mattgodbolt / onslaught Goto Github PK

An unreleased, unfinished BBC Micro game from 1993. Written by Rich Talbot-Watkins and Matt Godbolt while they were both still at secondary school, it was due to be published as a series of articles in Acorn User until they (understandably) dropped support for the BBC Micro.

Short version: the source is in AllSource, in all its early-90s 6502 assembly glory.

The game can be played in your browser (via jsbeeb), or the SSD can be loaded into your favourite emulator.

It is presented here as the original SSD image available also on the Stairway To Hell archive, original-disc.ssd, the disc unpacked, and as the source in decoded files. BBC BASIC programs are tokenised, and their detokenised equivalents are in the top level. The original code used *LOAD (in Core) to load in three parts of the codebase. For convenience the combined code is in AllSource, which is the best place to start reading code.

Charmingly, the !Help is written to the Acorn User team, so you can see what two teenagers thought were the most important things to get across.

We believe we are giving the 6502 a good run for its money - printing the whole screen every frame at a frame rate of 25 Hz, with up to 16 monsters, 32 bullets/tokens and 128 dots on screen at once! As the Beeb falls foul to the technological progress that created the ARM chip, we think that this game could be said to be a parting shot, given that things have pretty much dried up these days.