Back in February, Jeroen Vermeulen released a version of Infinite Bunner for RISC OS, and soon followed that with a version of Cavern – both games published in the book Code the Classics volume 1, available from Raspberry Pi Trading.
All of the games in the book are written in Python, but for those two titles Jeroen did an excellent job of converting them to work in BBC BASIC, with the aid of the AMCOG Development Kit. For a further two titles, however – Myriapod and Boing – Jeroen was able to get them running on RISC OS in Python itself.
Having successfully done that, with a little extra time available thanks to it being the summer holidays in the Netherlands, he has turned his attention back to those first two games, and updated versions are now available – both now using Python. Both games can be downloaded from !Store, with the download containing both the BASIC and Python versions.
An important difference between Jeroen’s original BASIC conversions and the new Python versions is the graphics. In the BASIC conversions, a 256 colour graphics mode is used, but the Python versions both run in a 16 million colour mode, which do much more justice to the graphics, which were created for the book by graphics artist Dan Malone, and now benefit from anti-aliasing, shadows, and transparency.
The BASIC conversions, on the other hand, have features not present in the Python versions, such as high score lists – and given the lower colour depth are probably playable on a greater range of machines; for the higher colour depth Python versions performance is still pretty good, Jeroen tells me, but the more powerful the RISC OS hardware the better.
