Homemade RIP OFF cocktail table arcade machine.

Sometimes people surprise you – and this happened to me recently. Earlier this year, Stephan D from Germany, wrote to me to tell me that he loved my remake of Rip Off and asked if he could build a Rip Off cocktail arcade cabinet and use my game and logo for it? Naturally I said yes.

I have always loved vector games and back in 2007 I decided to remake Rip Off (which was one of my favorites) for the PC. It was enormously fun to make and I’m especially proud of the state-machine behind the enemies that decide their behaviour. And nothing beats my sigh of relief when I had to optimise my code at the end of the project – because it slowed to a crawl when there were many enemies on screen at the same time … and it worked. But I digress.

 

Back to Stephan now.

 

Two months passed and he sent me a new mail; “the cabinet was done” and attached 5 pictures. The one at the top with a “Tardis Remakes” logo instead of the Cinematronics logo (the rest are below). And not only that – the cabinet is also made to allow two players playing at the same time. Awesome! It’s only one of two games I’ve made that has a two-player mode, but this was never intended to be placed in a cabinet – especially not a cocktail one, so there is no option for flipping or rorating the screen … but I guess that if Stephan is okay with that, so should I be 🙂

It’s pretty great to know that my game is running in an arcade machine out there. Someone even remade it, LOL, but the best moment was without doubt back in 2009 when I received a nice mail from Tim Skelly (the coder of the original arcade game) calling it a “good job” and taking time out to write a bit more to me than I could have hoped for

 

Here’s the rest of the pictures of Stephans cocktail cabinet. If you click them, a window with open a bigger version of the pictures.

 

 

 

 

Cool, right? 🙂

SQIJ 2018 now out on cassette tape.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any news, but I’m now happy to announce that my latest ZX Spectrum game is out on cassette. I just received my own copy a little while back. Here’s a picture (click to enlarge).

It’s available from Psytronik Software here and the price is only £6.99 + p/p.

Hurry and get yourself a piece of (revised) Spectrum history 😉 🙂

New arcade game: Sqij 2018 (for arcade hardware)


Another day, another release. This time it’s SQIJ again. The previous game I released was a Spectrum version of this C64 game, but here I’ve taken the Spectrum game and coded an arcade version of it – and because the Taito arcade hardware is much more capable than the humble ZX Spectrum – this game is now looking as good as it’s ever going to.

As this version is for arcade hardware most people will have to play it on the MAME emulator, but it should run on the real hardware too.

Go here to download the game, read all about the game follow the interesting links to its story.

And not only that: the ZX Spectrum version should be available on physical cassette tape in the near future, but more about that when it’s out 😉

New Spectrum game: SQIJ 2018.

My first release of 2018 is a funny one – basically it’s a remake of one of the very worst games for the ZX Spectrum. Or more precisely: this game is a remake of the original C64 game that unfortunately only received such a truly atrocious Spectrum version back in the day.

But here’s a new version that’s almost identical to the original C64 version – same map and item placements … and most importantly – unlike the official Spectrum version from 1987 this one is actually playable.

Go here to download the game, read all about the game follow the interesting links to its story.

You can also buy it on cassette here. The price is a mere £6.99 + p/p