Timebomb - Amiga Beta release

[Coagulus]

Hi guys,

After finally finishing the PC game JetHunt and got my coding mojo a bit back I decided to convert one of my PC games back to the Amiga. That game is Timebomb which itself was a remake of the Spectrum game of the same name.

It's written in Blitz but I used WinUAE rather than setting an Amiga back up. Hopefully it works on a real Amiga too.

The game is mainly for 1MB Amigas (OCS, ECS or AGA) but I believe I've managed (despite really rubbish coding) to get it to load a lower spec version for 512K Amigas (it works in WinUAE and Fellow) with trimmed gfx and music.

[edit] if you only have 512K of Chip ram then then 512K version is loaded also.

get it here it's a zipped .adf file, not had time to make a .dms of it yet.

Hope it works! There's the odd flicker when sliding (fire and left/right) but the game seems playable. ESC quits out too.

Had to relearn a heck of a lot about coding and optimising! Had forgotten because it didn't really matter on the PC!

[Graham Humphrey]

I look forward to playing this... will give it a try on my A1200 later

Plenty of new games appearing at the moment, long may it continue.

[Coagulus]

Originally Posted by Graham Humphrey

I look forward to playing this... will give it a try on my A1200 later

Cool, would love to know if it works on a real Amiga, mine are in cupboards and drawers!

Plenty of new games appearing at the moment, long may it continue.

This is all good practice, I think I'll do another one then.

[Predseda]

I am a bit lame in it, managed to get 6090 points so far. Who composed the music for it? Sounds pretty oldschool

[Coagulus]

Originally Posted by Predseda

I am a bit lame in it, managed to get 6090 points so far. Who composed the music for it? Sounds pretty oldschool

I wrote the music on Protracker in the early 90s. I still have all my tunes and I intend to finally use all of them. The hardest part was trimming them down for the 512K version which loads the smaller tunes.

ironically, I wrote the tunes on the Amiga, used them in the PC version, then had to trim a channel out for the SFX!

[clenched]

My mini review on A500. Looks easy on level 0. When the boot comes the difficulty jumps about three fold. By the time two boots were on the screen, I became too psyched out to keep up. When two boots are near the perimeter, it seems like two queens vs. a pawn in chess. Maybe a novice/expert type thing is needed? Maybe capture a flag removes a boot?
On the technical side, when booting from floppy more time is needed to give the floppy motor time to stop before going Blitz. The motor was on constantly while I played. The only blemish I spotted: the screen wipes were slightly rough.

[Coagulus]

Originally Posted by clenched

On the technical side, when booting from floppy more time is needed to give the floppy motor time to stop before going Blitz. The motor was on constantly while I played. The only blemish I spotted: the screen wipes were slightly rough.

Thanks for the review, it's based closely on my PC remake of a Spectrum game Timebomb so the gameplay matches it.

I added a delay for the disk to finish, I'll up it and see if that helps. And yeah, the wipe is rough, I'll see if I can fix that too.

[s2325]

Thank you. [ Show youtube player ] There is small typo on title screen - 'sofware'.

[Coagulus]

Originally Posted by s2325

Thank you. [ Show youtube player ] There is small typo on title screen - 'sofware'.

Oops, in all the time I was writing it, I never noticed the typo.

Ps, when you're playing it holding fire and pressing left and right horizontally scrolls the row you're stood on, makes the game much easier!

[killergorilla]

Cool, this looks good!

It looks like the same game as "Danger UXB" on the BBC Micro [ Show youtube player ].

Game used to scare the sh*t outta me!

[clenched]

Originally Posted by Coagulus

Ps, when you're playing it holding fire and pressing left and right horizontally scrolls the row you're stood on, makes the game much easier!

Now I didn't know this before so I tried it again. It does help when I have cut too long a tunnel and the next bomb is far away. More troubling is now I read there can be four boots on the screen at once. .
The flicker in post #1 is also on the A500 while sliding. It seems confined to the lower three rows of tiles.

[Coagulus]

Originally Posted by clenched

Now I didn't know this before so I tried it again. It does help when I have cut too long a tunnel and the next bomb is far away. More troubling is now I read there can be four boots on the screen at once. .

There can be 5, mwahahaha!

The flicker in post #1 is also on the A500 while sliding. It seems confined to the lower three rows of tiles.

On WinUAE (A500) it's in the middle, weird thing is the sliding code is writing to the back buffer but the flicker suggests that it isn't. Hopefully I can find the bug.

[s2325]

There is also Amstrad CPC version http://cpcrulez.fr/GamesTest/time_bomb.htm

[Shatterhand]

Ha.

There was a dutch company making MSX games back at the 80s, called "Aacksoft" (Nearly sure Ronald Pieket worked with them), they rarely made original games, most of their games were "inspired" by classics... and usually better than oficial ports (Oh Shit! was better tham Namco's Pacman on the System, Apeman was better than the oficial Donkey Kong MSX port, etc).

One of their few "original" games was a nice game called "Kick-it"

And now I find out it wasn't original. It was a version of this speccy game called Timebomb I had never heard about.

Except Kick It has one single difference that makes it a lot more playable: you can scroll rows and lines of tiles, so you can find a way to keep moving when you get "trapped".

Unfortunately the only video of this game on YouTube is being played by someone who has no idea of what to do on the game (and also never uses the scroll tiles feature, you have to hold the button and push the joystick to the direction you want to see the tiles moving)

[ Show youtube player ]

Really nice to learn something new about such an old game