Category Archives: Retro Computing

HERO for VZ200

H.E.R.O. for VZ200

At the end of last year I decided to write a port of the Commodore 64 game H.E.R.O. for the Dick Smith VZ200 and VZ300 computers.

I wrote it using the Multi-Platform Arcade Game Designer software. This makes it much easier to design games since it has built-in sprite and code designing all in the one package.

H.E.R.O title screen

You fly your backpack helicopter around the various caves and try to rescue the trapped miners. You will need to use dynamite to blow up walls blocking your progress and shoot critters with your laser gun.

In-game screenshot

It was quite fun to make and I’m glad it’s completed so others can enjoy the game.

There’s a link on the Blue Bilby website to the itch.io page for the game.

VZ200 Christmas demo

I saw a few people had written demos for Christmas for the Commodore 64 and other platforms and I decided I didn’t want the Dick Smith VZ200 to miss out. So, I got out Aseprite and designed some very large sprites and a heading in Paint.Net

Next, I wrote all the required code in Turbo Rascal Syntax Error.

You can see the results below:

TRSE Demo for VZ200

I’ve added in support for non-destructable sprites and fixed a few other things (one with the help of Leslie Ayling on the VZ200 Facebook group, THANKS!) 🙂
You can write text, draw sprites, make sounds, etc using Turbo Rascal Syntax Error.
Next, I need to work out support for joysticks and reading keys held down. (You can currently scan for keyboard presses using ROM Calls but this is not efficient and doesn’t work too well for games).

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Turbo Rascal Syntax Error “;” expected but BEGIN

This past week I became interested in this funky development environment called TRSE. They have written a (mostly) Pascal compiler and IDE, etc for 8-bit and 16-bit computers. I noticed they had not covered the Dick Smith VZ200 which was my first love in computers, so I asked how hard it’d be to add another Z80 computer.

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Ghosts ‘N Goblins – VZ200

Ghosts ‘N Goblins for VZ200 / Salora Fellow / Texet TX8000 / Seltron 200
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