Introduction

This page is about games I've been involved with. In fact we were not allowed to call fietsplan a game. It is interactive, educational animation software. All games here are at least freely distributable in binary form. A ready to run version of FIETSPLAN awaits my reading of some 5" floppies.

The Tomato Game

The Tomato Game program has been written in C/C++. The source is not published, because it was an assignment of the Socialistische Partij of the Netherlands as promotional material. They consider it a trade secret.
The game is about throwing tomatoes at less-favorite (Dutch) politicians. This makes it a so-called FPS (first person shooter) game. The
1998 version of the tomato game is available for download as binary executable for Microsoft Windows 3.11 and beyond. It is a self extraction archive, so what you get is a program that must be run in order to extract the game.


The game is not of any political actuality any more, but that doesn't detract from its playability. I'm proud that some teenagers, real gamers, found the tomato game of interest. This is certainly not for the graphics, that is crude by modern or any standards.

Due to the tragic circumstances of the 2002 election a 2002 version, though it was build, is inappropriate, but political players of 1998 still deserve their tomatoes, some more than ever.

As a sidenote, this program is a testimony to the organizational stability of the Socialistische Partij. All their players are still active, and virtually none of the others, with the notable exception of the Dutch queen.


FIETSPLAN

FIETSPLAN was an assignment of a Dutch government agency responsible for traffic safety, called VVN. I was team-leader of a group of 5 involved in the program design and implementation. An other dozen or so people were involved with the educational and graphical aspects.

It is an animation of a street plan where you can run about with your bike and meet cars. If you manage to do this well, you get a certificate, but the real sport is to do it flawlessly.

The binary of this program is sitting on a few 5" floppies at my home, and they may well be the last surviving. I had a copy of the source -though not the source of the commercial libraries-, but that copy turned out unreadable after a year. I'll do my best to make available what I can.

The technical merits of this program are not obvious, until you realize that this 1985-program runs well on the original IBM XT and early clones.


To have this running on a 320 by 200 pixels monochrome screen is a real feat of graphics design.


DUNGEON

No computer system is complete without it. This is a quotation from the help of the mother of all text games dungeon. Download the Unix-version here. I salvaged this source from an MS-DOS port. This source compiles on MS-DOS (Turbo C++ 3.0) and Linux. I set the #defines to exclude curses, that is no longer generally available. It was used to scroll back and that is available anyway of you run the game from a text window in a GUI. The archive contains a Linux binary, but you can build it by extracting, then make. This may be necessary on older systems where the required libraries are not resident.

It may sound unbelievable, but this may well be the only compilable Unix version on the Internet.

My modification to the source code of dungeons are in the public domain. This mainly amounts to replacing <CR><LF> pairs by <LF> only and selection a scroll mode in the Makefile.


ROGUE

This is another classical game, the predecessor of hack that was the predecessor of larn and nethack.
I couldn't find any ready-to-play Linux version on the Internet. So here it is.

This is a role playing game, but compared to dungeon it has levels, more monsters, more fighting, and no riddles. It was the first game to have those randomizing things, different potions, wands, and maps, each time you play it. I found this version as a shell archive, distributed in small 24 kBytes parts on the Internet, in the eighties. This archive was unpacked, and 3 levels of patches applied, then another ifdef introduced on top of those already present, for Linux. This source compiles on Linux, with gcc 3.x. This source requires curses. For convenience a binary is included. Download the source including a Linux-binary here. You can build it yourself if you want it, by extracting, then make.

My modification to the source code of rogue are in the public domain. They are documented in the file bugs4. I refrained from making an official patch file. There are some loose ends, maybe after they are fixed. In particular, after playing you have to say reset;stty sane.


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