Over the last couple of weeks, there have been a small handful of announcements arrive at the RISCOSitory bunker that I’ve been unable to deal with immediately, instead putting them on hold. As such you’ll see a small clutch of posts appearing shortly – and this one is actually a combination of two announcements, both from the same source and covering the same subject matter in two parts.
Some time ago, Jeroen Vermeulen developed and released RISC OS ports of all the games covered in a book published by the Raspberry Pi people, called Code the Classics. The first few started out in BBC BASIC (using the AMCOG Development Kit) until the RISC OS port of Python reached a good enough state, at which point Python versions were released – that being the programming language used for the versions in the book.
Jeroen has updated the RISC OS versions of those games for two main reasons. The first was a request to (if possible) make them run in a full-screen 1080p mode, and the second was a desire on his own part to improve their user interface.
With that in mind, early this month he released updates to two of the games (Myriapod and Boing), with the remainder (Infinite Bunner, Cavern, and Substitute Soccer) more recently, with improvements that include them starting in desktop mode, rather than full-screen mode, a new menu to allow the user to set up the controls, sound, screen resolution, graphics quality, etc, support for a game controller, and more.
The new versions can all be downloaded for free from !Store.
In addition to the second announcement, relating to the second batch of the Code the Classics games, Jeroen also included news of a completely new release – Cherry Bomb.
Like the other games, this one started life elsewhere, in this case from a series of tutorials on a YouTube game development channel called Lazy Devs Academy, run by Krystian Majewski. Trying to learn from the tutorials, Jeroen converted a couple of them to BBC BASIC, and more recently to Python/Pygame, with Cherry Bomb being an example of the latter – and with Krystian’s permission, Jeroen is now able to release it for RISC OS (but if you want to play it on other platforms, Krystian’s version is also available, and there is also a Ko-Fi page to support his efforts).
The game is a shoot ’em up – or as Krystian calls it, a ‘shmup’, not unlike Space Invaders or Galaga, in which you control a ship at the bottom of the screen and must shoot your way through wave after wave of aliens attacking from above. The goal is no more complicated than to destroy all of the aliens in each wave in order to progress to the next.
Lives are obviously lost when your ship is destroyed, but for some inexplicable reason the aliens occasionally drop cherries – and when you collect ten of these, you gain a life.
As with the Code the Classics games, this one can be downloaded from !Store.
