Sometimes projects work out.
(2000 - ongoing)  |
ElectrEm is my attempt to create a definitive Acorn Electron emulator. Prior to ElectrEm there were no Electron emulators outside of RISC OS and none that attempted cycle perfection. ElectrEm was the first emulator to implement the UEF file format (originally created by me, now incorporating work from several other people) which has now become a de facto standard for storage of Acorn style tape images. A new update of the Future version of the emulator is all but complete, including a substantially improved "fast tape hack", but the Windows version suffers from a serious hang causing bug that I have yet to eliminate. |
(2005)  |
The result of my participation in the Allegro.cc Christmas Hack '05 - an 8 day secret santa event that involved participants implementing the vague game descriptions of others in order to provide them with a Christmas present. This entry was for a guy named OICW on the theme of a nuclear war simulator and attempts to mimic the graphical feel of the early 80s Atari vector arcade machines such as Tempest and Battlezone. It uses a custom anti-aliased line drawer based on the well known, and blindingly obvious, wu-lines algorithm but modified a little to better preserve line thickness at all angles. Originally based quite strongly on the famous missile riding scene from Doctor Strangelove, this evolved into something like a very simple 3d perspective variant on the Tanx/Scorched Earth theme of trying to aim at things from a distance, with a little bit of post shot guiding thrown in. This project finally used the retro sound effects I had made for my tiny little Robotron themed thing. Source Code (Allegro required) (272.5 kB) |
(2006)  |
This one's from Allegro.cc Christmas Hack '06. It's a quite simple first person "locate the minerals while avoiding a monster" game that reuses Sandy White's Ant Attack map with a simple (read: very much sub-optimal) shadow volume thingy to do some light/dark/shadow stuff. Sadly, it's not great. See the development blog to try and derive excuses if you want. Source Code (SDL and SDL_mixer required) (644.6 kB) |
(2005)  |
A submission to replace the previous Allegro demo game, included in versions up to 4.2.0, I am responsible for all the gameplay aspects of this short game. The code uses a continuous/discrete hybrid 2d physics simulation and a polygon based level build as a quadtree for fast collisions and display. This game will be available alongside Allegro with the next release. |
(c. 2000)  |
A quick remake of the ZX Spectrum game 3d Deathchase. This was originally intended to be a software game but I adapted it to use OpenGL at the last minute. It retains a strange hybrid of Allegro matrix code and OpenGL drawing functions. Unfortunately written directly in win32/DirectX code for window creation, input devices and sound output this project is not currently available for any other platform. At some point George Foot contributed an AllegroGL port, but that file seems not to survive. |
(c. 1999)  |
A partial remake of Julian Gollop's ZX Spectrum title, Chaos. Completed shortly before I began university this project features an interesting 3d engine that uses a queue of z-buffers to build up a scene so that only the currently active monster is actually redrawn frame on frame. Features computer opponents, but not very smart ones. Looking over the code is interesting because it shows a plan to incorporate some Z80 emulation to provide something like scripting support and a start on the Gooey Blob - always my favourite part of Chaos. Presented here is a slight 2005 remix of Anarchy, adjusted to run in 640x480 resolution rather than the original quirky 640x400 and patched to correct endianness issues and incompatibilities with modern compilers. Source Code (Allegro required) (365.2 kB) |
(c. 1998)  |
A two player only (i.e. no computer opponents) futuristic sports game, originally an entry for the Allegro Golden Floppy competition (which it did not win). One of my few games with entirely original gameplay, it revolves around floating blobs and a simple alternating wave based progression. Although this features some good gameplay design it tends to become boring after a while. The name comes from the fact that I was developing Anarchy simultaneously and knew it would be my next release. The 3d engine is entirely my own and was the result of several attempts to produce a good, free general purpose 3d engine - 3d accelerators being an extremely expensive commodity at the time. Unfortunately the source code for this project appears to have vanished into the mists of time. |
(c. 1997)  |
Sometime during late 1996 I ended up in contact with a graphic/audio artist named Sic Coyote who wanted to produce a game inspired by the movie Independence Day. I did the coding based on his description which I have subsequently learnt is strongly based on an old video game of which I do not know the name. Your ship constantly runs from lef to right, slowly descending. Below are some buildings. The player must press space to drop bombs and destroy the buildings before they are so low that they just crash into them. Gameplay for the main part is complete. There was to be a boss section which would involve a genuine bitmap background and Lemmings/Worms style destruction and I seem to have fully or near-fully coded that but never incorporated it. Originally the game was a 320x200 DOS friendly thing that used Allegro + a separate sound library. I've converted it to an Allegro/DUMB mix, fixed up some scancode stuff and added high score table saving. I've also incorporated a software scale to 640x480 for the OS X build in order to allow full screen play - although it causes that version to be incredibly slow when combined with the paunchy Allegro library. File size is large due to the sound effects and music incorporated. KEYS:
Source Code (Allegro and DUMB required) (~ 294.6 kB) |
All projects on this page are distributed under the GNU Public License version 2. Email the author.