Pocket Pirate Pursuit for Android

 

Looking around the Android market place at games I see many that are billed as being "retro". Most of these are calling the original Nintendo game console (NES) "retro". I didn't think that was "retro" enough so I thought I'd create a simple freebie terminal style game like one I played on my TRS-80 in the '70s, or that was available via dial-up on terminals. Anyone remember 110/300 baud modems and BBSes?

I'm not sure if there is much interest in terminal style games on Android. It may just appeal to me. But there should be other terminal jockies out there. I guess we'll see if anyone else likes it. Putting it on the market certainly made it easy to install on all of my devices!

Part of the inspiration for this was that FreePascal (FPC) can now compile to Java byte code. This meant that I didn't need to learn another language to participate in the Android ecosystem. It turns out you still need to know a fair bit about Java (mostly their run-time library) to write FPC code for the Dalvik VM. But I was impressed with how well the FPC developers have transported Object Pascal into the Java world. No small feet when you consider the many limitations that Java imposes.

This game was written completely from scratch using FPC, the Android SDK, GNU Make and Gimp for graphics and textures.

Services we provided:

• Wrote game from scratch in Object Pascal using FreePascal (FPC).
• Did initial mock-up with FPC game engine and Java GUI.
• Wrote simple GNU Make based build system since Android's SDK won't build with FPC. Or it was just easier to use "make" rather than beat Google's stuff into submission.
• Testing and debugging on multiple Android devices.
• Wrote help file
• Created graphics, including 9 patch files.

NOTE: While Google demanded I upgrade the target Android version, for security reasons of course, I refused for several reasons. The first and primary was the target version wasn't even commonly available at the time. But an upgrade would have further broken the visuals. Each increase in target version further breaks their buggy APIs. My target version was chosen for the best API and visual function with an eye on the greatest range of comaptibility. It requires very little and would likely run from the earliest v2 Android to the most current. There was no viable reason to claim it needed newer versions of Android. Pocket Pirate Pursuite still runs good on the Samsung phone I bought a couple of years ago (2022). (I side loaded it.) But because I wouldn't bow to their demands they blocked it from appearing in their market. At the same time they would not let me delete it off their service. Rather shady if you ask me.