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Planet X3 is oldschool … very oldschool.
With the good old days, programmer David Murray says not only for fun. Murray is known as "The 8-Bit Guy" on Youtube and has successfully funded his strategy game Planet X3 on Kickstarter with over $ 110,000. Nearly 2,500 fans have been found who are not afraid of coarse pixel pieces and awkward controls.
Because Planet X3 will be written on an MS-DOS system and will also be released. Yes, exactly this age-old operating system of the 80s and 90s, which had to go without an intelligent graphical user interface and could only be used by text input. Experiments with such stone age devices could already collect the only developer. The predecessor, Planet X2, appeared a year ago for the C64 and sold about 500 times.
Actually Murray wanted to program a single port for MS-DOS, but then decided to develop a real suite. Unlike the bread box, it now has more available memory, which it fills with eight different buildings. In an interview with Gamasutra he talks about the difficult development process, but also "lost art" of MS-DOS programming.
Here's what Planet X3 looks like on an emulator for MS-DOS games.
More report: 35 years of C64 – Bread basket for the world
Floppy Disks and Dead Links
Planet X3's code written in Notepad, then converts it into a language that MS-DOS can use. He then tests his code with an emulator on his (modern) computer. Again and again, the files are transferred to a floppy disk and then played on a Tandy 1000, year of release 1984.
Because, of course, the old storage media are not too short. In addition to a purely digital version for the local emulator, the strategy game should also appear on a floppy disk (720k and 360k). But that turns out to be a big challenge, says Murray.
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Every graphic, every map, every unit takes away a bit of space and requires the most accurate planning possible. For example, 360k floppies need to do without VGA graphics (certainly at high resolution). But especially if the programmer has problems, troubleshooting is anything but easy:
"You googled a programming problem and then found a forum where it says:" Here they do that, go to this link " has probably been dead for 10 years. "
About 1,700 of the 2,500 supporters get the digital version and the floppy version for the planned release in May 2019 . And not only David Murray has a very special love for MS-DOS. The author of Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin swears by the operating system and only uses such a computer in his work.
Sources: Kickstarter, Gamasutra
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