Maggoo's MSX page

We have just added a link to Maggoo's MSX page to our MSX links database. Maggoo, also known as Olivier Hustin, was a coder for the popular demo groups IOD (Metal Limit demo) and Abyss (Uncle in Brazil demo). Recently he surprised the MSX community with the magnificent MSX 20th anniversary demo, which has been downloaded more than 850 times already from our downloads database. Now, he has another surprise for us: the VScreen Platform game engine for MSX.

The VScreen engine is currently in development. Ultimately it will allow people with limited programming skills to create amazing platform games on MSX. To make things even easier, a nice level editor is already included. The current specifications of VScreen are:

• Allows both Horizontal and vertical scrolling at any speed
• Levels can have a resolution of up to 8 by 4 screens wide.
• Collision detection with background
• Active enemies managed in a virtual screen of 3*3 screens around main character
• Different types of enemy movements / animations
• SCREEN 4
• Interactive and animated tiles
• Level of inertia / gravity can be adjusted

In the future, this engine will be perfected with things like the (quite essential) collision detection with enemies, support for music, sound effects and more. Of course we will keep you posted on the progress of this interesting project. Although it is not yet possible to create a fully working game with this engine the demo that can be found on Maggoo's website already looks very impressive, and it's very nice to play around a bit with the graphics and level editor. If you want to comment on this new engine, or if you have some suggestions for the future we advise you to do so in this forum thread.

Apart from VScreen Maggoo also offers other interesting tools like a SCREEN 7 to SCREEN 5 converter, a SCREEN 5 to SCREEN 4 converter, a SCREEN 5 to Sprite data converter (!) and the VScreen level editor. Demo lovers and developers can enjoy the demo's (including source codes) of a simple scroller, the 20th anniversary demo. Furthermore you can find interesting things like a Overscan and a Vertical Sync scroller.

Relevant link: Maggoo's MSX page