Fire Track
This was an attempt at creating a conversion of the BBC Micro game Fire Track to the Sega Game Gear, rewriting it from scratch in Z80 assembly.
I got pretty far with it, but interest in the project fizzled out when I realised that I wouldn't be able to add sound, and that the game was impossibly difficult to play anyway.
Videos
I recorded a handful of videos using a digital stills camera — hence the rather poor quality. The Game Gear's LCD is not especially easy to photograph at the best of times!
They are presented here in chronological order as MPEG-4 AVI clips.
 Very early scroll test. |
 A decent amount of work had been done here, mostly on the pause screen. |
 Here is the first instance of shootable enemies. |
 This has a syncopated version of the Blackadder theme playing in the background. |
 Better title screen and level start screens added. |
 Addition of parallax scrolling stars. |
 Palette fade test. |
 Enemy-spawning logic running at full-tilt. |
Maps
I converted all of the maps over from the BBC Micro game. They were done by hand so might be off by one or two tiles in places, but are still pretty faithful.
The tile graphics were redrawn from scratch to suit the Game Gear's lower-resolution screen.
Download map 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.
Screenshots
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Sound
I also recorded some MP3 audio clips.
- In-game sound effects (shots and explosions).
- Title-screen drone (and here's the original for comparison).
Download
The first source and binary zip is just a dump of the source directory as it was left many moons ago. It can be considered the most up to date version of Fire Track there is.
If you drop wla-z80 and wlalink into the unzipped directory and run the rebuild command script it'll assemble everything for you. Take a look at config.inc for some possibly interesting switches.
Hold 1 and 2 when the ROM boots to access the cheat screen.
The second binary is something I originally released shortly after killing the project.