K-BOOM

Celebrating 25 years of coding by reviving an old school project!

Video for the lazy: Building from source and game play

You can either build from source or run the binaries:

Running the binaries

• Download and install DOSBox
• Mount the directory and run K-BOOM!.EXE
• See Gameplay below

Building from source

• Prerequisites: Windows (sorry)
• Download and install Turbo Pascal (With DOSBox)
• Start it. A console window pops up with the familiar Turbo Pascal interface.
• File -> Change dir... and navigate to the directory containing this repo. Click OK.
• File -> Open and choose K-BOOM.PAS
• Options -> Compiler and tick the checkmark for 286 instructions. Close the dialog via OK.
• Compile -> Make. After a few seconds this should be successful.
• Run -> Run

Gameplay

• After the fake Doom startup screen you can configure the keyboard (Ja = Yes). Configuration will be saved for next time. Sorry, language is German.
• Next up is the intro with some nice pictures of our school, and a tribute to our computer science class :)
• In the menu, use Cursor Up/Down. You can choose how many games need to be won to win the series (go to second menu entry and hit Cursor Left/Right)
• When you are ready, Start Game
• The aim is to be the last survivor. The player who survives most often wins the series. There are three human-controlled players, no AI. You can place bombs to blow up rocks. your opponents, or yourself. Bombs will also trigger explosions of other bombs in their range.
• Default controls:
  • Player 1: W/A/S/D for movement, Left Ctrl for bomb, Tab for kick
  • Player 2: Cursor keys for movement, Right Ctrl for bomb, Enter for kick
  • Player 3: U/H/J/K for movement, B for bomb, V for kick
  • It's probably a bit cramped playing like that. I only had a laptop available - perhaps a good idea to use a full keyboard and use the numblock for Player 3.
• Power-ups:
  • Bomb: You can place multiple bombs at the same time (one at the beginning, up to nine possible)
  • +1/-1: Range of your bomb increases/decreases
  • Yellow bomb: Now you can destroy multiple wall segments at once

Remarks

This is a clone of Atomic Bomberman, a great multiplayer game we spent countless hours playing after school. So for our computer science school class project we built this game as a hommage.

• Code: Martin Richtarsky
• Graphics: Martin Hagenberg

Some details:

• Written in 1997 on a Intel 80486
• However, at school we only had slow Intel 80286 machines, and it had to run there ;)
• Code is Turbo Pascal with inline assembly for fast drawing
• Video mode is the famous 13h: 320x200, 256 colors. Linear framebuffer, ideal for fast drawing. It's possible to calculate the address of a pixel (x, y) in the buffer without expensive multiplication since 320 == (2**6 + 2**8), which are two shifts and one add. The colors are drawn from a palette, and changing the palette changes all pixels of that color on the screen. So it's possible to do smooth fadeouts even on a 80286.
• The game fit on a floppy disk (3.5" 1.44MB if I recall correctly)
• We wanted to include a video. But video playback on 80286 is not that easy due to the limits of the machine. It also had to fit on the floppy disk. A custom compression and assembly decoder was the solution.
• PCX was the image format back in the day
• The source has very... inconsistent indentation
• Let's say I write better code now ;)
• Bomb kicking was possible in the original Atomic Bomberman and this game here has hotkeys for it. I'm not sure it's implemented though.
• I still love the Turbo Pascal experience. Very fast compiles! (TP was developed by Anders Heljsberg, who went on to build C# and TypeScript)

Endorsements

"It's as good as FIFA 22 - and FIFA is the best game ever!" -- Unnamed family member