After lying dormant for a few years we're back in action! Here is a blast from the past for my own personal STOS projects. Not sure when I started out in STOS, probably around 1990. Took a few years to get the hang of basic functions, though by around 1993 was already producing full games and demo screens. Not too long after myself and a few others got together to produce MEGA Disczine.

SPEED RACE 1. Insperation from the old "SMILE MENU" on the RM Nimbus machines (I think?).A 2 player game, green and red balls are yours to control. Take it in turn to guide your ball around the track by entering movement numbers. Of course avoid crashing into the skulls else you die.

ULTO-FORMAT. Places a sampled sound on the title screen (not sure why but it does!). On the main screen you select your track numbers etc and it formats your floppy for you. The white lined graphics were done with Neochroms "T-edge" function. Creates a nice pattern if nothing else!

A very small shoot-um-up test game.

KAID. Insperation was from "Starquake" form this game. I stuck together about 500 sheets of A5 to create the world map. Each A5 sheet was one screen like the world map example above. Unfortunatly the map got damaged over time and eventually got chucked out.

Like the old game "Simon". Still looking for a "working" game of this, its probably on floppy number 1,574 or there abouts.....

Another small shoot-um-up game test.

Just a nice little Trek screen. Not sure where the actual game is yet, I know I started it though im sure I will find more bits to it latter....

ALIEN. Another very simple game from yester-year. Enter a angle and shoot bullets and the brown alien which gets closer to your ship.

ALIEN functional test. No graphics just the basic text funtions.

It don't look much. Was attempts at drawing up a "Super cars" type game. The car rotates though 360deg and moves in that direction. Unfortunatly while the game would be easy to make, I couldn't get the SIN/COS angles 100% so when the car was pointing left, it would actually drift to the side... I wasn't happy with the car graphics either... Car was rendered in Canvas using the 3D options... Would be nice to get a rip of "Super cars 2" cars if anyone can do it ?

FATAL. The 3 blobs or actually alien ships rotate around the screen. You have to shoot them a few times to kill them. Your ship rotates 360deg and fires at whatever angle its pointing at. The ship moves slowly forward (makes the game harder, abit like the game GRAV) moving forward on the joystick makes it go faster. Basic scores and "Energy" level, which is actually your sheild health kind thing. This was based upon the car example above to rotate the ship. The ship isn't perfect either, again problems with sin/cos angles again, still playable though.....

Very early game. Title says it all really!

REVERSA. You have to get the numbers in order by revesring numbers in from 1-9. Hard at first, but its actually really easy to do it when "you know how".

TERRAGRAZ. Based on Termodroid, rotaing aliens, a ship to control and kill them. Didn't get too far with this as you can probably tell.

FREDDY, A kids game. To start with you select a word using the joystick to select the letters (V2 would have a word file to load in random words). You guide Freddy along and you have to catch the letters in order which are moving up and down the screen. For clever kids, there was a bogus letter option which confuses what the actual word is.. the LETS GO screen has a speeded up sample of my father's voice, rather amusing if anything!

A loader menu, not found ANAGRAM yet!

As the name says, version 2 of SPEED RACE. Better graphics in this version and better sounds, more levels too!

MEGA KOPY. A file copier, kinda like FcopyIII (thouch not as advanced). Proves that STOS can access the BIOS directly to format and copy disk sectors. The box in the middle was a GEM immitation "OK" box.

Experimention with Rasters.

The STOS Editor screen before and after a raster crash. Rasters remain in the editor!

OK, I didn't do this one. Though the STOS TRACKER DEMO brings back fond memories. It uses that ABK sound format which is a patched version of the MOD format. A lot of my early demos used the tracker extension.

MEGA DISKZINE!

ISSUE 1. The word MEGA was "Drawn" onto the screen (as if someone was writing it). A fancy effect which took a lot of coding. Latter I developed a took for doing such text which was used frequently though MEGA. After a nice bit of 3D work using the STOS 3D extension. Probably the only bit of 3D work I ever did. The starship enterprise *cough* moves around the screen and the MEGA zooms in from the background and the ship flys though the middle of the "A". Issue 1 was renound for having the worst menu selection ever created dispite it taking hours to get the zooming letters to work right, ah well.....

ISSUE 2. Sky image drawn by muscles, I must had that he did a very nice 3D animation of the MEGA logo to which I didn't use, hes still upset even today about it, SORRY! So after everyone had a dig at issues 1 shell, I sat down "for a while" and thought up probably the most ambitious shell ever. I set to work and ripped all the falcon's desktop GEM graphics and locked myself in my room "for a while" to produce a basic imitation of the GEM desktop. clicking on the folder opens up and lists the files, with all the basic animations of GEM. The UP and DOWN arrows scroll the files.... well im sure you don't need me to explain how GEM works ;-) The top menus also work too! needless to say everyone loves it and it got really nice reviews! I got some other bugger to do issue 3's shell cos I had enough, lol!

Another MEGA "hand drawn" image. I thought I would go one better and instead of drawing plain text, draw a colourfull text. Nobody seemed to notice :-(

Deano ( get in touch Deano if you'r reading this!) did a nice intro for us, gave everyone a good laugh. The "old guy" has dancing teech and the little people on his head play the drums. Lee came to the rescue with his stylish shell. Maybe Lee an tell you a little about that ?

Issue 4. A into I did, was pi*s take scroller demo... the screen starts off with nothing but a scroller and a black screen. Latter it gets more and more going on, until the classic like "I forgot to turn the bloody light on" which people liked since it all bursted into colour instead of the one purple colour which your forced to watch at the start. Lee came to the rescude again with a Startrek style shell for us, Maybe Lee can tell a bit about that also ?

More to come as I find it!

Chris AKA exxos.