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This was made for the 2007 Look Around You competition at Retro Remakes. It's a remake of a BBC micro game by Allotment Software. It was a technical triumph. With large multi coloured sprites, and fast paced gameplay, this game was akin to something the legendary Nik Pelling (aka Orlando P. Pilchard) of Aardvark Software was famed for coding. The game took almost 3 years to code - way longer than any other BBC micro game - even Elite only took 9 months tops to write. But every stop was pulled to create the game in order to get the right atmosphere and speed within the game. Graphically, the game had huge multi coloured sprites, which on their own would have taken up masses of CPU in order to render on the machine. But a star filed was also needed as the setting was in space, so the 6522 VIA chip was considerably rejigged and recoded to allow for the 100 interrupt driven star field. Another fascinating fact was that this game was a disc-only based game. No suprise there seeing how the game contained almost 64K of graphics. The fascinating thing was that the game was actually distributed via cassette. Due to rising costs of 5 1/4 floppy discs at the time, a simple C12 cassette worked out at 1/8 the price. So the decision was taken to ship the game on cassette, but would contain a loader program that would transfer the whole game onto disc at the user end. A new and improved copy protection was needed for the BBC micro, one that had not even been thought of. The only thing that all BBC micros had in common was that it had in internal speaker for the sound. So was borne the AudioLock Copy protection system. A series of filters and layers of foil was placed on top of the speaker to refilter the audio so that spoken words could be typed as passcodes. |
