Xor, Anyone?

Posted by Cliff on Monday October 18, 1999 @03:30PM from the searching-for-obscure-games dept.

RallyDriver asks: "Does anyone else remember the fiendish British puzzle game 'Xor' (pronounced 'Zor')? The game pieces were (among other things) theatrical masks, chickens, fish, dollies and two types of bombs. Was developed on the BBC micro and later ported to the ZX Spectrum and possibly Amiga, Atari ST and MS-DOS. It was produced by a little distributor above a pub in Gwdywr St, Cambridge, England, whose name escapes me." Darn. And they say that the US has all of the interesting games!

"It would be a great shame if this unqiue gem (think - Lemmings) were to be lost forever, so I was thinking of doing a C / X11 rewrite of the game engine (very easy and very portable) but I thought I'd ask to see if it had already been done. Also, does anyone know what the legal situation would be regarding distibution of the original game levels (concept, not exact binary data) with it? A RAM snapshot of the Spectrum version appeared a few years ago on one of these emulator download sites, but it was in Slovenia..."

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YES I have got one! by jim · 1999-10-19 02:28 · Score: 3

... well most of one. No music, no end-of-level coded message display, X11 only and it re-uploads the background on palette changes so don't run it over the network yet. Oh and it busy-waits for frame timing and pegs your load at 1. Game engine is reproduced faithfully as far as I can tell.
I'm not quite sure of the legal angle myself so I've been keeping it under my hat a bit. Logotron (for it was they) apparently still exist but I can't find anything about Xor on their site ... the original game binaries are available for download here and there on the Web (I got my info from disassembling the BBC version). The upright thing to do would be to contact Logotron and ask them if they'd consider releasing it into the public domain as they don't seem to be selling it any more. The sneaky thing to do would be to distribute the game engine and let players download binaries themselves.
No, my source isn't downloadable (in fact it's not even with me at the moment) but contact me if you're interested.

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-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.