The Most Officialest SkiFree Dwelling Web page

The “^” indicators are bushes, and “//” is the skier turning barely
proper. The program was written in Fortran,
and used a mix of
VT100 escape sequences and bizarre textual content scrolling to attain its
animation. I made a number of text-terminal video video games like this in
school (on the College of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington)
they usually had been pretty standard among the many pc nerds.

VAX Ski was itself impressed by an
Activision game
for the Atari 2600
console, which I loved enjoying in my youth. I bear in mind little or no of
the Activision sport, however I feel it seemed just about like SkiFree.

I wrote SkiFree in C on my residence pc, totally for my very own
schooling and leisure. In the future whereas I used to be enjoying with it at
work, this system supervisor for Home windows Leisure Pack occurred to
look over my shoulder and instantly determined he needed to have this sport.
I known as it WinSki, however the Microsoft marketroids hated that and determined,
for inscrutible marketroidal causes, to name it SkiFree. After some
token resistance I allow them to have their manner. For the reason that program was not
initially a Microsoft product, Microsoft licensed it from me and paid
me some trivial one-time price (one thing like 100 shares of MSFT inventory,
no royalties) for its use.

SkiFree was supposed to run on a 386 PC with VGA show. Such
computer systems weren’t very highly effective, nothing like fashionable PCs that may do
3-D rendering at tens of millions of textured polygons per second…. No, in
these days there wasn’t even any such factor as a “video accelerator” —
the VGA was only a dumb pixel buffer hanging off the excruciatingly
sluggish ISA bus. This made it fairly difficult to get good efficiency
out of even easy sprite-oriented animation! Home windows did not assist
issues any by introducing a number of layers of abstraction between the
program and the video {hardware}…. I found that it was price
nearly any quantity of preprocessing (on the “quick” 386 CPU) to cut back
the quantity of video I/O (over the sluggish ISA), so I designed a
pretty intelligent algorithm to mix overlapping objects/erasures and
blt minimal areas in every body. The consequence was completely flicker-free
clear sprite animation at cheap velocity even on very sluggish
computer systems, akin to an previous 286/EGA machine I discovered within the testing lab.
These days one would in all probability simply render the sprites back-to-front in
a reminiscence buffer and blt all the window on every body.

In 1993 I began engaged on Model 2 of SkiFree, which might have
barely extra sensible physics, multi-player, community play, robotic
opponents, and sounds. I bought about half of these issues executed (break up
display/keyboard multiplayer, very crude robots, and sound), however managed
to get the physics fully screwed as much as the purpose the place it was no
longer playable. At about the identical time I additionally misplaced the unique
supply code and bought distracted by different tasks, so SkiFree type of
went into everlasting stasis at model 1.0.

In April 2005 I discovered the supply code for SkiFree 1.03
and compiled it, so now we’ve got an actual 32-bit model that ought to
run on any Home windows XP system, even the brand new 64-bit XP. It is also
extra CPU-friendly (makes use of 1% of the CPU as a substitute of 100%) so it will not
drain your pocket book battery. There are a couple of different modifications from 1.0 — see
if you happen to can spot them!

In October 2005 I fastened a couple of bugs and launched model 1.04.
(A number of the bitmap colours had been incorrect, and ski slope did not
“wrap round” like in 1.0.)

This is the voice of the Abominable Snow
Monster.


This is what he seems like at dinner.


That is the place child snow monsters come from:


Right here is the crappy Home windows icon I made:


Right here is the great icon that some graphic artist at Microsoft made:

This Google search
truly returns a number of pages about SkiFree now, and never so many
promotional “purchase one raise go get one free” adverts any extra. Most of them
are warez obtain websites and “cheat code” lists, however there are a couple of gems
like this
SkiFree
clone for the TI 92 calculator
(!!). There’s an
amazingly
long article on Everything2
and a Wikipedia entry
(although a number of the

more philosophical passages have been deleted).
There’s even a
SkiFree Fan Fiction
website!

I’ve obtained loads of fan mail over time, however
this one is my favourite.

I even bought a fan message on my answering machine!
(Sorry in regards to the awful sound high quality.
This is my best guess
at what he is saying. Let me know if I bought it incorrect.)

On February 10, 2010, fragments of the
lost diaries of my cousin SigFried
had been found in a curio store in Istanbul. SigFried went lacking
someday in 1991 whereas doing discipline analysis for SkiFree. We nonetheless have not
discovered SigFried himself, however now we’ve got some additional clues about what
occurred to him….

Get SkiFree here
(39409-byte ZIP containing one 118784-byte Home windows 32-bit EXE).

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That is the newest model (1.04) compiled for 32-bit Home windows, which
also needs to work on Wine and 64-bit Home windows.

If for some purpose that ZIP file would not be just right for you, strive downloading
the uncompressed 118784-byte EXE file as a substitute.

ANTIVIRUS WARNINGS

I’m advised that some malware scanners are reporting these EXE
recordsdata as “contaminated” or “malware”. I’m 99.99999% certain it is a
false optimistic, however I after all I am unable to show something, and the
corporations that produce the malware scanners haven’t responded
to my inquiries.

The 16-bit EXE is the unique one printed by Microsoft in
1991. The 32-bit EXEs had been compiled by me on a fairly safe
Home windows NT machine in 2005, and by no means set off any
warnings till very lately. I’ve confirmed towards previous
backups that the recordsdata haven’t been modified.

For the sake of utter thoroughness, I’ve put in a recent
copy of Home windows 2000 and Visible Studio 6.0 from unique Microsoft
CDs on a clean pc not related to any community, loaded the
SkiFree supply code by floppy disk, and recompiled. The brand new EXE
file is right here:
ski32‑rebuild‑vs6.exe

And I’ve additionally recompiled with Visible Studio 2019 (downloaded
from Microsoft) on a Home windows 7 machine:
ski32‑rebuild‑vs2019.exe

Please let me know
if these newly rebuilt EXEs are (or usually are not)
setting off malware scanners. I feel I can fairly effectively assure
that the VS6 one is clear!

For historic curiosity, you would obtain the unique
16-bit SkiFree 1.0
that shipped as a part of the Home windows Leisure Pack in 1991.
It does work on most 32-bit Home windows programs, however not very effectively.
If you cannot get it to work in Home windows XP, do that:

Configure Windows XP to run 16-bit Windows programs.
That has fastened the issue for a couple of folks thus far. Most probably
you need to get the newest 32-bit model as a substitute.

In the event you really feel like blowing some cash right this moment, why not purchase a
T-shirt?