Programming in Turbo Pascal 7: Bloxinies

20 October 2013 19:29

Back in the old days I wanted to program a game called Bloxinies. One of the requirements was to use the DOS-based smiley but besides that not much thought was put into the game. Sometime later the game Zeux popped up which used the smiley as main character.

Today, 2013, I fired up Turbo Pascal 7 and created a game using Borland's CGA.BGI file. It's pretty straightforward and uses only a few game-components. The maps are built using a 16x12 raster consisting of numbers from 0 to 9. This means there are not more than 10 types of objects. You can create own maps by editting LEVELS.DAT and using the following numbers:
0: Empty tile
1: Concrete wall
2: Big stone wall
3: Small brick wall
4: Boulder
5: Bloxinies
6: Diamond
7: Enemy
8: Static shooter
9: Exit door

The primary goal is to grab all the diamonds and exit through the door. Use boulders to block enemies and to block the static shooters. You can also use enemies to block shooters.

Download

Download Bloxinies here (version 1.1). The ZIP-file includes the game with 16 levels and the source code.

In-game video:

In-game screenshots:

It runs fine on my Toshiba T3100 (8MHz 286; CGA):

How to run this game on a modern PC?

Use DOSBox.

Source code

The game is programmed in Turbo Pascal 7 for DOS. I have included the source code for those who want to know how the magic is done or want to change things. The source code includes some comments to help you understand the idea. If you have ideas to optimize the game, let me know!

Version 1.1

I have updated Bloxinies to version 1.1 after seeing footage on YouTube. I noticed that the sequence of dying (after touching an enemy) wasn't always clear and I noticed that some of the early levels (especially level 3) was quite difficult. A pitfall from my side since I made the levels, knew precisely how to finish them and gained the muscle memory for them: it made me blind for the difficulty! To ease things a bit more I've increased the lives from 3 to 9

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And by the way, you can skip levels using the + button. I used this while programming and never removed that feature. You can consider it as a cheat to skip levels

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You can still download the old version (1.0) Bloxinies here.

I tried the game, works great! Despite the simple graphics and low count of game elements it's fun to play. 25, 30 years ago you could earn money with this!

Thanks!

Yesterday I've tested the game on an AMD 8088 4,77MHz (on IBM 64-256k motherboard with 256k fitted) with Paradise PVGA1A VGA card. The game runs very well on this slow machine. Next step is to run it with Hercules and a software CGA simulator.

Not bad, very retro!

Would it be able to run this game in Hercules/Monochrome mode as well?

Yes, you can run it using a CGA-emulator like SIMCGA .

I've made a few subtle changes to Bloxinies. You can now download version 1.1 here.

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