Blastoid (MSXdev'22)
Travelling back into deep geological time in your time machine tank you want to bully those spiky skinned echinoderms into oblivion. You’ll take them all out, sand dollars, sea urchins, starfish... but for some strange reason you really have it in for those blastoids. You’re madman enough to say that five fold radial symmetry deserves an explosive shell right into their ambulacra. They’re not going to sur- vive the Permian extinctions. Come on Psycho, blow them out of the water. Wipe them from Planet Earth.
Blastoid requires an MSX 1 or later or emulator and is a 32Kb ROM image.
Blastoids is a riff on a 1978 arcade game called Blasto from Gremlin Graphics. Blasto had its only home port, to the Texas Instruments TI -99/4A, in 1981.
Blastoid was written by Matthew Thredgold in C for MSXdev22. It uses the SDCC compiler and MSX SDCC Make Script, and the msxbios and msxromcrt0 libraries by Danilo Angelo (adapted from mvac7/303bcn and Konamiman respectively) and the SDCC AY-3- 8910 playFX Library from mvac7/303bcn.
mkdir -p package/
unzip blastoid.zip
mv "MSXdev22_Blastoid_v1.0.ROM" package/BLASTOID.ROM
cat > package/BLASTOID.BAT << EOF
REM Look for SROM.COM in default dir
IFF EXIST %_DISK%:\SOFAROM\SROM.COM
%_DISK%:\SOFAROM\SROM.COM BLASTOID.ROM
ELSE
REM Try to run it from path
IFF EXIST SROM.COM
SROM.COM BLASTOID.ROM
ELSE
echo "SROM.COM not found. Install it with: 'HUB install SOFAROM'"
exit 1
ENDIFF
ENDIFF
EOF
unix2dos package/BLASTOID.BAT
hub install BLASTOID