New cricket game in the works

[John73]

Firstly, I guess I should introduce myself as I haven't posted on this forum before. I'm from Brisbane, Australia and a mad cricket fan. I've been programming on and off for over 30 years and have always wanted to write a decent cricket program.

I've been starting/stopping work over the years on what I want to write, but have decided to really give it a decent shot this year. The game is based on a program called "Test Match & Limited Overs Cricket" which was originally (I believe) released for the Sinclair home computer. I had the game in the early 80's but it was a rewrite for use on the Amstrad 464 home computer.

Anyway, in an attempt to keep myself motivated, I've decided to Blog the development process. Hopefully if a few people get interested then it will inspire me not to quit writing this after a few weeks like I've done so many times in the past.

For anyone that is interested, the blog is here: Test Match Cricket | An Amstrad CPC Remake. You can either post comments at the blog, or just post comments/suggestions in here. At this stage, I'm looking to more or less just make this a PC remake of the original version, if/when this is completed then I'll move onto expanding the game into what I'd always hoped this game could be - but more about that down the track.

There's not much on the blog at present, but I hope to add to it every day or two and get some early stuff uploaded shortly for feedback. In the first post I give a basic idea of how to play the original game using an Amstrad Emulator - if you've never played this game, I'd suggest at least having a look at the original as even 30+ years after it was released I still find it a fun game to play. I may post more comprehensive instructions in this thread later tonight or tomorrow on how to get the game going using the emulator in case it wasn't clear enough on my Blog.

Well that's enough for now, hope there is some interest

 

[Maximas]

If you continue and get reasonably serious, keep posting here as well, I like the sound of it.

 

[John73]

Got a fair bit done, even if it didn't take all that long to do when I actually stated coding. If I could just sit down and code for 24 hours straight I'd knock this game out in a couple of days. Unfortunately I get restless programming and have to take breaks all the time - how people can program for a living is beyond me - I'd go nuts.

Few more updates on the blog for anyone that is interested and there are now a couple of clips uploaded to YouTube showing the original game and my remake to date. Not much really done in 6 days, but it's a slow exercise when you only code for an hour or two a day and even less during the work week.

The old.....

 

[John73]

and the new....

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

Ah! All the wonderful technicolour glory of the Amstrad CPC. Alan Sugar brought us the age of quality, affordable home computing. The delirious sound of the tape deck whirring away as Sultan's Maze took 12 minutes to load before conking out half way through. But the highs, OH! the incredible highs. Nothing can match Sorcery +'s simplicity but joyful game play. Bringing us out of the dark depths of the early 80s and shining with fluorescent colour in front of our very eyes. Ah, bliss.

 

[John73]

Ah! All the wonderful technicolour glory of the Amstrad CPC. Alan Sugar brought us the age of quality, affordable home computing. The delirious sound of the tape deck whirring away as Sultan's Maze took 12 minutes to load before conking out half way through. But the highs, OH! the incredible highs. Nothing can match Sorcery +'s simplicity but joyful game play. Bringing us out of the dark depths of the early 80s and shining with fluorescent colour in front of our very eyes. Ah, bliss.

I could go on and on about the games too, some awesome games were available for it and I used to have many discussions/arguments with friends who had the CBM 64 over who had the better computer. Did a massive clean up a few years ago and chucked out about 100 of the Amstrad User Australia magazines - wish I had have kept them, still good to read those old mags 30 years on. The Amstrad's unlike the Commodore 64's seem to be rare as hens teeth - I've had a couple of looks on eBay over the years and you just can't seem to pick them up At least we have people writing emulators so that we can still play all of these old games in all their 8-bit glory lol

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

Indeed, John, indeed. My brother used to have one of the Amstrad 6128s (the disc drive one) with a load of the plug-in ROMs for it that he'd picked up from junk shops over the years. Seems that a lot of plebs had no idea how much their old Amstrad and parts were worth, so a lot of it ended up in charity shops and the like. So, if you had an eye for it you could make a stack. I think my bro even picked up an original, still in the box 16k ZX Spectrum for a fiver. And sold it for a few hundred.

Much easier to download an emulator... And you can even save your progress!

 

[NZTailender]

An Amstrad was our family's first computer, bought Xmas 1990 I think, which we didn't replace until 1999. I actually remember this cricket game! Didn't play it too much, though...

 

[sledger]

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral.

But which is GIMH?

 

[HeathDavisSpeed]

Judging by some of his posting habits, I'd definitely have him under vegetable.

 

[samreddevilz]

Really nice.

 

[psx12ns]

goodluck with the idea. hope it works for you

 

[John73]

Suppose an update is in order, done nothing, zilch, nada the last month. Going through some business stuff and need that sorted first, which should hopefully be finished this week. Not working this week, and am actually planning on doing some more coding later today.

 

[John73]

Finally found some motivation in the last 24 hours to get some coding done. Been working on the main scoreboard, probably only 25% of the way through the code for showing everything that needs to be shown.



Little bit more info is available at the blog : Test Match Cricket | An Amstrad CPC Remake

Any questions or comments can be left here and I'll try to give you an answer

 

[John73]

Really starting to progress, hoping to have a very early beta version available by this time next week.

Couple more screen shots.

 

[shilu]

that's very nice.

 

[John73]

that's very nice.

Thanks very much

Haven't done much this week unfortunately due to cancer scare in the family, hope to get back to it in a couple of days.

 

[J_asonR]

I'm keen to give this a test! Will it work on Mac?

 

[John73]

I'm keen to give this a test! Will it work on Mac?

Funny you should ask that, as I'm going to give it a go today.

It's being written in BlitzMax, which cross compiles (without any changes I believe) to both Mac & Linux. I have zero experience with either of these operating systems, but I will have access to a Mac this weekend and am going to give it a go.

Didn't get nearly enough done this week, I'll try to get a bit more done so that I can compile an early pre-beta version (if such a thing exists)

 

[John73]

Very early beta download available

Hosted with media fire, wasn't sure if there was anyone better for free hosting - let me know if there is.

PC 40mb - tmc_pc_beta_1.zip
MAC 43mb - tmc_mac_beta_1.zip

The application you want to run is called TestMatchCricket.Debug

When it loads, press 'S' to start the game

The ball should go to somewhere on the field, and you'll get a flashing Run Y/N message at the top left of the window. Press either Y or N to choose whether or not to run. If you choose not to run, press the ENTER key to bowl the next ball.

Before pressing ENTER, you can press F1 to bring up the full scoreboard.

If a wicket falls, you'll be shown a new window with the available batters, use the cursor keys and ENTER to choose your next batsman.

Some quick things to keep in mind before downloading/running:
1. Scan for viruses, they are virus free to the best of my knowledge
2. I make no warranty to usefulness of the download, use at your own risk
3. This is a VERY early version, it still has bugs and is subject to crashes - i.e. there is no code to deal with the end of an innings, so the program will likely either crash or just present you with a list of batsman with none available to be picked.
4. The exit the game, when you press ENTER to bowl the next ball, press ESC immediately after and it should close down gracefully.
5. I don't have access to a Mac, so if the download doesn't work, I'm sorry you'll have to wait for a bit before I can get someone to re-compile it for me.
6. It does some weird stuff on the Mac (hits ball outside of the field) and also has some graphics issues (flashing of player status panel) - I'm not sure why this happens, I'll work on getting the PC version working first and then will have to ask others with more knowledge why the Mac version is behaving the way it is.

Any other questions, post in here and I'll get back to you.

EDIT: Forgot to mention a couple more things:

1. I've included pics of players from Ashes T2 - I am not going to normally include these pics as I don't own them, I just ran out of time to alter the code and if I provided the game without these pics it would just crash on loading because I haven't written code that deals with pic files not existing.

2. The download is so big mainly due to sound samples - WAV files - one is 34Mb on it's own, haven't investigated if there is a better/smaller file format that I can use.