Ballerburg SDL – Play classical castle combat game from 1987 in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Ballerburg SDL – Play classical castle combat game from 1987 in the browser

baller.tuxfamily.org

73 pointsmidzer21 comments

The creator of the original Ballerburg, Prof. Dr. Eckhard Kruse, teaches computer science at the Cooperative State University Baden-Württemberg (DHBW). I attended four of his courses (C, Interactive Systems, Software Engineering 1 & 2) during my Bachelor studies. He's a bit odd sometimes but also funny, with a strong interest in ghosts and spiritual stuff.

If only you'd written that 15 years ago :/

I've played Ballerburg on my dad's Atari ST when I was a kid and everybody else already was on DOS/early windows. I later on attended the DHBW (back then still the "BA Mannheim") and would have loved to know that he was the creator back then.

Thanks for making me smile, anyways!

This is how things go. As a kid I learned Pascal in school from a wonderful teacher and I loved it. Unfortunately I only had a C64, while most of my friends already had PCs. So I got hold of a Pascal version for the C64.

I only realized many years later and many years after graduation, that one of my university professors was the original author the C64 Pascal.

http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/matthes/

He has a very "old-school" personal website: https://www.eckhardkruse.net

Nice, I'm getting really old. The name rang a bell, but I just couldn't picture anything. Opening the page was like "oh of course!" Killed quite some time with this as a kid.

I see this pre-dated Scorched Earth [0] but I have so many hours playing it growing up. Worms is 2nd but probably not even close in sheer hours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)

There's a 3D Scorched Earth! It's fun!

Autotranslation of the instructions:

> Notes about the game:

> Click on a cannon to change its settings and fire.

> Click on the bullets, powder kegs or money bags to get to the market.

> Press the ESC key for general settings.

> For more details see the instructions.

> Ballerburg SDL is free software and can be distributed and modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 3. Further information is available on the Ballerburg SDL main page.

Nice.. played that on Atari ST as a kid. Then later in school there was a very old IBM PC in some corner and we were sometimes huddled around it to play Ballerburg.. good times.

This has worse graphics than Artillery Duel on the C64 from 1983.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbT7OrvOvhs

https://c64online.com/c64-games/artillery-duel/

That's debatable. High res simple graphics vs low res pixel art.

It's certainly a much more complex game:

- multiple castles with different layouts (not sure if that's exposed in this port)

- positional damage: hitting a cannon or one of the stores destroys them, hitting the weather vane removes the ability to determine wind speed, hitting the king ends the game

- an economy: you use up powder and cannonballs and need to buy resources

- a builder aspect: you can rebuild destroyed walls and other structures and build mine shafts for an initial investment but continuous returns

This game had a 3D spinoff (by Ascaron) that as far as I can tell only has been somewhat popular in Germany that was a substantial part of my childhood (through being included on a magazine CD). Time to delve into the internet to try and find it I guess.

Me too! I loved to play it during holidays at my grandma's place.

I haven't tried it but it seems to be available to download from the Internet Archive.

Computer Bild Spiele #3 from 2004? Because that's where I got my copy.

There is a lot of variability in the target. If I don't change any settings at all, the cannon ball lands in a wide range of different locations. IS this trying to be 'real' in some way, does wind play that large a role?

src: https://baller.tuxfamily.org/

    The king says:
    'You ought to earn more money,
     build more shaft towers,
     and vanquish the opponent!'

This is great. Was a bit small on my screen, so I zoomed to 200% and set image-rendering: pixelated;

The sound - more than the game itself - tickles my nostalgia bone in a big way.

Strong GORILLA.BAS vibes.

Used to vibe on Artillery Simulator on the Apple II in grade school. Never played Ballerburg but enjoyed the market concept and still worked from mobile :)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game

The eternal problem with Worms and most Artillery games is having a human opponent.

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