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Chopper Commando Revisited
- olliej 6y agoI always liked the wonderful game “sopwith” which I believe has been rewritten/updated over the years
- loadzero 6y agoI have not played it, but it does look to likely be an early inspiration for Chopper Commando. It would be nice if someone made a web version of 'Sopwith', too.
- ZiiS 6y agohttps://archive.org/details/msdos_Sopwith_1985 https://archive.org/details/msdos_Sopwith_1985
- mark_currie 6y agoYes Sopwith was an inspiration so was F-15 Strike Eagle and F-19 Stealth Fighter by Microprose.
- loadzero 6y agoAh, it does have a Microprose feel with the campaign, mission structure, and ejecting. Thanks for giving me permission to publish the port, and cheers for writing a game that has given people some fun memories. It's great also to see that you're still making games, 30 years on from this.
- sbuttgereit 6y agoI never played this one... but the article did take me back to a game I greatly loved: Choplifter, which I played on the c64. I remember being impressed that the helicopter in the game could pitch and yaw and such... at the time it seemed so polished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choplifter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choplifter
- transitorykris 6y agoAh yes. The Mark Currie zone. Going all the screens to the right and shooting a hole in the hill and flying through it got you re-armed. And don’t hit the text, it’s quite solid.
- RhysU 6y agoAaaaahhhhh my head! Also, the slowdowns on partially off-screen explosions.
- loadzero 6y agoAuthor here. I used to play this 2D flick-screen CGA DOS helicopter game as a kid, and I remember enjoying the simple presentation combined with what would now be called sandbox elements. I thought it was really cool that you could eject from the helicopter and still run around and do things as a little sprite dude, and then get back in and fly off. When I saw that the source was available, and had a poke around, I decided it wouldn't take (too) much effort to do a modern port, and make the game natively playable on today's machines. It was a fun little project, certainly easier than my previous game restoration (Space Invaders in C), and it was interesting to explore the creation of a young Mark Currie, cranking out a bedroom coded game in Turbo Pascal. So, here it is, a modern port of "Chopper Commando" from early 90s Turbo Pascal on DOS, to C and SDL running on modern unix (linux/mac) and the web. Enjoy.
- jrrrr 6y agoThanks for doing this! I too have a lot of nostalgia for this game, which had a depth to it beyond most of the other stuff I was playing at the time. What was the porting process like? Use any tools to assist with it?
- loadzero 6y agoI'm glad to see that others remember this fondly as well. The Pascal to C translation was a bit gruelling. I'd like to say that I'd written a fancy transpiler for it, but it came down to a 20 line ruby script, some vim macros and a ton of elbow grease. I added the functions to emulate the Turbo Pascal library as I went. This was a bit more fun, because I got to play around with implementing line drawing, circle drawing and flood filling, and really low level stuff like that. The final stages, adding in threading to handle emulating the keyboard buffer, framebuffer and PC speaker was also a lot of fun. I plan to cover at least some of these things in part two.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoWhy not use something like freepascal with SDL bindings?