> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 :)
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?
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