Death Match

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.

I managed to locate the executables for the second program, but it seems that the graphics files are long gone.  Perhaps I'll dig them up one day.  The first version still exists on a 5 1/4" floppy.  If I can ever figure out how to read it, I'll try to recover the program.

I've found a copy of the first game that seems to work.  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.  I have also placed the copy protection reference sheet up for download.  Note that you can also use the word "LEMMEIN" as the answer to any of the copy protection questions (this was an original backdoor).

Here are some screenshots from the program.  Note that some are running through Bochs and some through Windows emulation of DOS.  Also note that the game runs amazingly fast on a modern computer.  It used the standard methods in Turbo Pascal to wait for a period of time, which ended up being ultrafast on any reasonable computer.  Perhaps Bochs might yield a proper timing emulation, but I'm not too confident:

Download: (not yet)