Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

Here is a collection of my oldest programs and games. Spanning from about 1993 to 1996.
I did them in Turbo Pascal 7.0 in elementary school.
Simple graphical demo programs and games limited by 1990s hardware.

📜Old

Left column has screens from the earliest programs in EGA 640×350, 16 colors.
They had also only PC speaker sounds. Except music score? player (with editor) which I made later.
Like most of my early drawing on screen, everything was blinking awfully, not having V-Sync.

The Military and Sea animations (left bottom) were the biggest of my programs at the time (435 and 223 lines). But not complicated at all, only using for loops and few procedures for shortcuts.

💡New

Middle and right has screens from VGA 320×200, 256 colors, the favorite mode 13h. Which I learned from a new book.
Later I also was using 10 or 22 kHz, 8bit sounds (another book). I gathered and extracted them from wherever I could (i.e. other games, programs). Some sounds I recorded on my analog microphone.

There was a cool program for editing and playing animations on 8×8 matrix of LEDs, saving and loading them in files.

I created my first music tracker (way before SXIV). It could only play 1 pattern and there weren’t even real notes, just all letters from alphabet changing frequency improperly. It had 4 channels with oscilloscope view and was fun.

🕹️Games

I made many small games at the time. Most were for 2 players on keyboard.

• Space games (3 on top right).
  Top view, 2D, having cyclic borders, i.e. when you fly over bottom, you appear on top, same for left and right.
  Those were pretty funny games. Only Mars shooter was funnier, newer and same style.
  The fist one though was too complicated as there were only 8 directions of movement and too many weird weapons, all having own keys to use.
  The later 2 were cool and just used 4 keys to move and 2 to shoot with some ammunition buffer that slowly auto refilled.
• Frogs game
  Front (side) view, 2D, with gravity.
  Using just integer values multiplied by 1024 for more precision (so fixed point).
  Game’s idea came from my colleague. Flies appear over time and move randomly. You control a frog, jump and stick out a short tongue to catch them, until time ends. The longer you press the higher you jump, this was bit tricky to code back then. Tongue goes fast and back slower, then has some idle time.
  The second version was already great, it had up to 2000 particles from splashes and 3 types of flies.
  Ah and those pink particles were puke ?, happening when frog got a wet fly, falling slowly after being splashed. It was a lot of fun and laughing. Even more so with dying flies having sounds from e.g. Dune 2 dying troopers or Cannon Fodder ?.
  Then I already was using assembler for double buffered drawing and V-Sync. It was nice and smooth.
• 2 Planes
  Game featured 2D map of a big size (max. what 640kB allowed, I think 750×750). Scenery was created with simple drawing code for grass, trees, water etc.
  It had 2 views, 1 for each player. Map was moving, the plane was always in center.
  It was quite simple, had keys to turn, faster, slower and shoot. Weapon heated up so it had to cool down to again shoot faster. Planes were leaving smoke pixels with more damage.
  In the middle there was a green (rectangle) radar with fading dots where the planes are.
  Ah and lastly you could blow up few buildings on ground just for fun.

⏳Next

What came next were bigger games (just more content), but in the same VGA mode. Sadly I stick to it for too long, not having either fast code (DOS4GW was out of reach) or hardware. I didn’t move to bigger resolutions until I left DOS.