Posted by SneechMeister on Aug 7, 2009 in
Old Skool Sneech While reconstructing Sneech I’ve been playing the original version on an emulator (WinUAE), making notes of features, sampling sounds, and generally reminiscing. Once in a while I come across something I’d completely forgotten about! It’s weird when it happens, but this week I rediscovered the “Foolish Bonus”…
Bonus money and points were awarded to players that did really badly… What fools!
This was one of the many places where the game rewarded players that were not doing so well. This is an obvious one, but there were less obvious “balancing acts” elsewhere. Its an important thing to do in a League that may last for an hour or so. You don’t want players to give up hope, so you give them a little reward, that may lead to a better match next time!
This could be a regular feature on the Blog; as I already have some more features we need reminding of!
Posted by SneechMeister on Jul 22, 2009 in
Past and Future 
The original Sneech was written in AMOS Pro, a type of BASIC geared towards rapid game development. I has planned to run some conversion processes over the original source code to extract at least some functions that could be reused. I hoped, at least I could recover some basic algorithms, and some long forgotten game rules, or scoring systems, that would make a port easier.
Unfortunately I’ve not really managed to extract much at all. I’ve copied some timings out, score values, some snake characteristics, player starting points, and some sample frequencies. but thats about it!
The problem back then was, even though I was trained to write wonderful structured, and formatted code, the system i was working on just didn’t make that easy or viable. I coded 100% of Sneech on an old portable TV screen. The screen mode was 320×256, so as to save my eyes from too much work, I tried to keep the source code tight, to reduce scrolling about!
I was also working on an Amiga with just 1Mb of ram (and floppy disks only!), but I was targeting minimum-spec as an Amiga A500′s with 512MB of ram. The most annoying thing about the AMOS language was the interpreted nature of it meant the cleaner your code was, the more ram it took up when running! I used to find all sorts of ways to make the source code uglier, and the memory requirement lower! (note: the compiler didn’t change this at all.) The use of short variable names like TL for tail, LTH for length, and so on, also kept the footprint lower. This was probably the last time I ever used GOTO in program, that’s how bad it was!
I thought I would take this chance to present to you the whole source code, unedited, with all the comments still missing (comments also caused runtime memory bloat so were of course not used!)
Here is the original AMOS source in text format: sneechpro.txt
Also, a version partially converted to C with some automated script I created. don’t expect it to look any less ugly: sneechpro-hybrid.txt
You can see from the source code that the very first lines I wrote were on the 14th of September 1994. So, lets see if the first iPhone version will get released before the 15th anniversary!
(I don’t expect anyone to do anything with the source code, but feel free to modify it if you like. I might be able to find the original set of data banks, if needed. Just let me know if you want it! )
Posted by SneechMeister on Jul 19, 2009 in
Past and Future Sneech was a popular ‘shareware’ video game on the Amiga personal computer, way back in 1995, and updated/maintained for almost 2 years. Back then the game was written using AMOS Pro, on a 512k computer running at 14.4Mhz, using a 320×256 pixel display in 32 colours! We did have up to 4 Joysticks though! 
The game fuses the classic ‘Snake‘ genre with Multiplayer deathmatch action. Today most people will recognise the game as Nokia Snake, but Sneech pre-dates Nokia snake by some years. The Snake genre goes back as far as the mid 70′s! Sneech was a different beast altogether!
Today Sneech is being rewritten from scratch in highly portable C++ code, using standard technologies like OpenGL for rendering. The game will initially be tested and released for iPhone, but Windows and Mac versions will soon be developed alongside. Mmuch of the Network Multiplayer functionality will be tested on a Windows version, before it gets added to iPhone (in a later revision) and Mac.
The modern Sneech will feature high resolution displays, Multiplayer (via Network) support via Bluetooth/WiFi/LAN/Internet, lots of new effects, all the classic sounds sampled from the original Amiga version, plus new sounds, graphics, and game modes.
