Mission Alphatron

Download the Windows version from http://www.nyangau.org/alpha/alpha.zip. The Memotech version is included in MEMU.

Introduction

Mission Alphatron is a scramble variant.

The rules are simple: shoot the bad guys, shoot fuel to refuel, but don't shoot nuclear power stations.

On the Memotech MTX, it had character based scrolling and as well as the laser, you could drop bombs too. It looked like this :-

On Windows, smooth scrolling was introduced, the bombs were removed from the game, and it looks like this :-

On the iPhone (and iPod Touch), with 1.x firmware, it looks like this :-

The game cleverly avoids repainting the whole landscape by only drawing on the edges, to give the appearance of movement.

History

It was originally written for the 8-bit Z80 based Memotech MTX computer, back when I was a kid at school.

Next, it was ported to 16-bit Windows 3.1, before WinG, DirectX or any other form of accelerated graphics. The amazing thing about this game is that it was fast enough to be playable. This version used a Windows PeekMessage loop, and basically went as fast as your computer would let it. Of course, modern computers go massively faster, so this version became unplayable.

Then it was ported to 32-bit Windows (NT, XP, 2003, ...), and changed to use a multimedia timer to control the rate of play. This is the version available today.

It has also been ported to the iPhone (and iPod Touch), using the excellent iphone-dev toolkit. To do this, a thin emulation of Windows GDI was created, allowing the bulk of the Alphatron logic to remain unchanged.

I have also ported it to iPhone 2.x using XCode and the iPhone SDK from Apple. However, as the code currently uses the CoreSurface private framework, I am prohibited from distributing it via the App Store (same is true for Doom). Also, for a reason unknown, the same code runs a little slower on 2.x firmware.

Copying

Originally the Memotech variant was commerical software, sold through Continental Software, and this helped fund my early computer acquisitions. Nowadays, the Memotech MTX is a relic, and you'll find downloads of games like Alphatron on various sites, for use within emulators - Enjoy.

Originally the 16-bit Windows 3.1 version was shareware, but I got so few cheques it actually would have cost more to cash them than they were worth!

So now, basically the code is public domain. Please distribute (unmodified) and play for free.


This documentation is written by the Mission Alphatron author, Andy Key
andy.z.key@googlemail.com