Anarchy!

Anarchy

INDEX

About Anarchy
Hardware Requirements
Soure Code
Screen Shots

Anarchy was to be SoftySoft's greatest project to date, a 3d update of the very popular and enduring 1980's classic : Chaos by Julian Gollop. It is a strategy game for up to eight players of magic, mythological creatures and such like. Perhaps the best impression of the gameplay (without actually playing it) can be gleemed from Chaos's subtitle of 'Battle of the Wizards'. Or alternatively you could try Chaos through ZX Spectrum emulation, either the usual sort of way or through Java here. Looking around that site will also enable you to download and play Chaos without the usual Java tedium! Notice, law abiders, that both the ROM images for the ZX Spectrum computer and the (machine) code of the game itself are freely distributable and have been made as much by their original authors.

Unfortunately the plan fell down when the various protagonists disbanded and went to quite seperate universities towards the end of 1999. However, the game reached a very playable state by that time, and a slightly modified version (to run at the correct speed on all computers) now rests here.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS
The development machine is a P200 with fairly average PCI bus graphics card, but it has been reported to run at an 'acceptable' speed on more or less any 'mid-range' Pentium class machine with one caveat : it is RAM hungry and 8Mb machines may have the bonus of enjoying disk swaps. Less than 8Mb machines need not apply, though quite who'd have a 'mid-range' Pentium with less than 8Mb I don't know.

The zip file linked to at the top of this page includes both DOS and Windows executables.

THE SOURCE CODE

The source code is available with the usual open source agreement, here. I have made absolutely no effort to clear it up or document it, but I doubt anyone will be interested anyway.

One use of it would be to build a Linux version against the Linux (WIP) port of Allegro. Tell me if you have any luck.

SCREEN SHOTS

Here are three in miniature. Click any one to see a large version. The fourth shot is absolutely the most interesting.

Notice that the large versions have been stretched to appear at the correct aspect ratio, and that my paint package has sampled the images up to 16Million colours, bilinearly sized them and then decreased the colour depth back to 256, so these pictures will have some dithering and anti-aliasing that is not present in the actual game. Also, the palette locations of various colours will be entirely un-related - though I don't see why anyone would care about that.