The Horror of Homebrew.... ST Style!



Having 'semi-retired' the Spectrum for an ST in late 1988, I was a bit annoyed to discover that ST BASIC was... well... crap. You couldn't even make rubbish games with it! I was also lacking an adventure-writing package, so I was stumped for making my own games for a while. Then came... STOS! Mandarin saved my programming life by releasing a fabulous(ish) version of BASIC which made it entirely possible to once again construct piss-poor games over several weeks and then get annoyed that they weren't actually any good.

I only ever managed to construct one game that I was happy with - Manic Minefield, my last ST project. That's below, as is the rest of the old tat. Enjoy!

I've tested all of these under STEEM 3.1 using TOS 1.2 and 1mb of memory. They all work like that. They might not work in later TOS versions.


Manic Minefield

Manic, Man!Hang about... it's bloody Minesweeper!



Manic Minefield was the last game I ever wrote on the ST. I created it while on my 'out' year from University having gotten hopelessly addicted to Minesweeper on my office PC. By this time there were hardly any new ST games, so PD and 'my own' stuff was all I had. This one turned out quite well, I think - it's just about as close to the Windows original as I've ever seen - especially on the ST. It can be a little slow and the sound effects are dreadful, but all in all... it's not bad!

Having failed to secure a deal to get it released as licenseware by one of the PD libraries of the day (they were all giving up by that point), I released it to the (just becoming popular) Internet as shareware for the princely sum of £5, having provided the full game as an incentive. How much did I make? Bugger all. Thanks to everyone who played it and didn't register - you convinced me not to write anything else for the ST and to buy a PC instead. Oh well.

Here's the full game. It really is free this time.



Evil Dead

Groovy!


Now this... this is really terrible! I wrote it for a joke and to test out some 'sample-playing' routines that I'd been given. It's based on a 'guess the number' game I wrote for my programmable calculator during a very dull physics lesson, and as such isn't really very interesting for any reason other than to hear the (awful) sounds and check out my really qutie awful graphics. I can't draw for toffee. The big font looks quite nice, though!



Apple Jam

Mmm... squashed rat!Retro! Hurrah!


Apple Jam was a Spectrum game by DK Tronics. My mate really loved it, so I tried to create an ST conversion. This actually didn't turn out that bad - it's a moderately successful conversion of the original, with the omission of the 'rat bait' because I didn't realise it actually did anything in the original! It's a little bit slow and a little bit flickery, but all in all it's.... who am I trying to kid? It's rubbish! Holocaust software was our 'rather inappropriately named' homebrew software brand for a while. Think we'd been watching too much Terminator 2.



Zombies!

Grr! Argh!Whoo! Spooky!


Zombies was an attempt at an original arcade-style game. You ran around one of 30 levels avoiding zombies or blowing them up with bombs. The trick here was that the zombies came back if you didn't destroy their tombs. It sounds good in theory, but it practice it's not. For a start, it's not quite finished - the title music is missing, the level-loading code is totall unoptimised so the game takes aaaaaaaaaaages to load, and the game itself runs very, very slowly. And power-ups only ever appear in the top-left corner. Dang. Still, there are 30 levels and I've included the editor just for fun. Chances of me ever finishing this off? Exceptionally slim.


Light Cycle

Tron! No.. not Tron! That would be copyright infringement!Look at the pixels on that!


A simple 'Tron-like' game that I wrote because we wanted to play one. Literally a day or two's work here, but we actually played it for quite a long time. It's multi-player only and all the included options are things that me n' my pals thought would be 'cool'. So there you go. It won't change your life, but it won't kill you either. Probably.


The Fruit Machine

Lovely font! No, really!Hmm... yuck!


Surely everyone on the planet has written a fruit machine simulator at some point? This was mine. It's a bit like Fruit Machine Simulator on the Spectrum and also a bit like the machine that was in our local pub at the time. Knocked up 'very quickly' again with some truly eye-melting visuals and terrible chip-based sound and music to make your ears bleed. That said, it's vaguely amusing for ten minutes. And it saves your high-scores to disk!


The Ones That Got Away


There are loads and loads of unfinished games on my disks. Maybe someday I'll get around to putting something up here. For now.. have fun with the others!