Soft Oldies - MatoSimi

I started writing this post an unbelievable three years ago, but I’ve finally gathered all the materials and finished it…

I was poking around the web recently and realized that my old website is long gone, and with it, my old PC games have basically vanished from the internet. The last time I updated that site was probably back in 2002. To my surprise, even with my hard drive being a graveyard of various old backup folders, I couldn’t find a single backup of the actual site. Since I’m the one who coded this stuff, I figure I might as well dump it all here so it doesn’t get lost for good. Let’s revive some of this old abandoned junk!

Most of these are games I wrote back in 2001 while I was still in high school. It’s a mix of hardcore DOS-era Turbo Pascal (spiced up with some Assembler routines) and a few simple Windows projects written in Visual Basic or Delphi.

I actually had to recompile a few of these or hunt down all the scattered components because I’d lost the original archives with the finished binaries. I didn’t feel like making a separate post for every single game, so I’m just throwing everything together right here:

Rock

This is the biggest PC game I ever made. It’s a platformer where you control a little guy who has to grab all the fruit and reach the exit in the bottom-right corner. It’s actually a remake of the Atari XL/XE game Rockman.

The game packs 10 worlds with 10 levels each… so for those of you skipping math class, that’s 100 levels total. Every world has its own password that pops up once you clear a set of ten. I wrote this in Turbo Pascal 7.0 using the XVGA unit.

Pro tip: You need to run this in DOSBox with the command loadfix -64. If you don’t, the game will start, but the levels will look completely mangled.

I recently optimized the code just out of boredom because it was running like it was in slow-mo in DOSBox. The funny (and painful) part was realizing halfway through that I wasn’t working on the final source code—I was editing an older version that was missing some effects and the entire ending! I had to recode the ending from scratch, but I think it’s pretty much the same as it was 12 years ago when I first finished it. Just a heads-up: the game has no sound or music.

Download “Rock” ROCK.zip – Downloaded 212 times –

Jumpmania

This game is a remake of Cuttlemania from the Atari XL/XE. The gameplay is exactly the same: it’s a two-player face-off where one of you uses the arrow keys and the other uses WASD.

The goal is to claim as many rows and columns as possible by coloring them in. When you jump on an empty square, it switches to your color. You can mess around with the settings to decide what happens if you land on a square that’s already colored—you can set it to either clear the square back to neutral or flip it to your opponent’s color. There’s also an option to turn on teleports that zap you to random spots on the board.

I wrote this in Turbo Pascal 7.0 using the XVGA unit. You’ll definitely need to run it in DOSBox, and make sure to crank up the emulation cycles—otherwise, the game runs at a snail’s pace!

Download “Jumpmania” Jumpmania.zip – Downloaded 174 times –

Hanoi

Hanoi is implementation of hanoi towers in Visual Basic 7.0. I think everyone knows this game so it does not require additional description.

Download “Hanoi” Hanoi.zip – Downloaded 185 times –

Not

Not is an implementation of a Gardner puzzle game, written in Delphi using the Turbopixels library. Your goal is to get the entire playfield to be a single color. By clicking on the green markers around the edges, you invert the colors of all the tiles in that specific row or column. It sounds simple, but it gets tricky fast!

Download “Not” Not.exe – Downloaded 793 times –