Prophecy

Prophecy is a MS-DOS 3D action game I developed at the end of my high-school (1997). I wanted to make a cool 3D engine (DirectX was still very young those days), and the game came as a practical demonstration of that engine. The game was entirely written in C++ (but not in an object-oriented fashion). Prophecy won first prize at the national programming competition (DMIH 97).

I developed my own drawing, math, direct-input and memory checking libraries for this game. In order to make it fast enough on a 20MHz machine, I had to learn a few tricks used in game programming: integer line drawing, double buffering, sinus lookup tables, fast polygon fill, polygon hiding. Well, it was definitely the most amusing program to write.

It doesn't look impressive nowdays. With 320x200 resolution, low details, lack of textures and 256 colors it really looks like an old-timer. What is even more, as this is a MS-DOS program, you will probably experience following problems while running it in Windows command prompt:

  • In order to get sound, you will need MS-DOS drivers for the sound card (and properly configured BLASTER variable). My advice -- don't bother. Just run "nosound.bat".
  • Internal game timer doesn't work because windows hooks to the same system timer. As a result, the game usually runs too fast.
  • The game uses a direct access to keyboard and other input devices. Windows do the same so don't be surprised if controls don't act as they should.

If you still want to try it, you can download it here:

Beware of licensing rights: Prophecy is cardware. If you like it, send me a postcard!