G'day everyone, today we're taking a look at a homebrew game called Castle of Viana made by
Montyontherun back in 2017. He made it for the CGA game jam that year. What makes his entry different
to many of the others is that his game is actually made for MS-DOS computers and can run on a 386 or
486 machine. The basics of the game is that it's a platform game where you, the hero travel through
the castle, the viana de castello to kill the demon capirotto. It's an extremely short game
in that you can find the demon you have to kill very quickly, although learning how to kill it
was a little bit of a challenge because I had some difficulty with the controls.
It's a little bit difficult to describe, but basically if I pressed the jump and movement keys
in the wrong order I would end up not actually jumping and moving in the direction I wished to.
I suspect that the reason this happened is because montyontherun didn't implement the controls using
his own keyboard handler, he just used the bios routines and that makes it much more difficult
to actually read the keyboard in the manner that you need for a platform game like this.
Writing your own keyboard handler isn't terribly difficult but if you don't have the experience
on how to do it you'd have to go and look it up and it could be quite time consuming
the very first time you do it. So given the short time frame he had to develop the game
I don't really blame him for sticking with the bios key handler. In the end it worked
out as I was able to get used to the controls as they are and managed to kill the demon anyway.
Like I said before this game is exceptionally short, but the main achievement here is
managing to make a full MS-DOS game in an exceptionally short period of time.
He's clearly managed to do this with very little assistance from any external libraries
such as allegro, so that makes it even more impressive as he would have had to have looked
up all the technical documentation on the hardware and written something in assembler.
Unfortunately it seems he didn't have a lot of time to optimize his code
as when you try playing it on a slower 386 or 486 processor it doesn't really play very fast,
it starts to get more playable with a 50 megahertz 486 for instance and becomes really good at about
a pentium 75 megahertz from my play testing. Although that may depend on your preferences,
it will also depend on which version of the game you download as there are actually two.
The first one which he actually submitted to the CGA game jam has pc speaker sound and actually
performs a little bit faster than the second one. The second version has a slightly different
keyboard layout which makes it a little bit easier to control although it still has the
same issues as the first one. It also has some extra sound support in the form of the opl3lpt
device that you can put on your parallel port. On my laptop that I tried it on this didn't work,
but i suspect it's probably a matter of the parallel port not being compatible with the game.
With castle of viana being so short there's not a whole lot more left for me to say.
There are some technical aspects that could be improved,
but i think the most glaring flaw is the lack of content. i.e it's basically too
short. That's hardly surprising given the short period of time available in the CGA game jam
Castle of Viana isn't the only DOS game that montyontherun has made I'll put a link in the
description below to his itch.io page where he's got some other games he's made for MS-DOS as well.
I encourage you to go there to check them out some of them look
quite interesting. Today's video certainly was quite a short one compared to the usual.
I hope you enjoyed, thanks for watching and I'll catch you next time.