Comet Busters! 1.4

1996 · MS-DOS · Windows 3.x · Arcade · Steven Hugg

Comet Busters! 1.4 Registered Version w/ Source Code Use arrow keys and space bar for player 1. (NOTE: Sound does not yet work, requires WAVMIX16) From the original Comet Busters! web page: "You think you've seen it all? Play the mutant offspring of the grandpappy of video games -- with much awesome graphics, sound, and arcade action for Windows 3.1/95! Evil saucers, alien cronies, and flying chunks of dead planets are all waiting to tear you apart! Celebrate your video gaming roots and download Comet Busters!" Comet Busters! started as an experiment to try and learn Windows programming. These were the days of 16-bit Windows, before DirectX, even before WinG (the primitive ancestor of Direct2D). There wasn't even a sound API in those days (1991), much less a joystick or sprite API. I used Borland Pascal for Windows 1.0, which later became Delphi. You could coerce BP into doing whatever evil you'd otherwise do in C -- Comet is sprinkled with plenty of inline assembler. The original versions of CB didn't support WinG, so they had no access to the framebuffer. The 286's of the time weren't fast enough to command an entire redraw every frame. So all of the sprite-drawing had to be done using the region functions in the Windows API. This turned out to be some very convoluted logic, but it worked. Only problem was that each object had an ugly black rectangle around it. In later versions I'd use WinG, but with my own bit-blitting and dirty-region-redrawing routines. All versions I think had pixel-perfect collisions. I was amazed at the feedback I got from the game. I asked for $9.00 for registration in the help file, and uploaded it to a BBS, not expecting to receive so much as a postcard. To my surprise, I soon was getting up to six registrations in a single day, from all over the globe! CB soon was appearing on compilation CD's -- one was a Japanese floppy-disk set, one was a French half-porn/half-games CD, and one appeared in the Best Buy $1.99 bin with CB as the headliner. But even today, it's a fun game. It was the first *decent* arcade-style game for Windows (I believe) and had awesome multiplayer support. I remember trying to fit four guys on one keyboard in my dorm room, while bullets and screamed insults flew everywhere. If someone had a suggestion or tweak to the gameplay, I went right into the BP editor, made the change, compiled, and started the game up again. Let's hear it for progressive refinement! :) COMET BUSTERS! IMMORTALS (High Score List) 1. RGJ R. Gregg Johnson 178,920 2. TJP Tim Peterson 136,060 3. JRL J. R. Lorence 119,560 4. SKP Stephen K. Palmer 93,620 5. BPD Brian Dugan 83,190 6. DON Donald Rothfuss 67,640 7. MRB Michael Bennett 63,660 8. DJK Daniel J. Karnes 63,080 9. ELR Erin L. Rothfuss 55,960 10. DOH Dennis O. Hugg 55,280