Martin's Stuff

PureBasic:

I've been using PureBasic for some time in the past. PureBasic is a Basic-dialect with compiler and IDE (and a few other tools). You can make small programs as well as more complex programs with it, as it has powerful libraries, and you can also access OS-functions directly or use inline-ASM.

I've been mostly using the Amiga version, which was the first one available. Nowadays it's available for Windows, Linux and MacOS. The Amiga version is unfortunately not worked on anymore.

Sprite Grabber

PureBasic-Amiga has a very nice sprite library for games. The blitting of the sprites is done in parallel to the CPU, by having the Blitter-finished-interrupt work through a queue of blits. The library has some very nice commands, but lacks some more advanced things, such as better control over the Blitter's mini-terms.

I've written a program in PureBasic called "PureBasic Sprite Grabber", which can grab sprites from IFF-ILBM pictures, and save them using SaveSprites(), to be easily loaded with LoadSprites() in other PureBasic programs. It was packaged with PureBasic-Amiga, since version 2.00.

It can grab sprites which are in boxes (it scans the picture for the boxes and detects their sizes), or tiles (sprites which all have the same size and need no boxes).


This picture shows the PureBasic Sprite Grabber with a picture of Bubble Memories sprites (taken from screenshots of the game).

Bubble Dragons

I used the Sprite Grabber for a game called "Bubble Dragons", which is a Bubble Bobble clone. It uses graphics mostly from Bubble Bubble and Bubble Memories. It features a variety of enemies and bonus items, and a 2-player mode.


These pictures show the title screen, the player selection screen, and some ingame screens.

Visual Environment

This was meant to be a program to visually create GUIs for PureBasic. I first started this for the Amiga version only, and later, when the Windows version of PureBasic turned up, it was changed to be portable between the Amiga and Windows version.

The program was functional to some point, and was supposed to be bundled with PureBasic later. Unfortunately this never happened for a reason unknown to me (Fred stopped answering my eMails and later forgot that he did that). Much later after I stopped development, and until now, PureBasic got a similar program bundled with it called "Visual Designer".


PureLibrary Viewer

This is a program for looking into PureBasic libraries ("PureLibraries"). There was a library sdk bundled with PureBasic with which one could easily find out the library file format. The program had a 68K-disassembler built-in to look into each library function and see how things are done or where the bugs are.