"Where In The World Is That #@*% Owl!?" is an honest-to-god DOS game written for an obscure British business computer called the Apricot. Why? Well, I have one, and I've been slowly learning the ins and outs of it. It's a really unique machine with some features that set it apart from your average PC clone. Unfortunately it came a bit too late and was too expensive and wasn't PC compatible enough to compete, so it faded into obscurity.

The features relevant for this game are an 800x400 monochrome screen, quite a high resolution display for 1983; and the SN76489 sound chip, also used in the PCjr, Tandy 1000, Sega Master System, and many other systems. The entire game fits on a 720KB floppy.

The game itself is written in Turbo Pascal 7.0. It provides libraries for graphics but since this is not a PC, I had to write those myself. I actually spent roughly a week before the competition building the "engine" for this, which is basically just displaying graphics, text, and playing music. Everything else is regular Turbo Pascal and DOS.

The graphics system is character-based with no sprites, so the graphics you're seeing on screen are actually many 16x16 cells arranged together. The bitmap data format exploits this by storing character-sized chunks that can be reused.

Music and sound playback is a fairly simple interrupt-driven timer system that reads I/O bytes and delays from a buffer. All of the data is precomputed, the driver just shovels it into the SN76489 at the appropriate times.

All of the assets came from Discmaster, of course. I wrote several python scripts to convert the images and sound. The image conversion also applied some compression by replacing similar chunks with others. All of the songs were originally MIDIs that were heavily hacked up in MidiEditor to cut them down to the three channel max.

The concept is a take on one of my childhood favorites, Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego. I booted up the version I had as a kid, and it's actually a pretty tough game! You would have had to look up a lot of things to complete a game. That's easy nowadays with Wikipedia, but imagine leafing through a real paper encyclopedia in 1994. I tried to make the clues in the same spirit, but practically this game is a lot easier because there's only ten cities.

Anyway, I hope you like it. :)