4pac is on hold... it was a small project based on an idea @ yahoo atari newsgroup..... drc did great gfx... nice msx as well ;)... but i made small progesses with this little game...the player routine did not worked (i still not know why...)  and my free time was limited... at the beginning i thought its like demo coding but it wasn't... coding a game is something different... than demos...

so... i thought i'll start a new one... 1st i started to code again when i was waiting for my connection flight on a business tripp... the game was called trackball and was kind of trailblazer clone which i wanted to do kind of inspired by rainbow walker as well... and it should fit into 4k... i had the 3d engine running and working, the level structure & depacker but then i lost my USB stick with all source files of "trackball".... so i lost interest again in coding... as i did wanted to start again from scratch...

then ii was watching my floor with the tiles...and then i thought...why not put 3d trailblazer onto 2d and again try to fit that into 4k or even 1k... analmux and i had a discussion on atariage about his mario clone and the scroll wrapper to minimize screen ram and i started to write a wrapper just kind of proove of concept (same concept as on GBA f.e.) interesting thing is that the 1st version worked so kept me motivated... then Retrofan did the level & tile gfx and the ball animation... so boinxx was born and grows steadily... as i am a fan of the old happy computer game "jump!" because of the 3 layer parallax scrolling i implemented parallax as well... so again it worked easily... at the moment i am working on the sprite engine as Boinxx will use software sprites for the enemies... i hope that i have enough CPU time left...

i have a lot of ideas for the game, small update was the power up panel which will enable you to perform special moves... i have many others like

- weather conditions (fog, night, rain, wind)
- power ups (long jump, slow down, revers controls, warp, ....)
- enemies (darts, ....)
- special fx like f.e. earthquake & meteors...

and my biggest motivation is that i definitly seem to have the "flow" again of being creative again and to have game coding experience...

so... **j... that's the story behind 4pac & boinx...  i still love your 4pac msx but i am using RMT for boinxx... but why not using MPT and your tracks??? i hope i still have them...

cheers, karolj