Jeroen Vermeulen, who has already ported two games to RISC OS from the Raspberry Pi Code the Classics book – Infinite Bunner and Cavern – has now given the same treatment to two more games found in the book – Boing and Myriapod.
The first of these, Boing, is a treatment of the classic game Pong, itself probably one of the first video games ever produced in the early 1970s by Atari. In Pong, the player controls a bat at their end of the screen, and can move it up and down, with the objective being to bounce a ball back across the screen – with play being against the computer controlling the bat at the other end of the screen, or another player. Boing is very much the same thing, but with much better graphics and sound effects, and something the game of old didn’t have – a music track.
Myriapod, the second of the two games, is an update to Centipede – another classic game, dating back to the early 1980s, which threw a new twist onto the Space Invaders concept. And just as Boing is to Pong, Myriapod is to Centipede – with much better graphics and sound.
Like the original, in Myriapod the player is at the bottom of the screen, and must avoid and destroy – by shooting at it – the myriapod that starts at the top from making its way down. The myriapod crawls from side to side, and whenever it hits the edge of the screen or an obstacle (in this case small rocks replacing the mushrooms), it drops down a level and changes direction. If a segment of the myriapod is destroyed, the remaining segments either side of it move independently, which splits the action, giving the player more to concentrate on and making the game harder.
The rocks can be destroyed, though it can take several shots, and this can mean it takes longer for the oncoming myriapod to drop a level – if it’s a rock that would have been one in its path.
In both cases, the games have been ported to run on RISC OS using Python 3.8 and PyGame 1.9.6, and can be found in !Store.
Depending on your current set up you may need to install these and various other components and libraries, which is best done using package management software Packman.
Jeroen has developed and tested on Raspberry Pi-based systems, and in both cases recommends a Pi 4 for best performance (though he suggests a Pi 2 as a minimum requirement for Boing), and although he hasn’t tested on other RISC OS 5 platforms he believes they should be useable – to which I can add that they both work on an ARMX6.
