I decided to take it as a comment on the interface — the original games (at their best) look like this:

http://www.allegro.cc/files/attachment/594731

Which means a lot of not particularly smooth world interaction (especially as they don't seem to be able to do things like detect turning at the same time as moving), and have an incredibly slow display (less than 1fps on the 8bit platforms, I'll wager).

I meant that because the interaction was so limited they had to make puzzles and shooting bits out of basic interaction. Something that people wouldn't try today.

I have to dash out now, but I should be back later (it's just a game of squash) — I'll package up my source and upload it. But you'll need a whole bunch of libraries to build it. Specifically:

• FreeType

• SDL

• SDL_mixer

• SDL_image

• OpenGL & GLU

It might be better to wait until I've built a Windows version — let me be the one to deal with that amount of hassle if I insist on using so many libs...

In the meantime, new movies of my engine attempting Spectrum versions of Driller and Dark Side are attached. And no, I have no idea what I'm meant to be doing in either. And neither claims to be anywhere near complete — they both rely on at least some hard coding of gameplay and I've not hard coded anything like that yet.

I'll also try to find time to chuck them both onto youtube for the people who don't like .movs later.

Source attached...

Yes, well, swimming underwater works — exiting that area doesn't. I'm confident I know why, it's to do with a quick hack fix I used to make some collision cases work in the 8bit Freescape games. It's only a temporary loss.

EDIT:
Oh, youtube links:
Dark Side
Driller

I like it, it reminds me of my youth!

Oh, I should say — it's built on my own little game framework, which I've been building up in spurts for a bit more than two years now. So there's a whole bunch of bits in there that isn't directly useful to the Freescape stuff, at least not now. In particular, there's stuff for loading and maintaining textures, preliminary support for shaders, something of a Wavefront OBJ loader (though it won't immediately work because its use of my VBO stuff is incomplete) and possibly some other bits that are just dangling. I've used a historic form of it in my ChristmasHack '06 and '07 entries, so I'm reasonably confident that most of it works reliably, but I've not once tried a UNIX build so there may be all sorts of minor irritants like #includes that expect a case-insensitive filing system and possibly some other things in the platform specific stuff. Though I've tried to be UNIXy in my OS X bits, so that a potential UNIX port isn't a problem — e.g. if it's not on Windows then it uses a dotfile in the user's home directory for settings.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear how it goes. I'm planning to launch a website for my Freescape remake in the near future, so that I can distribute it more widely.

EDIT: Hey, I made the front page of Retro Remakes. I'm very proud right now, it's quite an honour. Look for the appearance of a proper website dedicated to this project very soon indeed.

EDIT2: this project now has a website.

OS X — I've yet to even built for PC. I used Snapz Pro X, which is shareware but which I got a license for in the last MacHeist.