Alley Cat & Sopwith (DOS) - Classics from the CGA-era - Saturday Afternoon Gaming
7Exploring the magical purple, cyan, and white/black world of CGA with these two DOS classics!
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I'm Gaming Jay: Youtube gamer, let's player, fan of retro games, and determined optimist... Normally I'm working my way through the book 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE in my Let's Play 1001 Games series. This is a great book with a ton of classic retro games but it doesn't have everything and it's even missing some of my favorite video games. Hence, in Saturday Afternoon Gaming, screw it, I'm just going to play whatever I want!
In this series I will be playing some of the best retro games that don't appear in the 1001 VIDEO GAMES YOU MUST PLAY BEFORE YOU DIE book. So pull up a chair, slap on your headphones, and join me as babble aimlessly through some of my most favourite classic games! And hey, if you have ideas or suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments below. I'm always looking for more games to try! Today we play...
Alley Cat
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alley_Cat_(video_game)
Alley Cat is a video game created by Bill Williams and published by Synapse Software for the Atari 8-bit family in 1983. The player controls "Freddy the Cat," who enters people's homes through open windows to perform various tasks in order to reach his love, Felicia.[1] A port for the IBM PC as a self-booting disk and the IBM PCjr were published in 1983 by IBM. These use four-color CGA graphics.
Alley Cat was based on a one-screen prototype by John Harris. Harris had become unhappy with the direction of the game and handed it over to Williams who expanded the concept into a finished game.
In the main screen, which is the alley, the player is presented with a tall fence in front of an apartment building with several windows. Each window periodically opens to throw out random objects (a phone, shoe, etc.). Every once in a while a dog may come running along the bottom edge of the screen. If the cat touches this dog, they get into a fight and one life is taken away.
Sopwith
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)
Sopwith is a side-scrolling shoot 'em up created by David L. Clark of BMB Compuscience in 1984. It was originally written to run on the IBM PC under MS-DOS. The game involves piloting a Sopwith biplane, attempting to bomb enemy buildings while avoiding fire from enemy planes and various other obstacles.
Sopwith was created to demonstrate the "Imaginet" proprietary networking system developed by BMB Compuscience.[1] David L. Clark, employed as a programmer at BMB, developed Sopwith as a multiplayer game. The multiplayer function would not operate without the Imaginet hardware and drivers. However, single-player functionality was also included, with the player flying alone or against computer-controlled planes. Because of this, the game was widely distributed, even though the Imaginet system itself was not hugely successful. Sopwith 2 added the ability to play multiplayer over an async serial interface, but a BMB dictionary driver (NAMEDEV.SYS) and a BMB serial communications driver (SERIAL.SYS or SERWORK.SYS) are then needed.
All versions of Sopwith feature four-color CGA graphics. Sound is provided by the PC speaker in the form of music and sound effects. The C and x86 assembly source code to Sopwith was released in 2000,[2] at first under a non-commercial use license, but later under the GNU GPL at the request of fans.[3][4]
Following the source code release, SDL Sopwith was written as a C port/rewrite of Sopwith 2: The Author's Edition written in 2001 by Simon Howard which utilizes the Simple DirectMedia Layer library to interact with graphics and sound hardware, all while preserving the CGA graphics of the original game.[5] With the source code of this version, SDL Sopwith can be theoretically compiled for any system which has an SDL library available for it, including non-x86 systems.