Skip to content
Trending Topics: Personal•Travel•Tech•Ramblings•Raspberry Pi

Category: Game Development

Retro-style cover artwork for Jason Brooks’ Space Invaders game, originally written using DirectX 7 in 2000 and re-released in 2026.

Space Invaders for Windows Returns

What happens when you find the source code for a DirectX 7 game you wrote 26 years ago and try compiling it on Windows 11? Rather unexpectedly, the bloody thing still works. Space Invaders lives again, now with the entirely unnecessary Who’s Your Daddy Mode.
Leave a Comment
Amstrad CPC computer displaying BASIC code for a music compiler, alongside printed code and musical notes, illustrating retro 8-bit sound programming.

Looking Back at a 1992 Amstrad CPC Music Encoder

A look back at a 1992 Locomotive BASIC utility I wrote while converting Money Matters from the BBC B to the Amstrad CPC. What began as a quick and dirty way to encode an arrangement of Fiddler on the Roof into three-channel sound turned into a small music compiler, using note parsing, CPC sound periods, and interrupt-driven playback to keep the menu music running smoothly in the background.

Retro-style cassette cover artwork for a Knight’s Tour program on the Amstrad CPC, showing a numbered chessboard, a knight piece, and a glowing path representing the solution across all 64 squares.

Knights Tour – My First Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

A look at my first entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition for the Amstrad CPC: a Knight’s Tour solver written in just 8 lines of Locomotive BASIC. Using Warnsdorff’s heuristic, the program solves a centuries-old chess puzzle in real time while drawing the board, rendering a knight graphic, and displaying each move on screen.

Retro cassette cover artwork for “Pavement Panic” on the Amstrad CPC, showing a pixel character running along a road while surrounded by colourful ghost enemies, styled like a vintage 1980s arcade game.

Pavement Panic – My Second Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

My second entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition is Pavement Panic, a fast-paced ghost-dodging survival game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by simple road-crossing games, it starts gently, then quickly turns chaotic as the ghosts speed up and survival time becomes your score.

Retro cassette cover artwork for “Volt Maze” on the Amstrad CPC, featuring a glowing orange electrified maze, a small green player character, and a red robotic hunter, styled like a classic 1980s home computer game.

Voltmaze – My Third Entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Competition

Voltmaze is my third entry into the 2026 BASIC10 Liner Competition… a procedurally generated maze game for the Amstrad CPC written in just 10 lines of BASIC. Inspired by classic 8-bit design and powered by a stack-driven depth-first search algorithm, it’s a small game with surprisingly sharp teeth… electrified walls, flickering hazards, roaming hunters, and a new maze every level.