Applejack, Dropzone and Caffeine Free Zoned

[Master484]

Here are three high quality Public Domain Blitz Basic games that are not yet listed on HOL: Applejack, Dropzone and Caffeine Free.

I took screenshots and DBS from all of them, and uploaded them to the Zone.

Here is some info on each of the games:

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Applejack

Release Year : 1994
Number of Disks: 1 (or 2, but the second disk only contains the source code)
Number of Players: 1
Language: English
Hardware: AGA
Have SPS release: no
WHD install : no

Developer: Omega Design

Coder: Neal Goodwin
Graphics: Tony Jones
Music: Nick Morison


Made with Blitz Basic 2, one of the info screens mentions Blitz.

Has a level editor.

The game has two disks: first disk has the game and level editor, second disk contains the full Blitz source code.

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Dropzone

Release Year : 1994
Number of Disks: 1
Number of Players: 1
Language: English
Hardware: OCS / ECS / AGA
Have SPS release: no
WHD install : no

Coder: Richard Tunstall

Made with Blitz Basic 2, game docs mention Blitz.

Inspired by the C64 game Dropzone, made by Archer Maclean.

System Requirements: OS 2 or better and 1.5 MB of Chip RAM. AGA chipset + FastRAM recommended, but not required.

According to the game docs, originally Dropzone was intented to be a shareware game that you would get by registering the demo version and paying a registration fee. But in 1999 the full version was released as freeware by the author.

And about the screenshots, picture number 1 is the game's loading screen, and the slight blurriness of it is caused by the quality of the original .jpg image in the game disk.

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Caffeine Free
(full game name in the title screen is "Caffeine Free Diet Shoot'em up")

Release Year: 1993
Number of Disks: 1
Number of Players: 1
Language: English
Hardware: OCS / ECS
Have SPS release: no
WHD install : no

Coder: Ben Campbell
Graphics: J.S. Hong


Made with Blitz Basic 2, game's title screen messages mention Biltz.

Magazine Review: Amiga Power issue 35 Mar 1994
http://amr.abime.net/review_19784

Game released on following Coverdisks:
Amiga Format issue 54 disk A. (full version)
http://amr.abime.net/issue_210_coverdisks
Amiga Down Under issue 7 March 1994 (demo)
http://amr.abime.net/issue_456_coverdisks

Also has a sequel, Assimilation-Caffeine 2:
http://hol.abime.net/4494

[Predseda]

Note: AppleJack Lemon crosslink ID is 3891

[DamienD]

Wow, AppleJack looks cool indeed

Reminds me a bit of Mr. Do! or Dig Dug

[DamienD]

Thanks for these suggestions Master484

...all added to my WinUAE collection

One issue with "DropZone" though; I can't get it to work with any A1200 Quickstarts. It either doesn't load or "Software Failure"...

[Arnie]

Try with nocache. Worked for me with kick 3.0.

Has anyone found Caffeine free? (never mind, found it hiding on the server)

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Arnie

Try with nocache. Worked for me with kick 3.0.

What do you mean my friend? I'm using the .ADFs and not WHDLoad...

Tried the following Quickstart A1200 settings in WinUAE v3.3.0:

... A1200 - Basic non-expanded configuration (with / without Cycle-Exact ticked)
... A1200 - 4MB Fast RAM expanded configuration (with / without Cycle-Exact ticked)

Also tried with a "KS ROM v3.1 (A1200) rev 40.68 (512k).rom".

It's no biggie as I have it working with an ECS / 2MB Chip / KS 3.1 configuration but thought I'd mention...

[Arnie]

Sorry, I meant 'Disable CPU caches in the early boot menu'
You can also use the 030 cpu and it will load with KS30/31 without disabling the caches.

[DamienD]

Oh ok. Shouldn't really have to "Disable CPU caches in the early boot menu" with the .ADF though should I? I'm never going to remember that for this game out of 1500+ configurations that I have...

Yes, I can set "CPU = 68030" (tested and this works) but shouldn't it also work with standard "A1200 QuickStart" settings considering all is ok with an "ECS / 2MB Chip / KS 3.1" configuration?

[Arnie]

According to the readme it should work in a vanilla A1200.
We need someone to test it on a real Amiga A1200

Caffeine Free is quite good, don't you think?

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Arnie

According to the readme it should work in a vanilla A1200.
We need someone to test it on a real Amiga A1200

Caffeine Free is quite good, don't you think?

Yup, that and AppleJack are very cool indeed

Thanks again to Master484 for pointing these game out

[Arnie]

Dropzone works from HD with 020 and 2mb chip. I wonder what's wrong with the floppy?

[Master484]

Nice to hear that you liked the games.

Applejack is very polished for a freeware game, one of the best PD Blitz games out there, and maybe the best Mr.Do clone on the Amiga, and totally deserves to be listed on HOL. And Caffeine Free is also cool, a 50fps Blitz shooter, and just like Defender and Insectoids 2 the frame rate stays at 50fps most of the time.

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About Dropzone, I tested it again, and there indeed seems to be some small problems with getting it running on an A1200 WinUAE setup.

I don't know what's causing it, I guess the game just isn't fully AGA compatible, despite the instructions recommending an A1200.

But it runs fine on an ECS setup with K3.1 and at least 1.5MB of RAM.

Although running speed is a little slow when levels start and all aliens are still alive. But the more aliens you destroy, the faster it'll run, reaching a full 50fps when only a few nasties remain.

Most likely the speed variation is caused by the classic mistake of drawing all aliens in the entire level to the bitmap every frame, including those aliens that are located off-screen. Off-screen drawing operations are as costly as visible screen area drawings. Or then the AI of the aliens is super complex and CPU intensive, but this is unlikely.

And because it's somewhat slow on a standard machine, A1200 + fast RAM setup is then recommended as a simple solution. So if your Amiga runs Gloom Deluxe, it'll also run Dropzone.

Most likely the programmer made the game on a A1200, where it runned fine, and then tried it on a A500, and noticed that it's slower, but didn't bother to optimize the code. But despite the small speed issues and A1200 compatibility problems, it's a nice little game, and a quite accurate clone of the original C64 Dropzone.

[DamienD]

Yup, DropZone does work with an "ECS / 2MB Chip / KS 3.1" configuration but as you say runs / plays slow...

I just followed Arnie's advice and set the following:

... CPU = 68030 (or 68040).
... Chipset = AGA (Cycle-exact ticked).
... ROM = "Kickstart v3.0 r39.106 (1992)(Commodore)(A1200).rom" or "Kickstart v3.1 r40.68 (1993)(Commodore)(A1200)[!].rom"
... RAM = "Chip 2MB" & "Fast 4MB".

Game then runs at a nice speed in WinUAE

[DamienD]

@Arnie; just noticed that Master484 also mentioned there's a sequel to "Caffine Free"...

Assimilation: Caffeine 2: http://hol.abime.net/4494/screenshot

Need to try / add this one to my collection also

[Arnie]

Yup, downloaded that one from the Server, I haven't gotten around to playing it yet as I've been busy fixing the DropZone ADF.

The disk needed Setpatch from WB3.0. I've made a fixed version that works on 1.3, 2.0 and 3.0/3.1 with 2mb chip ram. Grab the file here.....

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Arnie

Yup, downloaded that one from the Server, I haven't gotten around to playing it yet as I've been busy fixing the DropZone ADF.

The disk needed Setpatch from WB3.0. I've made a fixed version that works on 1.3, 2.0 and 3.0/3.1 with 2mb chip ram. Grab the file here.....

Cheers, thanks man. Will give it a bash

...meanwhile I've been fixing / creating the following:


The Caffeine Free Diet Shoot'em Up:

Whoever created this disk made a right mess... Basically he / she:

a) Copied a "Workbench v3.0 rev 39.29 (1992)(Commodore)(A1200-A4000)(M10)(Disk 2 of 6)(Workbench)" disk to a blank floppy.
b) Delete a few directories to free up space I guess.
c) Created a new directory "Caffeine".
d) Copied all files / directories needed to play the game into the above.

The disk looks like this once booted:



It's horrible, there's still the original WB 3.0 "S/startup-sequence" there (amongst many unneeded WB 3.0 directories). Also, they slightly edited the "S/startup-sequence" and added a line to load "xcopypro" that clearly no longer exists, hence why you get the error when booting:




Assimilation - Caffeine 2:

The disk loads the game immediately. There's no way for you to view the "Assimilation.ReadMe" file. Whoever hacked the disk also renamed the main game file from "Assimilation" --> "1".

Searched and downloaded the original files from Aminet: http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/Assim


Anyway, I've now created clean .ADFs that look like the following:

The Caffeine Free Diet Shoot'em Up:




Assimilation - Caffeine 2:



Attached to this post for whoever wants them

[Predseda]

Thank you!

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by Predseda

Thank you!

My pleasure

...they are great games and deserve to be preserved correctly.

Plus, I enjoy tinkering around with stuff these days. Always good to "clean" / nice looking .ADFs

[Master484]

Nice work on fixing those disks.

I got my ADF of Caffeine Free in the classic way: I downloaded the coverdisk from AMR, and created a Caffeine disk from it following the instructions on the disk.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_210_coverdisks

Back in the day I owned that very same coverdisk, and everything still worked the same way; it has 3 packed directories in it, that you have to expand to separate blank disks.

And in addition to Caffeine Free, that same coverdisk also has a shareware demo of an AMOS game called "XAP", which is a cool and unique arena shooter, and also not listed on HOL.

Here is a Youtube video of Xap:

[ Show youtube player ]

It's a high quality AMOS game, maybe the full version exists somewhere in the internet? The demo version has only 5 levels + 1 boss.

[DamienD]

Oh thank you kindly my good sir

...I was trying to find the original archive before making the "clean" disk but had no luck

Now thanks to yourself, I've had the opportunity to analysed / created a new disk. This time it includes the "README" that is missing from the TOSEC disks

Disk removed from the previous post and added here. Thank you again my friend for pointing out the original source files