Project Spitfire is a retro style side scrolling shooter. It was originally written for DOS using Borland Pascal and assembly language, and used Mode-X hardware scrolling and triple buffering for perfectly smooth, full frame rate scrolling. The game had only half a demo level, only one player life and a fake highscore table. I wrote the game as a university programming project, together with Ferenc Habony, who wrote the map editor and created some of the graphics and part of the demo map.

Is Project Spitfire dead and forgotten?

No, but it's been asleep for several years. The only news during that period is the addition of a weapons power-up, some minor tweaks on the demo level, and quick'n'dirty ports to Win16 and later, Win32 (unfinished). All DOS and Windows versions are dead projects, but you can download the Win16 version here, or just look at some screenshots from the Win16 version:

So, it's still dead then?

No! :-) For a while now, I've been working on a serious rewrite in C for SDL, which will run on pretty much any platform. (Linux, Windows, Mac OS, BeOS,...) The graphics engine and control system written for this version are also used in Kobo Deluxe, my SDL port of XKobo.

However, as Project Spitfire is really more of a playable tech demo than a real game, there's a lot of work to be done after the new engine is finished. Graphics, enemies and maps for a substantial number of levels have to be created, as well as sound effects and music. (The PC speaker sounds of the DOS version aren't all that exciting! ;-) I'll probably start on my own with a few levels, and then see what happens. FreeWare, ShareWare, Artistic License collaborative project... depends on my level design and art skills. (Music is my favorite art form, so I'm not worried about that part. :-)

Can I have the fast, smooth scrolling DOS version?

Unfortunately, the hardware scrolling requires a fully compatible VGA card, which means that the scrolling doesn't work well on your average PC these days - most modern cards don't support VGA scrolling properly. Because of this, as well as issues with the development tools, I've decided not to make this version available for download any more. I've considered converting the DOS version to software scrolling, but I don't think it's worth it for a game with only half a level to play...