Homebrew Extra Retro Gamer 274
- andrewrfisher
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
Creating a game for these old machines is a challenge. Creating something playable in just 10 lines of BASIC is a real achievement, which is why we concentrate on the BASIC 10-Liner competition for our main feature and Champion Coder Matthew Begg. We’ll also be keeping an eye on the GB Compo 2025 - bit.ly/gbcompo2025 - to see what the Game Boy coders can achieve. And there’s news of multiple arcade conversions for you to try.
QUICK LINKS
BASIC 10-LINER COMPETITION 2025
Interview with Sharp MZ coder Ben Coffer:
How did you become interested in the 10-Liner competition?
There was a bit of a buzz around four years ago amongst the retro folks I was
following on Twitter regarding the competition, and it brought back memories
of working on 10-line games with my friend and his CPC6128 when we were quite
young. He used to get Amstrad Action magazine, and they ran a competition for
games written in 10 lines of BASIC. We wrote a great little parachuting game
which we were proud of at the time, and it was pretty fun trying to squeeze
gameplay into such a small program footprint.
Is the Sharp BASIC an easy one to use for the competition, and does it have any advantages?
The standard BASIC language on the Sharp MZ-80A is fairly similar to Microsoft
BASIC but with some additions for pseudo-pixel graphics. The machine itself
doesn't allow user-defined graphics, so you have to use the Sharp characters.
This is handy as there are lots of little graphic symbols that fit nicely into
games. That said, on the Sharp, we're at quite a disadvantage, as you cannot
use any abbreviations of BASIC commands. Also, it'll only allow 78 characters
(not including the line number) on a line. This makes things quite tricky
in comparison with, say, the C64, where you can have many more commands on one
single line of BASIC.
Which category do you try to compete in, and why?
I always try to compete in the PUR-80 category as it's really fun to try and
work out how to fit some decent game logic in such a small amount of space.
Once I managed to work out how to eliminate 'IF' statements from the program, a whole ton of space (relatively speaking) opens up for you. The Sharp
BASIC doesn't have an "IF THEN ELSE" structure, only "IF THEN", so if you
used that statement, then you couldn't do anything else on the single line
of the program. These can be eliminated using Boolean maths in most cases.
It's always surprising the tricks that people come up with in their PUR-80
entries!
What was your 2025 entry, and what inspired it?
It was called "Buggy10" and was inspired by the 1982 arcade game Moon Patrol.
In the end, it turned out fairly differently to that, though with obstacles
appearing along the road ahead of you instead of having enemies to shoot
in the sky above you. The closer you are to the obstacle when you shoot it
the higher your score. I admit, I ran out of space in the program on this
occasion and couldn't even fit a bullet in. I was still very pleased with
my parallax scrolling foreground/background, though!
,
Which games in the competition were you impressed by?
Obviously the winner, Sand-Stormer, is really exceptional. The code is
absolutely packed in, but you do have that advantage on the Commodore
machines. I loved it! I do tend towards the entries on machines with
more limited BASICs, though, and I think Roy's City Bomber-esque game for
the Mattel Aquarius is a wonderful achievement. The Wordle entry definitely
needs a mention too. The way that the words are encrypted in the program
is brilliant.
Would you encourage more people, and more Sharp users, to get involved?
Absolutely! The more entries, the better, it really encourages you to get
creative and get thinking. The programming of a 10 liner is almost like a
puzzle in itself. I do hope also that more Sharp users will contribute next
time. I should mention my friend Joachim, who entered a very playable version
of his game Numbertron to the PUR-80 category in 2021. Go look it up!
PRIZE PROGRAMS
The 2025 category winners
Sand-Stormer (RoePipi, Plus/4)
Winner of the PUR80 category, this survival game sees you tapping palm trees for water and reaching stone bunkers to cool down.
Mini Golf (Eric Carr, Atari 8-bit)
Written using Fast Basic, Eric’s game featured water hazards and a power gauge to win the PUR120 category.
5 Tides at the Purple Oyster Beach (FUED, Coco)
The WILD category winner used ugBasic, tasking you with picking up purple oysters before the tide rolled in.
Lost Temple of Gold (Eric Carr, Atari 8-bit)
Winning the EXTREM-256 category, this brilliant remake of the DOS game Paganitzu sees you manipulating boulders as you collect the gold.
Tiny Basic (Matthew Begg, ZX Spectrum)
A clever port of Dennis Allison’s 1970s Tiny BASIC interpreter for early microcomputers, Matthew Begg’s version won the SCHAU (show) category.
NEWS BYTES
Amstrad Plus: Harrier Attack Reloaded now has an armour gauge and smoother scrolling, with a cartridge version also being produced. bit.ly/harrier-attack-reloaded
Atari ST: Electric Dreams converted the influential 1978 David Ahl BASIC game Super Star Trek. bit.ly/st-trek
Atari 2600: Among the entries for the Jef Minter I, Rebel jam was StarGiraf by Dr Ludos. bit.ly/stargiraf
BBC: Read all about lovebug’s brilliant Lady Bug conversion here: bit.ly/ladybug-bbc
C64: Visit lowcarb.itch.io/ for LC-Games’ superb new Space Invaders conversion and a one-button variant.
Coleco: Check out collectorvision.com for new releases, Arabian and Super Space Acer.
Enterprise 128: KTB Retro Computing Productions has converted their Spectrum games, including Painterman. They have also posted tutorials for converting MPAGD games to the Enterprise. bit.ly/ktb-enterprise
(NOTE: A feature on these games will appear in RG278)
Lynx: Wayzard by Retroguru was created for the Revision party game competition and achieved 3rd place. bit.ly/wayzard-lynx
Master System: badcomputer0 released his new game, Frontier Force ($4.99). https://bit.ly/frontierforce
MSX: Cute puzzle game Matchy Matchy launched from bitsofbas. bit.ly/matchy-msx
PICO-8: Snekburd is Werxy’s fun demake of Snakebird. bit.ly/snekburd
Plus/4: The Hungarian game dev competition attracted great entries, including Gravity Boy and the tower defence game Rush!
Spectrum: Deanysoft released their brilliant conversion of the arcade classic Gorf.
Various: Jurl from Tonsomo Entertainment (RG264) has now reached the Spectrum, Amstrad, Game Boy, Neo-Geo Pocket Color, and GP2X! tonsomo.itch.io/
CHAMPION CODER - MATTHEW BEGG
From: Manchester, UK (originally Middlesbrough)
Website: bit.ly/begg-10liners
Format: ZX Spectrum BASIC 10-Liners
Previous games: ZXFM (2024), Hardware Hustle (2024), BimMobiles (2023)
Working on: DeLorean Dash, Minesweeper, Barcode Battle, ZX Stock Exchange
What got you into Spectrum programming?
My cousin Richard and I used to try and write BASIC games as kids on our Spectrums back in the 80s. We’d spend the week trying to beat the other one with some arcade clone or other, then meet up every Friday night to play each other’s games. His were always better, so that early friendly competition made me want to improve my BASIC coding skills.
What got you interested in the BASIC 10-Liner competition?
I hadn’t programmed anything for almost 40 years when I read about the contest in Retro Gamer. I liked the immediate feedback of writing such short games, the challenge of squeezing it all in and seeing what everyone else could achieve within the limits. There really is a lot of creativity to be found in the restrictions of the contest.
Are there any particular tricks or techniques you use?
Obviously, I’m combining lots of BASIC commands onto each line, separated by colons. But ‘IF’ statements are really hard to implement like this, as they use up the rest of the line. So I use a trick with FOR loops to zero so you can fit loads of independent IF-like statements on a single line. You’ll see these throughout my code. The Spectrum stores its commands as a single character, too, so that helps fit even more into the character limit compared to other computers’ BASIC.
Do you prefer a particular category in the competition, or does it depend on how the game develops?
I like the ‘EXTREM-256’ category, which allows 256 characters per line, so games can be more complex with more custom graphics. I’ve also enjoyed writing non-games in the ‘SCHAU’ (Show) category, such as a font editor and even a BASIC interpreter!
What is your development environment?
I use ‘128 BASIC’ in the FuseX emulator on a MacBook Pro so I can work on my games whenever the ideas strike, and regularly save my progress. I make copious notes to track the variables and things that need fixing/doing. I’ve written a BASIC utility for counting the characters in each line, so I don’t break the rules, and I always playtest the games on my real Spectrums before submitting them to the contest.
How did you cram a football management game into just 10 lines?
I was playing Kevin Toms’ classic ‘Football Manager’ and accidentally pressed BREAK. I discovered that it was written entirely in BASIC - over 700 lines of it. So I thought it would be a great challenge to get a football management sim into 10 lines and still make it playable with transfers, injuries, squad selection, vidiprinter, etc. There were some compromises to make to fit it all in - for example, my simple fixture generator had your team playing itself twice each season, so I just disguised those 2 weeks as the ‘international break’!
What inspired your own entries for the 2025 competition?
DeLorean Dash: I wanted to write a ‘Back To The Future’ themed game that concentrated on the presentation first - with the music, colourful logo and the colourful time circuits on screen. That all took up about 7 lines, so I only had 3 lines left to put the actual game in - and so ‘DeLorean Dash’ was born as a racing game using simple Daley Thompson keyboard-bashing gameplay!
TinyBasic: I had a mad thought that I might be able to write a BASIC interpreter in 10 lines of BASIC. I mean that’s crazy ‘Inception’ level stuff. And so I wrote ‘TinyBasic’, which does exactly that. I love that people have now written their own games in TinyBasic which run on top of Sinclair BASIC. It’s fair to say they’re pretty slow!
Barcode Battle: I loved the old ‘Barcode Battler’ handheld in the 1990s, where you could battle warriors using barcodes on household goods. So I wrote a fun 1 or 2-player game in 10 lines of BASIC that uses the same concept. Fitting in a custom font was especially challenging.
Minesweeper: Minesweeper in Windows 3.1 was the first puzzle game I remember getting properly addicted to. So I tried writing it in 10 lines of Sinclair BASIC. For fun, I tried hard to mimic the look of Windows 3.1
ZX Stock Exchange: I’d only written games in the 256-character limit category before, so this year I thought I’d also enter the tougher 80 characters-per-line contest. This idea came about when I saw an episode of ‘Friends’ where Monica dabbles in the stock market. I thought the scrolling ticker and time moving fast would make for a frenetic game.
Have you played many of this year's entries, or any particular past favourites?
I love ‘Bomb Squad’ by Noah Burney, where you have to quickly flick through an on-screen bomb defusal manual to know which wires to cut as the bomb timer ticks down - really gets your heart racing! And I lost hours playing ‘The Lost Temple of Gold’ by Eric Carr. It’s like 'Rick Dangerous' meets 'Boulder Dash'. Incredible that it was written in just 10 lines of BASIC.
Would you encourage others to try?
Definitely. Even if you have no programming background, or you last typed in a BASIC program in the 1980s, the 10-line format makes it easy to get started and achieve something in a short space of time.
Is there a machine you would like to see take part in the competition?
There tend to be a lot of entries for the Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. I’d like to see more entries for the Sinclair ZX81. It’s a challenging system to write for because you can only have one BASIC statement per line, and the processor only runs your code between drawing frames directly to the screen, making it really slow. So that’s even more of a challenge! I’d also like to see some games for the elusive SAM Coupé.
Have you ever thought of developing bigger games yourself?
Not really! Whenever my games end up longer than 10 lines, I now automatically think ‘How can I make it fit in 10?’
DATABURST REVIEWS
Ultima II and Ultima III
Format: VIC-20 (35K required) – tested, C64
Credits: Aleksi Eeben
Price: Free download
Web: bit.ly/ultima2-vic20 and bit.ly/ultima3-vic
Richard Garriott’s classic early role-playing games set in the land of Sosaria were never available for the VIC, and so Aleksi’s ambitious ports (cleverly reworked and compressed to fit onto a single disk image) are very welcome. Fortunately, Aleksi has provided excellent documentation to help players get into the dense and involving world. The graphics are primitive but accurate to the originals, including the first-person perspective for dungeons, while there is effective use of sound. The sheer depth will entice dedicated players to keep playing. There are also enhanced C64 versions available to download at the links above, so take up arms to save Sosaria (and the Earth!)
[Score] 82%
SkillTeam
Format: Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum
Credits: David Programa (based on FanCade game by LukaszM)
Price: Free download & play online
Web: bit.ly/davidprograma
[Body] 120 words
This is a great variation on the classic Soko-Ban format, but we do prefer the presentation of the Spectrum’s in-game graphics. This one will test your brain.
[Score] 85%
GP Hero
Format: Game Boy Color
Credits: Shane McCafferty (design, code, graphics), Beatscribe (music & sound FX)
Price: $1.99 digital download
Web: bit.ly/herogp-gbc
[Body] 90 words
After earlier racing games, Hoonigans and Nitro, Shane has tackled the classic Sega coin-op Super Hang-On. The changing graphics give a decent 3d effect, there is a pacy soundtrack, and the challenge increases as you progress. This enjoyable racer makes us look forward to Shane’s proposed OutRun-inspired title!
[Score] 80%
PREVIEW - HELL BREAKER (GAME BOY COLOR)
Mike Leisz (@technofantasy on X/Twitter) is working on Hell Breaker, a block-dropping puzzle for Game Boy Color.
What got you interested in making a Game Boy game?
I picked up GBStudio, an engine for building Game Boy games, for a game jam and never put it down. It provides my favourite workflow of any game-making software. You can easily write your own tools and override parts of the default engine to meet the unique needs of your game. I can’t recommend it enough.
What games inspired Hell Breaker?
Hell Breaker began as a sort of evil-twin remix of Jay Geertsen’s Columns, popularised by SEGA. I wanted to bring the core mechanics of that series to the Game Boy. As I progressed, I started to pour my own personal influences into the game. Among them are Puyo Puyo and Pnickies by Compile, Tetris Attack by Intelligent Systems, and my undying love for 2D fighting games of the '90s.
What makes Hell Breaker stand out from similar games?
Hell Breaker features asymmetrical battles against the CPU, wherein the player and their opponent use different systems to fight each other. The player uses a standard match-3 system familiar to falling block games to damage their opponent, while the CPU uses a dice-based system to drop obstacles onto the player’s field and defend against their attacks.
What is your development environment?
GBStudio with a modified engine.
Who else is involved in making the game?
Tara Touzie is my partner at Technofantasy, our two-person game development studio. She is involved in all high-level concepting, game design, narrative, and art direction.
robotmeadows composed the score.
What else are you planning to add to the demo version?
All updates to the game’s Arcade mode, where the player battles against the CPU, will be available in the demo. The full release will also get Endless modes and a 2P Versus mode, where players can battle their friends over a link cable.
How long have you been working on it, and when do you think it will be finished?
We started development at the beginning of 2025 and plan to finish before the Fall of this year.
Do you have any other projects in development?
We’re also working on a time travel-themed puzzle-adventure game for Game Boy Color called Project Pegasus and a dystopian driving game about a motorcycle courier called Box Runner.
What recent Game Boy homebrew has impressed you?
The Game Boy games coming out of the GBStudio community consistently impress me. EGVRoom has been making fantastic and impossibly fast pseudo-3D games [see the review of GP Hero above]. Mico27 recreated Super Mario Bros with an entire game’s worth of additional content. Michel Iwaniec modified GBStudio to compile NES games. All incredible projects.
Try the demo at: https://technofantasy.itch.io/hellbreaker.
Retro Gamer 274 published on 3rd July 2025
This blog was published on 2nd October 2025
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