Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies were my favourite pinballs games on Amiga (and then Psycho Pinball on PC). I know that nowadays e.g. Pinball FX3 provides so many bells and whistles and boards... but I often find all these boards to be kind of overloaded and so busy with animations, sounds and flashing lights... Maybe it is like with football games - I understand that FIFA or PES are much more complete games but the arcade charm of Sensible Soccer makes it a winner for me.<p>This or just a nostalgia factor...
This is cute:<p><pre><code> DB " HI HACKER! PLEASE DON'T CRACK THIS PROGRAM! IT WAS MADE BY"
DB " THE DEMO GROUP TSP. WE NEED THE MONEY TO BE ABLE TO KEEP ON"
DB " CODING GAMES FOR THE PC! THIS PROGRAM ISN'T HARD TO CRACK, SO"
DB " MAKE A DEMO INSTEAD TO PROVE YOUR SKILLS... IF YOU CRACK IT"
DB " WE WILL HATE YOU 4EVER! HAVE A NICE DAY! :-) "
</code></pre>
I remember back in the day I always loved seeing these little messages in hexdumps of programs I was trying to understand.
For reference: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-VT8Hs3OhY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-VT8Hs3OhY</a><p>It is so obvious from the style and music that a demo group (The Silents) were behind this game. I'm still loving it to this day. Missing getting boxes of demo discs :)<p>Also: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o96I_UfSdIU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o96I_UfSdIU</a>
Man, Jesper Kyd was great back then already...
Developed 30 years ago and in Sweden, judging by the code comments :)<p><a href="https://github.com/historicalsource/pinballfantasies/blob/main/FANTASIE.ASM#L18" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/historicalsource/pinballfantasies/blob/ma...</a>
Ooh, this is neat. Long time since I've had to read assembler. The first thing that jumps to mind is wanting to read the tests for this, which of course don't exist. In retrospect, creating this seems herculean; there's so much knowledge about how it should work that lives only in somebody's head, and only as long as they can hold it all there.
The subroutine "set_360x350" (in fantasie.asm) brings me back to teenage VGA hacking.<p>It starts with the standard 320x200x256c MCGA mode (13h), then proceeds to tweak a few dozen video card registers into a combination that produces a 360*350 frame buffer.<p>Just don't fry your CRT while trying to come up with the magic register combo!
For both preservation and nostalgia, this is fantastic to see. Several of my formative years were consumed by Pinball Fantasies on the Amiga. I still play it regularly on FS-UAE and a (seemingly unmaintained / defunct) port on iOS.
I was not familiar with this one - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3mQqdvm6lI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3mQqdvm6lI</a>