Really and truly, I never expected the video of Blaze I posted online a couple of weeks ago to generate so much interest. What surprised me most of all is the love Amiga users still have for the machine and how active the community is, to this day! Just the other day I was witness to an exchange between users (on the EAB) about the best (read: fastest) way to draw blitter objects in a multidirectional scrolling 2d-engine – it was both entertaining and enlightening.
Anyway, I digress. I never expected people to find Blaze interesting, but what do I know of people? To me it was a learning experience and an homage to a game I played to death. Moving on from Blaze, I made another attempt at programming a clone of two other all-time favourites of mine: Fatal Fury and Street Fighter II! The working title of the game was World Warrior. I know, I know, I could get an award for how unimaginative the name is. Le video below:
Although I can’t remember why I had stopped working on the game (probably it was school commitments or the like), I had been pretty happy with the character animation and compositing system I had crafted. Like Blaze, World Warrior was written entirely in assembly, although unlike the former, the code was much cleaner and modular. The game also had 50 Hz scrolling, although the actual character animation and sprite updates ran at 25 Hz. The version shown in the video is not the latest version developed, but an earlier copy I had copied to diskette (probably to show to my friends or something).
Unfortunately, the assets, source code and tools are lost forever – the bastard below broke – I lost tons of other stuff in the process. The problem seems to be a faulty controller. Sigh.
Well, this was my last *big* project on the Amiga before moving on to PC (some twenty years ago), so please take all my technical recollections with a pinch of salt!
Edit: More pictures of the faulty HDD, a Conner Peripherals CP 2064:
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