Solstalker 1996-2005
Solstalker is a DOS shooting game developed mainly in Pascal and assembly by a team of students from the first year of Computer Science at ICMC-USP (me, Marcio Andreeta, Cesar Ferraz, Leonardo Morelli and others).
It started as a Space Invaders clone but evolved to a full shooting game with multiple stages, multiple weapons and upgrades, 320×240 with 256 color graphics, basic Sound Blaster support and keyboard and mouse controls.
This is the 2005 edition of the game that has been patched to work on modern processors. This game still runs inside DOSBox. You can download the game for free using this link.
Unfortunately, the source code of the game (written by beginner programmers with absolutely no planning and no documentation) was lost forever thanks to the long lifetime and durability of 3.5″ floppy disks.
As soon this game was completed, we started to create our own game engine from scratch using what we learned from the Solstalker development process. This engine, written once again in Pascal with a lot of assembly, implemented multiple visual effects found on Super NES (mode 7), Mega Drive and even PSX under MS DOS without hardware support.
After 2 years of party-time development, this engine became obsolete by the introduction of new technologies such as Microsoft DirectX and the lower costs of hardware acceleration video cards. This engine was scrapped without being used to create a single real game.