Games

Here are a few games that I have produced over the years. They were mainly written to explore some interesting aspect of programming, or of the operating system, or some utility. They are usually "unfinished" (although the ones presented here are playable!) as once the interesting bit was more or less accomplished, the effort of polishing them to the level of "production quality" is just too painful and brings neither reward, nor usually so much as a squeak of feedback. Some games I wrote were dumped because they turned out to be too boring to play (viz. Blackjack (maybe included here..) Is there any way to make Blackjack interesting without playing for real money, I wonder?)

Common requirements

Unless otherwise stated, all these games are GD2, ie, they require SMSQ/E in some high colour mode (mode 16, 32, or 33). Most of these programs are written in S*BASIC and are compiled with Q-Liberator. Therefore the latest QLib_run or equivalent toolkit must be pre-loaded in your system.

In some cases it may be possible to get these games to run under Qdos (eg LastMatch, Tetris, WQRDLI, ..). However, they will normally require extra systems toolkits to run. Typically: TK2, ptr_gen, Wman, Hot_rext (= PE), and perhaps others, as will be listed in the game's documentation. For details of where to find these toolkits see here. Anything using PE will also work so much better with a mouse! The necessary circuitry (eg QIMI) is not easy to come by these days for stock QL hardware. A serial mouse could work? Consult QL Forum for the current state of play. Luckily, with PE, most mouse actions can be performed via the keyboard.

Most of my games and other programs that use PE also require EasyPointer's toolkit ptrmen_cde to run, so this too should be pre-loaded at boot. ptrmen_cde is useful for a whole load of different programs from different sources, so if you dont load this by default, you could be missing out! You can get the latest version here.

I do not deliberately set out to exclude any platforms, but I no longer have any original QL-related hardware to test on. My programs are often demanding of speed, memory and other resources commonly associated with high-end systems, so they may not perform well on, say, a Q68, or even a Qx0. For reference as to how the software is supposed to perform you could do worse than test them on QPC2 or SMSQmulator on a reasonaly modern PC/LinBox. Both of these emulators are now free, and they complement any QL hardware you may have.

Update: Ive recently tested most of the programs listed here on the Q68, mainly in DISP_MODEs 3 (512x384m33) and 6 (1024x512m33). They all appear to work remarably well qua speed, colours, sound - the lot!