Finalised the Gmail backups and organising, and decided to look at Gunstorm and Gunstorm II.
Looks like I updated Gunstorm a few years ago (I had totally forgotten that), but it still needed quite a few changes to get it working in Visual Studio 2022, with the latest incarnation of my engine.
Gunstorm II was another story and, this, my last game and therefore the technical highlight of my classic period, hasn't been touched since August 2008. It's taken all day to get it working, but now it does. The graphics are at least half the resolution they need to be, and upgrading the controls has proven difficult, as the latest version of my game engine involves a choice of 512 controls: 256 for the keyboard, plus others for mouse, game controllers etc. Before this I used 'unused' keys for those 'virtual' keys, but with just one or two game controllers those spare keys can disappear quickly.
I'll spend tomorrow updating the basic game engine and my C++ classes, as it, the DirectX9 Skeleton I use, is already in need of an upgrade. My little changes to the older games that I've refurbished, Radioactive and Taskforce, have updated some aspects of it, so I'll need to do that first. Martian Rover Patrol and Roton were my most recent programming projects, but they were 2D so don't really count, but there are bound to have been changes there too. I rememeber the nightmarish time with graphical glitches in Martian Rover Patrol. I can't remember anything about the bug or its soloution. My mind is certianly going, so perhaps it's good to make these games workable while I can. After the engine is updated I can fully update Gunstorm and Gunstorm II.
It's a big learning (or rather re-learning) curve. I've encountered about 9 regular 'bugs' concerned with compiling the old code. I do hope that DirectX9 remains supported forever. It would be a pain to update everything to the latest thing. Well, people still play Commodore64 games, so there is hope.
It will at least make things more stable and easier to upgrade if I can get my old games up to the approximately same standard.
