Phantasar Archives: Snakey II

Introduction in general

Sometimes when you search your old archives, you can find some of the old shit you created in the past. It happened to me yesterday, and thankfully the game still worked, and it was also quite easy to wrap it up for distribution.

HOWEVER! This game is THAT old that it will run in neither Windows nor Linux nor Mac nor any other system we might have today. This game requires either a real MS-DOS PC or an emulator such as DosBox. (instructions on how to install and run it in DosBox can be found down below).

The Game

Snakey is just a short snake who keeps getting longer and longer. He has to pick up all "Blue Dots" in order to complete each puzzle. Optionally you can pick up money bags.

A few notes on the game

• Some files or even in game you might see some traces of the fact that the game USED to be a ShareWare project. Any references to that are OUTDATED!!! The game is now freeware, and may be freely distributed in any way possible as long as no money or any sort of trade is involved and as long as the game is in its original state (not a single byte may be modified).

• A debug thing marked all secret walls you can move through with a money bag. Since I still got the original source files (and the original Pascal compiler I used back then) I SHOULD be able to fix that, however my libraries are missing and unless I recover them I cannot fix this issue.

• To put it even stronger unless I recover them I cannot fix ANY bug at all for that matter.

• ALWAYS and I repeat ALWAYS keep the game's age in mind when judging this game. Back in the day we had no game maker, blitzmax, construct, clickteam fusion or any other tool making game creation easy. AniVGA by Kai Rohrbacher was all I had at the time, and that AniVGA was (with all due resepect to Kai) not really a great lib to work with, but it enabled me to do something and it was free, so I still gotta thank Kai for creating it.

• Yes, the game is slow, I know that. See statement above.

• I hope you were NOT expecting this game to use the GameJolt API :-P

• If you have Windows 3.11 (or any other version of Windows that came before Windows 95, as back then it was only a DOS application) installed in either DOSBox or your MS-DOS PC. DON'T EVER run the game while Windows 3.11 is running. The game will not run well.

• Yes, the name "JBC Soft" does refer to me. I used that name back then, I switched to Phantasar productions once my Phantasar saga began to grow and I thought the name fit me better.

The "WRAPPED" version of the game

This contains a complete 'ready-to-go' wrap of the game. In Windows and Mac, everything you need in in the wrapper. Just download and unzip it and running the .exe file/.app bundle should run the game.

In Linux, it's still easy, but still you need to do something more. In Linux things must always go "the hard way", I guess. In Linux you need two dependencies: Python 2.7 (most distros have Python included by default) and DOSBox itself. You will need to install these yourself manually (sorry, I have no script yet to do it for you, because the procedure to do this differs per distro). If you got both installed then the file Snakey2 should run and do the rest.

Of course, these wrapped versions SHOULD all three work in the gamejolt client.

If you prefer to set everything up on either a "real pc" yourself or to set everything well up in DOSBox yourself just download one of the zipfiles I specifically uploaded for this purpose and read the instructions below.

Installation instructions for a REAL DOS PC.

You still got one? GREAT! The game should run on MS-DOS 5.0 or higher. I tested the game in MS-DOS 6.2 on a Pentium 75, with 8 megs of RAM (though I doubt you need that, as I'm not sure if the game actually USED EMS or XMS, you'll have to figure that out on your own I'm afraid. Cut me some slack, it's about 20 years ago, I coded this game).

If you have a PKUNZIP version lower than 2.0 you should download the "real dos pc" distribution. PKUNZIP 2.0 or higher should support the download for modern computers (the older versions do not support the "deflate" compression algorithm). And then it goes this way:

		
			C:\>md SN2
C:\>cd SN2
C:\SN2>PKUNZIP <path>SN2D.ZIP
		
	

This should do the trick. Running the game is just starting up the SN2.EXE file.
I do recommend never to turn off your computer while the game is running, but to quit it properly first. It should not be that harmful if you don't quit the game first, though a few crazy responses might appear on your screen otherwise. ;)

Installation instructions for DosBox

If you are a bit more pro in DosBox, you may of course come up with your own methods, but I guess you don't need this explanation anyway if you are. ;)

I shall assume that you make in your own "home" folder a folder named Snakey2 and that you unzipped all contents of the zip file there. Please note, when you go for this method only download the normal distribution, as modern zip tools can be a bit allergic to the older zip structures and the "Implode" and "Shrink" compression algorithms.

Once the unzipping is done, download and install DosBox.
Launch DosBox and you should see a prompt looking this this "Z:>".
If that's the case we're ready to go:

Windows users only:

		
			Z:\>mount s C:\users\<username>\Snakey2
		
	

Of course you need to substitute "<username>" with the username you use in Windows.

Users of an OS in the Unix family such as BSD, Mac and Linux.

		
			Z:\>mount s ~/Snakey2
		
	

Now in all OSes goes that you can now start the game like this:

		
			Z:\>s:
S:\>SN2
		
	

The controls are easy. You just have to use the directional keys to control Snakey.
You cannot use WASD to control Snakey (the WASD key combination was not common at the time in which this game was written).

Tags: #english #msdos #dos #dosbox #old #puzzle #retro #keyboard #snake #classic #turbopascal #pascal

Lastly, one lesser important thing. If you care to know, the game was originally written in Turbo Pascal.