Category Archives: Games

Software created for entertainment that you can play actively

Amiga Breathless for PC

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This project is about the porting of Amiga Breathless for PC with modern GPU hardware. If you like this project and you want that it will be continued in the future, please make a donation to support my work. It will be appreciated.

Downloads

Demo #2

After 4 years (!), I've found the time to release the second demo of Breathless, which is basically a rebuild with the latest version of TextureMind version. There are lot of improvements, the most relevant ones are the support for Linux (only Ubuntu24 for now) and AMD graphics cards (it should work on Intel series too, but it's untested). Another improvements concern program shaders, now the lava is rendered with a program shader bound in the material, instead of the original texture. Hopefully, the next demo release shouldn't take so long :-)

Windows x86_64 (portable):
Download (5.7 MB)

Linux x86_64 (portable):
Ubuntu 24 - Download (10.4 MB)

Demo #1

This is the first demo of Breathless for PC. In this demo, you can turn around your view with the mouse and set forward with the up/down cursors, eventually go up and down with the left / right mouse buttons. You can fly around the third stage with no collision detection applied. In the future demos, I will implement an actual walk with collision detection, and the missing code to open the doors.

As you can see, the graphics aspect is very simple without any lights applied, sky, characters or animated textures. That's because the 3D engine is still under development. As next step, I will introduce a new lighting system with PBR. I do not exclude that I will implement also a ray-tracing renderer in the future.

Background

The remake of Breathless was an old dream of when I was 14, along other titles like Gloom, Alien Breed 3D, Super Stardust, Mario 64 and so on. This work is part of another bigger project that is called TextureMind Framework, developed to facilitate the creation of these kind of projects, like games, demos, presentations and so on. The idea to make a remake of Breathless in this moment started when I saw that the 3D engine with Vulkan was stable enough to render any kind of map imported with AssImp library. So why don't import Breathless map and use the same 3D engine to render them?

I was amazed by the idea of rendering Amiga Breathless with Vulkan libraries. The biggest obstacle was to import the maps from the old format in GLD, that was more suitable for raycasting than polygonal rendering. I started downloading all the material from Aminet, with this link:

http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/Breathless-1996-Source

Then I studied the format from the original source code in C, in particular the map editor. The first important obstacle was that the editor was programmed for loading the map only in uncompressed format and all the maps were compressed in an unknown format called SLZ. I got 0 results on Google. I didn't know the format and I was about to abandon the project.

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Super Mario Bros for Amstrad CPC 464

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This is an attempt to port the famous Super Mario Bros for NES to Amstrad CPC 464. It has been programmed by me in C89 and Z80 assembly. The current status of the project is blocked but not abandoned. I started this project in 2015 but I never had time to continue it because of my current job and thousand of other projects. Recently, I found the time to cleanup and release the .dsk that you see in the latest youtube video:

If you click the "Download" button, you can get the .dsk with the first playable demo of SMB for Amstrad CPC 464. You can run it with any Amstrad CPC emulator, like WinApe. Do not expect a playble game, this is just a demo but you can still control the player with the same physics of the original title for NES. Enjoy!

Background

When i was a little kid I remember that i really wanted to create a Super Mario Bros game for the amstrad cpc 464. Now that I am 33 and I work as a software engineer I asked myself: why don't you make your old dream come true? :) Finally I found the time to create a demo with the famous first Level 1-1 of Super Mario Bros. The horizontal hardware scrolling needs a double buffer in order to get an accuracy of 4 pixels. The demo runs on original Amstrad CPC 464 speed emulated by Caprice. It is pretty fast and can loop horizontally with a limit of 512 tiles meanwhile the level 1-1 takes only 212 tiles. I readjusted the original smb graphics to fit a 256x192 Mode 1 with 4 colors. I really like the effect of the gray scale map mixed with the blue sky, like in the original NES game. This demo has been programmed with SDCC in C and Z80 assembly.

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An old Mario64 clone (abandoned)

Years ago I coded a 3d engine to create my own clone of super mario 64. The name of the project was Chronicle Time Quest and it never reached its final release or a version that was remotely playable. Unfortunately it was abandoned years ago for lack of time, resources and interests. However, it was  usefull as coding experience and the result wasn't so bad at all, so I have decided to publish this video to show something about it.

Probably this project will be restored as soon as possible, with a new concept (probably similar to the mario galaxy one) and a totally new 3d engine. If you like this idea or the video or the concept or whatever you want, please, write a comment to let me know what you think about it. Thanks.

Gianpaolo Ingegneri
Copyright @ 2010 – All right reserved

Super Ball Smasher

Rilasciato finalmente in versione completa questo clone di Pang che ho programmato qualche tempo fa. Potrete usufruire di 50 stages distribuiti in 5 livelli di gioco con ambientazioni a tema e musiche suggestive create appositamente per immergere il giocatore nel clima del livello senza degenerare nel fastidio della ripetitività.

Il concept, la grafica e la musica sono totalmente originali e studiati per offrire una interessante variazione al solito e monotono schema dei cloni di pang, non rischiando di appesantire il gioco ma rendendolo al contrario più divertente e longevo. Il boss di fine gioco cerca oltremodo di ripagare le aspettative del giocatore, proiettandolo in una sfida finale non eccessivamente complessa, ma neanche troppo banale, con lo scopo di concretizzare in una vittoria finale il lungo cammino affrontato attraverso i 5 livelli di gioco. L'intero progetto è stato creato in poco tempo e usando software opensource. L'unica versione disponibile è momentaneamente per pc/windows, che potete scaricare cliccando direttamente qui (download). Buon divertimento.

Gianpaolo Ingegneri.