One final, small piece of news for this year’s London Show comes from me, wearing my Soft Rock Software hat. (And if I can find it, I might even bring it, to prove it really exists!)
If you head for the Soft Rock table, you’ll be able to see and play Floopy, which has been resurrected in time for the show.
Floopy was originally written all the way back in 1993 – yes, thirty three years ago – and it was the first full program I ever wrote in C. At some stage, it saw a small tweak to make it run on a later version of RISC OS 3 (probably 3.7), but other than that, nothing.
In fact, because of countless changes of hardware in my home office, the source code actually became lost for quite some time, only being found again a few years ago – and after one failed attempt to compile it on a more modern version of RISC OS (and using a much more recent compiler), I put it to one side and did my best not to make eye contact with it.
Until now.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been looking at the code, fixing the problems that prevented it from compiling (and there were many), and doing what was necessary to make it playable again.
It’s still a long way off being suitable for release. It needs new graphics, for a start, because it’s now in a higher resolution screen mode than it was originally, yet still using its 1993 graphics; as a result the play area of the game only fills just over half the screen – but it’s running and playable.
If you want a copy of the game, you’ll have to make plans for another show visit – that’ll be to RISC OS North, on 10th April, 2027, where the resurrected Floopy will be included on a refreshed Soft Rock Software Collection disc.
