alienbashii/AlienBash_src.readme

Short:        Assembly sourcecodes for "Alien Bash II"
Author:       Glenn Cumming
Uploader:     aminet aminet net
Type:         game/shoot
Architecture: generic

These are the assembly sources (and graphics, sounds, level data etc.) for the
"Chaos Engine" clone Alien Bash II:

http://hol.abime.net/5406

The data was found by "Higgy" on an old nearly dead Amiga harddrive he
he got his hands on in January 2014. When he googled the name "Glen Cumming",
he stumbled across a thread on an Amiga forum, where Amiga user Prowler was
undertaking heroic efforts to rescue the Alien Bash II sources from a stack of
190 partially corrupted or dead floppy disks:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=934914#post934914

Together, Higgy and Prowler managed to backup the five partitions to the PC
and make sure all the files are intact.

This archives contains the contents of the "Code" and "Scratch" partitions.
The other partitions ("Workbench", "Tools", "Games") were left out, because
they contained copyrighted works from other sources (a complete Workbench
distribution, compilers and linkers, DPaint, Audiomaster...).

Note that this archive contains complete and unchecked backups of the two
partitions mentioned above, there is at least one unreleased game demo
(Scratch/exe/squizdemo) in there, including full source code (Code/platform/).
This should be split down into different archives, but this mess needs to be
tackled by somebody with assembly skills who can verify if anything is missing.

This code is available under the following license, as stated by Mr. Glen
Cumming in the above thread:

"I am happy for every scrap of code on my disks to be made available to
whoever wants it - I only ask that the really embarassing stuff is erased
(lots) and any potentially libelous messages (or swears) in any of the
code/scrolling messages are removed."

The following notes are from Glen Cummings, after he reviewed the contents of
this archive:

=========
ggcumming
=========

Hi all,

First thanks to Prowler for sorting all this out - a very dedicated Amiga
enthusiast indeed!

Just some quick notes from what I can remember after looking at the code.

1) I started mucking around with linking before I finished - the code that
gets linked can be brought back into the main assemble but for now to build
the code you need to :

i) Assemble main.s as a linkable file
ii) Asemble the four files in glens_code/link_code seperately (as linkable)
iii) You will then have five files which can be linked - see the scratch:link
directory - that's where the bits went and there is a link.bat file to create
the final executable - that can be run as is (picks ups data from
scratch:game_files)

2) The maps are all in scratch:ABII_MAPS - you can load the prj/level1.prj
into the map editor which loads level1 and the graphics block pages. There is
some documentation on the map editor in the code:newmaptool/docs directory -
note the overview function is useful as it shows the entire map - a point on
the overview can then be clicked to centre there - once the functions are
understood maps can be chucked together really quickly

An alienbashII map is two parts - a 16-bit word map for the blocks and an
additional 8-bit map (of the same size) for aliens - these are editable in the
tool - the aliens appear as numbers over the map.

The only bit missing at the moment is the special versions of the block pages
which indicate specific blocks for walking over which trigger scripts in the
code - however the code could be examined and the numbers added back in.

So the code assembles (note need 2mb extra ram for stock 1200), the maps are
editable - final bit is compressing (not looked at that yet but code is on
there) and modifying the in-game data to support the map - and trying to make
the game more interesting to play!

Happy hacking

ps. play squizdemo - much more fun (quite hard with keyboard - need to get
speed up before jumping over things, pull down for crushing enemies and second
fire button will throw balls when picked up)