Blagtron: new browser version!

Long time no post, I know. 🙂

Still, I couldn’t resist sharing the new web-based version of Blagtron (or BlaGTroN, if you prefer the classic capitalization)—my light-cycle game from 1994! Originally crafted in Turbo Pascal starting back in 1989 (yes, I was still in high school then) and later ported to Borland Pascal 7, it’s a nostalgic trip back to the MS-DOS era and the chaos of having a bunch of friends hunched over a single keyboard. It’s also genuinely fun to play!

A 4-player game of Blagtron

There’s no installation and no ads. It supports 2 to 5 players (plus a 1-player practice mode), works with keyboards and game controllers (no touchscreen controls; those wouldn’t suit this style of game), and more features are on the way. Eventually, that might include bots, though not anytime soon—I want to preserve its multiplayer roots for now.

Explaining the keys for you youngsters who never shared
one single keyboard with 3 more people. 🙂

I lost the original Pascal source code about 30 years ago. However, modern AI managed to decompile the old 16-bit MS-DOS executable (available from my previous post, for instance) and reconstruct a working Pascal codebase, which was then translated to JavaScript. I took the opportunity to implement a few ideas I’ve toyed with over the past three decades, but I deliberately kept the core logic true to the 1994 original.

Give it a spin, especially if you have a friend or two around (the fun factor scales exponentially once you hit 3+ players). If you have feedback or suggestions, feel free to drop me a line via the contact link on the game’s page. (Keep in mind I won’t be adding anything that radically alters the core gameplay, though I might stash good ideas for future projects!)

What you need to play:

  • PC, Mac, or Linux: Supports up to 4 players on a single keyboard. Alternatively, any player can use a gamepad.
  • 5-player matches: Requires at least one gamepad (or up to five, if you have enough controllers for everyone).
  • Mobile / Tablets: While touchscreen inputs aren’t supported, you can connect Bluetooth keyboards and controllers just like on a desktop.

The Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old today

Sinclair ZX81Yes, according to Wikipedia, Sinclair Research’s second most successful computer (if we don’t count revisions of the ZX Spectrum as separate “computers”) was released on March 5, 1981. Exactly 30 years ago today.

For more about the ZX81 and the history behind it, I direct you to this excellent post, Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old tomorrow (written, as you can guess, yesterday). Spot the ad for the 16KB “massive add-on memory” expansion. 🙂 And now for some more personal history after the break…

Continue reading The Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old today

ZX80 programming? Man, I feel young again. :)

Between yesterday and today, I took part in a thread in the comp.sys.sinclair newsgroup.

Yes, a newsgroup. Some of you may even remember what those are. 🙂

And the thread was about programming. In BASIC. On the ZX80. A computer from when I was 6 years old, and which I’ve never even had in my possession (though I had a ZX81 clone, the Timex Sinclair 1500, when I was about 9 or 10).