Death Match

Legacy project note: this game was developed circa 1993-1994.

When I first started digging around for old programs, I thought that Death Match had been lost. It turns out that I had a few copies scattered around. It’s not working completely yet, but hopefully one day I’ll have a full version of it available.

This game was a project started between myself and my friend Mike, two hard-core Street-fighter addicts. Like many of my earlier projects, it was written in Turbo Pascal.

The first version was a simple VGA two-person game. It used the standard VGA 320x240 mode for the game and intro screens, while using the Borland BGI mode and fonts for the option screens. At the time, using Borland’s graphics libraries was the only way I knew how to draw fonts.

The second version incorporated Ad-lib music, sound-blaster support for sounds and Mode-X for scrolling graphics. We entered both of them in the Calgary Regional Programming Competition, where they were well received.

In 2003 found a copy of the first version of the game that works. It turned out (I had forgotten this) that I had placed a crude form of copy-protection at the start of the game. I described my ordeals in the article Getting into Death Match.

In 2014 one of my friends discovered a copy of a newer version of the game that I had published to Fidonet, version 1.1. The game appears to run fine under DOSBox, though the sound is a little glitchy in places.

Screenshots from version 1.1: