26 years ago, I created my ownDirectX sprite and gaming engine. To demonstrate the API, I wrote a series of little games that developers could use as examples and reference code.

Then work and full-time jobs got in the way of doing fun stuff.

Today, of course, we have Unity, Godot, Unreal and many more game engines. My code is so old, there’s little point continuing in its current form.

However, Imagine my surprise when I found the original source on an archive disk, loaded it onto my Mac running Windows 11 under Parallels, hit Compile… and the bloody thing worked.

A bit of tweaking later and it now runs on modern Windows with x86, x64 and ARM64 builds.

Which is frankly shocking, considering I’ve got macOS games I wrote only 15 years ago that wont compile anymore because the APIs have changed so much.

Anyhoo…

There are much better Space Invaders clones out there. This isnt a painstakingly faithful recreation and never pretended to be, it was essentially a demo designed to throw lots of moving sprites around on old hardware using DirectX7.

But it has music, sound effects, controller support, windowed and fullscreen modes and, to stress test the sprite engine, a “Whos Your Daddy Mode” included as standard.

Even better, I’ve tested the resurrected version on Linux using Wine, and macOS using CrossOver and Parallels, and it seems perfectly happy there too.

So if you fancy giving a 26-year-old piece of code a spin, have at it. Its completely free.

And then we can answer the important question:

Who’s got the highest score on WHOS YOUR DADDY MODE?

https://muckypaws.itch.io/space-invaders