Remember this? I do!
Three years ago I released ROM CHECK FAIL, and it’s haunted me for three years since. Not only is it a fantastic game and debatably the high point of my career, it’s also an idea crying out for further exploration, and a litigation timebomb. I want to do more with it, but I also want to retain ownership of the shirt on my back, the pants I sometimes wear, and the house they all live in. After much ponderance I’ve decided to set the idea free. I don’t mean free as in beer, since it’s freeware already. I mean free as in Free Software Foundation.
Here, download the source code for ROM CHECK FAIL.
To use it simply grab the game from my Games page, install it, extract the source file into game’s install directory, and edit away. You don’t need to compile it or anything, any changes you make to the game source file should be detected and picked up automatically the next time you run the game.
I should warn you – this code be dragons. I wrote ROM CHECK FAIL over two and a bit weeks outside my fulltime job, so it really was just slapped together. Lowlights of particular note are my own atan2 function (because somehow I’d never discovered atan2), several virtual subclasses – and I use the word “virtual” to mean I never bothered to write the superclass, collision detection that works more often than I’d expect but less often than I’d like, repeatedly loading images from disk because it involved less typing, and the fact that the entire source code for the game resides in a single file. I’m so proud. If you’re looking for sample code, either to help you learn to make games or to evaluate my abilities as a programmer, then please, please look elsewhere.
I think I’m all out of disclaimers, and all out of excuses for lingering. Please take this file somewhere crazy. Be awesome, then tell me all about it.
Goodbye ROM CHECK FAIL. Have a good life.
<3 Farbs
Excellent. With all the fuss with Jameson, I think it’d be great to see some of your other works getting some attention.
We do, in fact, <3 Farbs. =)
ROM CHECK FAIL is among my staple of games that I keep socked away on my home theater PC to show off to visiting geeks during a party. You've done some excellent work here – extra kudos for open-sourcing it.
As a marginally related comment… how's Jameson 0.5 coming along? ;)
I've been redirecting the gaming energy that I'd been reserving for Jameson into Minecraft. And honestly… Minecraft is so incredible that I don't know how easily it will be to redeem that energy for the 0.5 release. :-/
Thanks a bundle, an awesome gesture. I look forward to mucking about with it =D
Bahaha even I am a less sloppy programmer. I always assumed your code for everything would be shining with an ethereal glow or something.
The glow is there – you just have to look closer :)
Seriously though, you should try writing deliberately sloppy code some time. It’s surprisingly liberating.
Thank you. Do not worry about code quality, be proud of your gift to the community!
Just yesterday, really, I was thinking about how I would love to be able to mod this game. I’d talked to you before about how certain characters seemed to work better than others or whatever, and I remember how afraid you were that this brilliant piece of work would blow up in your face some day. Never did happen, which makes me happy, but this is icing.
Thank you :)
I still play this game almost everyday.
I’ve shown it to so many people.
Keep being awesome.
Make this an iPad app please!!!!!!! OMG you could actually touch and place the girders and stuff come on man it would be awesome and you would make so much money because everybody would play it!!!!! I know you probably won’t but I had to ask anyways
That’s some, uh, pretty unclean code you have there! Just too much use of drawImage!
Anyway, what license is this under, specifically? Could you upload it to Gitorious (not GitHub, GH is terrible and closed source). Also, you’d have to update the Windows installer to remove the licensing information. I assume the assets are still closed source? Then again, they were never yours anyway (because they’re ripped straight from other games). :P
Anyway, I can’t think of much to add to it because the game is, naturally, a blast! Make sure you put a link to this post under “Games”!
Have seen this game first in Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. Now I’m playing it at home. Thanks to the author for the awesome idea which really came to life!
I can download the setup just fine but i can only play it when it prompts me to run the game for the first time, after that, if i try to run it, it gives me this error:
“Failed to initialize DirectDraw: RESULT_DD_CREATE_FAIL
DirectDrawCreateEx: E_OUT OF MEMORY”
please help me decipher this. i really like this game and want to be able to access it easily or when i dont have internet connection.i really appreciate any help you can provide. i know the game fails to check ROM, but it should be able to do it multiple times. thanks in advance.