jasonjayr/the-evil-wrath-of-zargon

And old QBasic game a bunch of kids made in 1999

The Wrath Of Zargon!

Version: (filled out by release script)

Release Date: (filled out by release script)

Github project

Home page

This codebase represents the efforts of a bunch of high-school kids back in 1998-1999. We've all moved on and grown up, some of us on to professional software development too, but this project still lingers at the back of our heads as one of our first multi-developer projects.

DISCLAIMER

Heh. This code is FULL of bugs. You will overflow the stack. You will crash the interpreter. You will force QB to mess up the UI and prompt you to 'Redo from start'. Sorry :) Perhaps it ought to be fixed, or perhaps it's part of whole experience of the game :) Although we reccomend running it in the dosbox emulator to isolate it from the rest of your system, we assume no liability if this breaks your system. You get to keep both pieces.

LICENSE

This work is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, Version 2.0. See COPYING in this bundle for details.

REQUIREMENTS

You will need a few things to make this work.

• Dosbox

  Debian/Ubuntu users can simply:

  apt-get install dosbox

  Windows users will need the windows installer on the downloads page.

• QBASIC

  QBasic is copyrighted software by Microsoft, So we can't distribute it in this bundle. However you can simply download it from this link. This is all the old dos utilities you'd find on the Windows 95 'Extras' cd (that no one every looked at anyway) Search for the "Download olddos.exe now" link on that page. This contains a few old dos utilities, including qbasic.exe. The .exe is simply a Self-extracting PKZip archive, you can open it with Windows' built in compressed folders or 7zip

INSTALLATION

This version does not have an integrated installer, and requires some steps on your part.

1. Download and Install DOSBox from the link described above.
2. Download zargon-$VERSION.zip and extract it's contents to a folder. For simplicity, we reccomend C:\Zargon (Note that there will be a subfolder named 'ZARGON' in there, this is normal)
3. Download olddos.exe from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/135315
4. Extract the contents of olddos.exe into the 'DOS' subfolder created in Step 1.
5. Windows users, double click run_windows.bat, Linux users, chmod a+x run_linux.sh, and run ./run_linux.sh

Enjoy!

NOTES

In the interest of nostalgia, I've left the original codebase mostly intact. I had made a few edits to this version over the past to try to make it work with the QB 4.5 compiler, but when even QB 4.5 choked on compiling this, I figured it was best to leave it be. Please refer to this readme for accurate email address information, and not in the source code.

CONTRIBUTORS

I (Jason Rodrigues [email protected]) have had this code lingering (festering?) on random systems untill I decided to see if we could get it published in 2010. I only had a small hand in this, making a tool that could assemble the graphics into a 'wad' file format (Which I've lost the writer for at this point), and more recently arranging it into a runable state with dosbox.

Other contributors, which put much more effort into the original codebase: (This is from memory, this was a long time ago)

Snappahed Software 98 is

• Greg Millette
• Geoff Graves
• Aaron Sokoloski
• Jeff Gariepy