NEW: A demo is now available here.

Chuck Jones: Space Cop of the Future is a funny 16-Bit graphic adventure game about Crime, Mystery, Rocket Powered El Caminos and funky tunes. More detail can be found here.

Writing games is hard.

For this game I decided to make it even harder, I decided to write it for DOS. Since the game was in the style of classic adventure games like The Secret of Monkey Island or Kings Quest VI, I thought it might be fun to actually develop the game the same way those ones were. It would be great to actually have a retro styled game that was able to run on hardware from the 1980s. Because of the excellent DosBox, I realized I could write the game for DOS and with a small amount of extra work have it run perfectly on Windows, Mac and Linux, and even Android and iOS. Because there was such a variance between DOS machines back in the day I had to pick a target so I settled on a configuration that might have been common in the late 1980s and early 1990s:

640k RAM
VGA graphics
6Mhz Intel 286 CPU
Adlib compatible sound card

Technical details

The game is written primarily in C++ using the wonderful OpenWatcomV2 compiler, with a little bit of 8088 assembly code used in the performance sensitive sections of the code, especially for graphics. Additionally a custom scripting language is used to make gameplay code simpler and more memory efficient through the use of a highly optimized game specific bytecode, the script compiler runs on modern windows and is written in modern C++17.