DOME

DOME our most ambitious project for the MSX2, read about its history development and future here.

Introduction

In 1992 Westwood released DUNE 2 based on the book from Frank Herbert and is considered as the grandfather of all RTS games.

After hundreds hours of play and getting completely obsessed by the game, we had a vision of re-creating the same experience on the MSX 2 system. So a start was made to capture the feeling of an RTS game on MSX. This was around 1997 when the MSX system already was abandoned by Sony and Philips, but the community was still alive and kicking.

Initially work started on a self designed RTS game called DOOM, see screenshots below:

But after a while we switched to the highly popular Dune 2 look and feel and the name was changed to DOME.

DOME was our first game completely developed in Z80 assembly and targeted at MSX2 or higher system fully loaded with features that where new for us and had to be thought out. Things like:

Scrolling in screen 5
GFX Compression
Mouse controls
A CPU driven enemy that had to be aware of the players actions and do counter attacks
Realtime radar

All these features where quite a challenge on a 3.58Mhz (yes 3 Mhz) 8 bit machine.

Unfortunately these challenges all added up in time and this together with changes in our private lives, interests and work eventually caused an halt to the development of DOME. We tried several restarts but this never really took off.

Nowadays i cant even understand or read the assembly code I had written 20 years ago..