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

I'd certainly be interested in playing it; I may even dig the A5k out of the loft to have a go

You may want to drop Samwise or [url]http://www.retrosoftware.co.uk/forum/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2]DaveM[/url] (Arcardian on stardot) a private message as they're the people behind Retrosoftware and Stardot/Stairway to Hell.

I can offer to help with somethings (maybe code some bits in assembler - though it's been about 15 years since I last touched ARM assembler).

Quickie reply. Real life is pressing atm. I'll drop you a line next week, Steve, but essentially we're happy to help out anyone coding a game for a retro platform. We're primarily an Acorn house, but we're by no means limited to that. There being at least one Commodore project potentially on the horizon.

We can certainly provide you with the same resources our other projects have, and it'd be great to see more 32-bit programs in development. We have 3 or 4 RISC OS titles on the books but we haven't heard from most of those in a while ...

Talk to you next week!

Sam.

You have mail!



Sam.

thanks for the email Sam! Much appreciated, will give me and graeme pause for thought

Hi there!

It's been some time since this thread was opened. I have some news regarding the game.

My brother acquired a Raspberry Pi over the summer, and has been doing some more work on the code for the game, and also the level editor. After clearing some showstopper bugs, it's now possible to create levels without crashing it.

Work on the Pi has involved some issues with mode independence, and screen banking. Due to my own lack of time, I've not upgraded my distro to the latest NOOBS version, so as to see what issues have been resolved, if any, on these matters. Some of the sound modules are not 32-bit compatible, and presentation is still lacking. However, the 3d tiles are now drawn using vectors, rather than sprites, which helps a lot with mode independence, and is much quicker.

Sorry, I've been a bit brief with the detail, but I leave you with a screenshot posted on Facebook of the latest iteration of the game. It's nice to see some progress has finally been made. I still need to fulfill my end of the bargain, and do some level designs. Now the editor is working, I just need the tiiiiiiimmmmeee to do it!

Cheers!

Steve

Just a quick word - the title screen is being worked on tonight, my brother is hoping to show the game at the RISC OS London show tomorrow. I may be possibly attending, it will be a first for us. It sounds like a great show

Hope to see some of you there!

Steve

Good luck! I hope it goes well.