My First Video Game : Fox!

Almost 10 years ago, when I was at school aged 14, me and my friend Stephen McAuley decided that we wanted to make a computer game. We were at Highworth Warneford School and at the time there was quite a community of geeks who'd spend their lunch hours writing games, demos, viruses and such. I doubt this is the case anymore, and the last I heard it was more about drugs and knife crime. It's funny to think that, at the time, I was considered one of the worse kids because I smoked and wrote a virus that infected the Acorn computer room, several local businesses, and a multinational bank. Smoking was unheard of.

Me and Steve both learnt to program in QuickBasic. I wouldn't recommend anybody start there now but at the time this was probably the beginners language of choice. I also knew quite a lot about assembly language (for a 14 year old anyway) and we made use of this to enable things like full screen parallax scrolling, sound blaster audio and some other pretty standard now, hard back then features.


Above: The Hidden Palace. Graphics for this level are from a set left over by the Sega team behind Sonic 2. The level never made it to the Sonic game, so we nicked their art :)


Above: The Reactor. This is another level from Fox that uses art sourced from the ill fated Sonic 4 game, scrapped in alpha.

Unfortunately, the game does not play nice with modern operating systems. It took a lot of tweaking for me to get it running properly in DOSBOX so as to make these videos. I think the problem is probably due to the games use of EMS memory.