Inspired by Rob Fulop’s classic Atari 2600 video game published by Imagic in 1982, Ascii Demon Attack introduces gaming to the console of consoles (i.e. text mode in the Command Prompt window). Return to the icy planet Krybor as never seen before in full-screen 160×50 resolution with 16 colors (i.e. at least twice as blocky as the original game).

It requires Windows with .NET 3.5 or above. Sometimes monitors need to be adjusted when switching to full-screen text mode for the first time. Play around with your monitor settings if the image is cropped or offset.

I always wanted to design a video game for text mode and this is my first attempt. Yeah, I know it’s possible to render any game in text mode using packages such as AAlib or Libcaca, but what fun is that? Ascii Demon Attack was written in C# 3.5. It takes advantage of Jim Mischel’s console library. Most of the graphics were borrowed from the Atari 2600 disassembly. Feel free to hack up the source.

2008.11.08