Fruit Land

Fruit Land is the first PC-game that has been produced by MesSoft and you can get it for free! The game was programmed in C using DJGPP, RHIDE and Allegro. The first version of the game appeared in 1998 on the MSX, an old 8-bit home-computer and was fully coded in assembly language. The graphics were done by Patrick Smeets and Jorrith Schaap composed the music. The game was published by STUFF, a group that produces the diskmagazine FutureDisk, which means at least 250 people have the game.

The PC-version of Fruit Land is not a straight conversion of the MSX-version, only the graphics and the level-data were ripped out of it. The game totally been reprogrammed in C without looking at the original Z80 Assembly source (which wasn't possible because I lost the source of the game) and it only took me less than 2 weeks to complete the game. The only things that are missing in the PC-version are the musics and the sound-effects. Maybe I'll release a second version if someone's kind enough to send me some midi-songs and samples...

Some technical information about the game. The game uses MODE-X with a resolution of 256*224. That's pretty weird (at least for PC), but since the first version of game was done on an MSX (which has a resolution of 256*212) this was the easiest way to do it. Offcourse I could scale all images, but then the images become very ugly. Anyway, I was very happy when I saw that resolution in the Allegro-documention because it made things easier for me. The graphics were ripped from the MSX-version, the only tricky thing about it was that I had to hack the game to get the right palette (I lost the original source code...).

Another interesting thing (well, interesting...) is that the game uses Binary Coded Decimals for storing the time limit in each level. In the MSX-version it was done this way because printing BCD-numbers is pretty fast, MUCH faster than printing integers. The PC version converts the BCD-number into an integer, so I didn't have to write special math-routines for handling the BCD-numbers. Well, I can't come up with something interesting anymore, so if you want to know more, just have a look at the code.

Fruit Land is a simple puzzle-game. Your goal is to eat all cherries within the time-limit. To accomplish this, you have to push boulders, stones, go through teleports, avoid some enemies...well, it's a pretty familiar concept I think. I won't tell what all items do, except the teleport. When you enter a teleport, the computer scans the level from north-west to south-east (from the left to the right, then next row) to find another teleport and teleports you to that point. Well, you know enough now. Just download the game and have fun!

DOWNLOAD Fruit Land (262 KB)