Well, once at the high school time I was very much into MSX computers and I coded a lot but for only my own satisfaction. Now, in the Internet era, I have decided to make some of my programs to bein public domain. That is, you can freely copy them under the condition that you let me know how did you like them! It was back in 1990 when I did anything with MSX; I'm not very sure do these programs run on your computer.
For those who don't know what is an MSX, I'd suggest to look at http://www.msx.org. Basically, a MSX II computer had a 3.58 MHz Z80 processor, 128 KB RAM and 128 KB VRAM.
At the high school we had a Yamaha KYBT MSX-2 network (one YIS802? and several YIS503III's as far as I remember with pecularities like Russian keyboard and Russian fonts in ROM. At this time, MSX-s were almost the only computers with full programming environment available in Estonia, so it is not a wonder they got so popular here. Some other MSX guys from our school were:
From those people, I only have programs written by myself. Ville and Indrek programmed actively on the Agat computer that our high school had before obtaining a class of MSX-s. (Differently from me, they work now as professional programmers.)
Another guys from Estonia whom I can remember: Janno Ossaar, Markus Klesman, ... There is also an MSX mailing list at lists.ut.ee.
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The game was written from late 1989 to summer 1990, when I was at the last year of the high school. I was the coder, idea generator etc. Music and part of the music routing was written by my classmate Indrek Pinsel, now a professional programmer and free-time DJ. He and two-years younger Alar Koot, who is now a professional web page designer, also helped me with graphics. In particular, Alar helped me to design the final screen. Many people (like Helvis Ints) provided invaluable help while testing and playing the game. Several levels would have been much easier without their ingeniousity. The game is said to be copyrighted by the "Santa Claus Software". Of course, there was no such company. :-) It was just me and friends.
About the name. It just happened that the protagonist is redheaded. So it was just proper that I, then at high school, assumed as an internal joke that he is Irish. O'Connor sounded very Irish. Protagonist's s first name might have been Patrick; it is not mentioned anywhere and I really don't remember. May be he did not have any. "Among the falling walls" was a logical part of the name, since the walls really fall in this game. An earlier name of the game was "O'Connor in the cellars of Boston" because the levels look like dungeons, and "cellars of Boston" was an internal joke we had at this time.
"O'Connor" is somewhat similar to the well-known MSX games "Rise Out" and "Lode Runner" --- it is a platform game, one screen = one level, you must collect all "collectibles" and then escape. You can shoot like in "Rise Out", there are enemies. However, it has much more possibilities than either "Rise Out" or "Lode Runner". The most innovative factor of this game was its dynamicism: walls, floors, ladders, almost everything can change their location (in a deterministic way) due to your actions. You can push stones, shoot certain elements so that they start to move (and then construct floors or routes from them), etc. So, the very room itself changes during the game several times. Despite the previous description, it is a puzzle game. All actions are deterministic, and you have to figure out what to do when and at what order. Some of the later levels are extremely challenging, and it may take a while to find out the winning solution.
Keys: Space (shooting), arrows, select (selecting a level), F1 (dying).
BLOAD "OCONNOR.GM1",R BLOAD "OCONNOR.GM2",R
To run it you'll need the 9938 videoprocessor (O'Connor runs in SCREEN 4, and makes the full use of user-defined palette and also of more colorful sprites compared to SCREEN 2 of 9918, present in MSX 1.) but not the MSX-2 BIOS, so it may be executed on your old SVI 738 by Spectravideo. The latter was actually one of the goals, since the SVI 738 computer happened to be popular in Finland at this time. "O'Connor" doesn't run on MSX I, though. I've tried it myself on fMSX-unix v 2.7 with flag -msx2 (on Linux) and on blueMSX (on Windows XP) and it works perfectly.
All symbols in the game (including for the man and the enemies) were designed by using my own Editor of Items (see below).
Please let me know, if you have tried O'Connor: did you like it?
Some user comments:
--- Answer: I'm not an expert in LodeRunner AI; but you can try with : - Rise Out (but you already know this game, isn't it?) - Lode Runner + (only for MSX2+/TR) park15.wakwak.com/~n_i/msx/p4.html - O'Connor (MSX2/2+/TR) research.cyber.ee/~lipmaa/msx/ The late being specially impressive... Greets --- And thank-you reply: Hey that O'connor game is very cool I never saw that one before but it's quiet fun to play!
A character editor called Editor of Items (version 1.5) for Screen 2 and Screen 4 that also works with 9918 but it also knows how to use 9938, so you can define palettes etc. You can edit 8x8 and 16x16 symbols that were suitable also to use as sprites, their colors row by row, a test screen editor. A lot of functionalities everywhere but a bit uncomfortable to use. It was used by me to design all the symbols and sprites in O'Connor.
Copy both of the files to the disk and then
RUN "ANIM.BAS"
Set Up! was made using my "trademarked" method to code the
stupid things (e.g. disk operations) in MSX-BASIC. You'll like
the editor. It has everything me and
my friends programmers have ever needed.
bat5 was my attempt to implement an isometric game like
"Batman" and "Head over Heels" in Screen 5, but the VDP was
too slow for it. Still, I did design the symbols and made some of the
main machinery to work. (The guy moves and jumps, there are horisontally
moving lifts that can carry you, you can collect items, and change the
positions of boxes.) Note: the different isometric symbols were done by
using Edit 5.
I probably will never give a link to this one.
There were some other people in Estonia that were actively programming on the MSX computers at the same time. I am sure there is a lot of software out there, some of it might be lost. Here I only list things that I have a copy of.
| Phobos - a shoot-em-up game; runs both on MSX 1 and MSX 2 (on screen 4). Attackersoft 1990. Program by Markus Klesman & Oleg Maskhov, graphics by Raul Keller. |
| Adventurer: King of England; a maze-based game. Requires MSX 2. Attackersoft 1990. Program by Markus Klesman, graphics by Kaspar Loit and Raul Keller, music by Markus Klesman. |
| Turbo assembler for Z80. Includes support for undocumented Z80 instructions. Sundry Inc. 1990. Janno Ossaar. (I have v1.02 from 04-29-1990) | |
| Sort - sorts floppy directory. Fully automatic + manual reordering. Sundry Inc. 1990. Janno Ossaar. |
Kain Väljaots has uploaded a copy of his old MSX notebook.
In 1990, I participated in the Soviet Union Informatics Olympiad in Kharkov. I made friends with the local MSX guy, Ted Chary (Alex Garmash). From him I got a lot of software, including some done by themselves. For example, they had made Nike DOS, an MSX-DOS based DOS (with many additional features).
Tuuli Lepik wrote a MSc thesis END IF ehk varane arvutikunst ja uute meediate algus on the people in Estonia in 80's who worked on early computers. It has a section (Section 8.6) on my production. In Estonian.
Passion MSX has a posting about Estonian MSX games.
gmail.com (Helger Lipmaa)