Heros: The Sanguine Seven for DOS

Today’s game is called Heros: the Sanguine Seven and was made for MS-DOS back in 1993 by Jeffrey Fullerton. He originally sold the game directly himself, but after some minor updates (including correcting the spelling of Heroes) a shareware version was published by Safari software in 1994. It’s an unusual platform game styled after comic book heroes and villains. Some super villains have escaped from gaol, so a band of seven heroes are selected to re-capture them. Today I’m playing the registered version as downloaded from the RGB classic DOS games site, you can also get the game from the authors website here.

It features EGA graphics, but unfortunately suffers from programmers art, it’s not really all that bad, but it’s not a great example of EGA graphics. I totally sympathise as my own graphical efforts suffer from a similar fate. On the flip side the graphic engine is coded exceptionally well, the scrolling is very smooth and the game performs well, even on the equivalent of something like a 286. I also found it cool that cartoon style biff and pow word art float up in the air when ever something takes a hit.

The game supports PC speaker for the main sound effects and Ad Lib FM music. The sound effects are pretty much as good as you can expect from the PC speaker. The music is nicely implemented, but the author chose classical music which is a little odd, but somehow it fits. I suspect the choice of music is partly due to it being royalty free and the difficulty in creating your own.

The game plays much like any other platformer with a few unique twists. The heroes gather in a control room reminiscent of the justice league where you select one to take into the current stage. If your hero happens to run out of strength (your health essentially) a bubble protects them from further harm and you choose another hero to rescue them . You have to rescue every fallen hero before you can finish a stage and the game is over if there are none left in the control room.

The heroes have different special abilities and weaknesses, such as Gumwad sticking to walls and Leadmans inability to swim . Each hero also has some basic stats like in a RPG such as their maximum health and jump height. You can upgrade these stats at the control room with Gems that you find. So as you progress through the game your characters get stronger. The only thing that took me by surprise was the limited ammo that carries across levels, it is easy to run out.

I found the controls work fairly well, but in the context of many of the levels I found it difficult to navigate without taking damage. The level design unfortunately doesn’t work as well, there are many dead ends with no rewards, I ended up wandering around the levels aimlessly never finding the exit. The small screen space makes seeing upcoming hazards difficult to see and react to, unless of course you’ve memorised the level. Enemies continue to shoot and move even when quite a distance off screen, which means you have to dodge incoming fire from quite a distance away. I actually couldn’t finish any of the levels, luckily the archive I got the game in included a save for every level in the game, so I was able to try out more than the first one. Practise and moving more cautiously did seem to help me progress further.

Heros: The Sanguine Seven is certainly very unique for it’s time. There are many really good ideas in the design, such as multiple heroes and the control room. Unfortunately the level design lets it down a little, there aren’t enough health pickups for the amount of damage you take, and there are too many paths with no reward at the end. That being said there is some clever design in the levels and it is quite fun to play. I quite like the quirky heroes and the mechanic around each of their special abilities. The author made it freeware back in 2005, so there’s little reason to not give this unique game a try.

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Campbell Scientific C20 Cassette interface

Today we’ve got something unusual, a RS-232 Cassette interface made by Campbell Scientific. They seem to have always been specialised in making data logger and acquisition system. I can’t be sure, but I think this device was used for storing digital data on audio cassette, a common media of the time. Micro computers of the time did this as well, but usually had this function built in. It’s likely that this would have been used with machines that didn’t have that capability natively, like a PC or perhaps some scientific equipment that can speak RS-232.

It’s built in a very sturdy and quite large metal enclosure. It feels very well made, the few switches on it (including the small DIP switches) feel like quality components that have held up quite well.

The enclosure probably could have been smaller, but here you can see it probably wasn’t specific to this one device. The card cage only houses two cards here, but could have had 5 which would have been enough room for something more complicated.

Here is the processor board, it has a Z80 CPU which would be running at 4Mhz. Around it are mostly simple logic chips in the 74 series, but directly bellow the CPU are two 2k word x 8bit SRAM chips as well as the EPROM. Interestingly the SRAM chips (CDM6116AE3) were used in the memory expansion socket on the MPF-1, I may be able to use one of these to expand my unit. Handily every chip is socketed, so repair (or salvage) is significantly easier. The board appears to have been designed by hand, as you can see many of the traces are quite curvy, it’s clear a great deal of care went into its design.

The front panel board has very similar construction, everything in sockets and hand designed PCB. All the input and output circuitry is on this board and includes a Z80 serial IO chip and two CTC (counter timer circuit) chips. Given that this is a tape interface there is a distinct lack of DAC or ADC chips, most of the smaller chips are 74 series logic, a couple of opamps and serial line drivers and receivers. I suppose other machines (like the ZX spectrum) didn’t have those chips for storing digital information on tape, so they probably use a similar technique. It does make it clear that analogue or audio data is not supported by this device.

I’m a bit conflicted about what I’ll do with this particular device, the collector in me says keep it, but I don’t have a lot of space or use for it. I may end up just keeping the boards for parts, as they are all fairly usable chips with data sheets available.