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Skyrun

Skyrun was more a technology demo than a game. It had two sprites (a ship, and a shield that appears if you hold down space) and full-screen scolling. At the time I was developing on a 286, so these weren't entirely unimpressive.

Here's a screenshot:

peng screenshot

The controls, incidentally, are the comma and period keys to move left and righ, and the space bar to use your shield. (Which costs points).

My 'sprites' were created by hardcoding commands to directly write to screen memory. At some point I actually wrote code to take a bitmap image and generate this code, to be fed into a compiler. Unfortunately it turned out that the size of my sprites was then limited by how much code the compiler could accept in one chunk.

This and many other problems disappeared when I started using Allegro, a games programming library.

Download: skyrun.zip

Note that it needs to be run under DOSBox or on an old DOS machine.