In 1995 I started work on an MS DOS game titled Constellation Stargates which had the MS DOS 8 character name STARGATE. The game was written for Constellations Educational Software and would run in either DOS or Windows. The game was released to Schools across Australia in 1996 and sold well for a number of years.
In 1997 I wrote Star Chaser Trainer, another educational game based on the Constellations Star Chart and Star Chaser manual. Constellation Stargates was based on the same manual and was named after ideas in the manual but the Star Chaser manual was not required to play the game.
Star Chaser Trainer was designed to be played with the Star Chaser manual and Constellations Star Chart. In 2002 Star Chaser Trainer was redone from scratch using Macromedia Director MX 2004 and went on to be released for Windows and Mac computers.
Constellation Stargates was written with Borland C using BGI which supported 640x480 resolution with 16 colours. The original release was keyboard only but mouse support was added in a later update. After a player successfully found all four lost constellation co-ordinates they were shown a small 3D animation of the Star Ship Star Chaser zooming into the opened space gate. The animation and the 3D model were created using Videoscape 3D on my Commodore Amiga 500.
That 3D model was later used as the basis for the new look of the Star Chaser as seen in the 2002 release of Star Chaser trainer. The original model was later used as a small shuttle like craft and could be seen docking with the new and much larger ship in a demo video included with Bilby Adventures.
A little while later I took over the redevelopment of Magic Turtle. The original had been written in Pascal for DOS and it had been partially redone using Macromedia Director 7/8. The project was upgraded to Macromedia Director MX 2004 and after completion sold quite well for a number of years. This new version of Magic Turtle ran in Windows 98 - XP, and Mac OSX 10.1 - 10.5
In 2013 I had to upgrade to Adobe Director 12 as my older Macromedia development software no longer worked on Intel Macs running OSX 10.6 and above. I have just finished an upgrade to another Constellations product Winning Bowls. This had been written in Macromedia Director 7 for Windows and ran at 640x480. The updated product runs at 1024x768 in Windows (XP and above) and Mac OSX (10.4 and above). It is now available for the iPad (IOS 5 and above).
