to run at a jaw-dropping speed on an standard Atom expanded to 32 KB RAM. More detail, screenshots, videos and all the image downloads are available here:
http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/galaforce
Source code for the Atom and original versions is available on email request, subject to the copyright holders' permission. So if you do fancy a crack at porting either version to another platform, drop us a line at contact@retrosoftware.co.uk.
Please feedback on the Atom port for Kees in the Galaforce forum. Feedback from the community is always a big encouragement to our hobbyist developers to stick it through to the end of their projects.
More to come shortly ...
Sam.
BBC Micro / Electron Galaforce (c) 1986 Superior Software / Kevin Edwards
Atomic Galaforce (c) 2012 Kees van Oss
Galaforce Worlds is available for Windows from Superior Interactive
http://www.superiorinteractive.com/galaforceworlds/