To celebrate 40th anniversary of BBC Micro, Galaforce 2 source code released

Kevin Edwards, the programmer of Galaforce 2 for the BBC Micro, has released the source code for the game on GitHub to celebrate the anniversary of BBC Micro.

Galaforce 2 was the follow up to his classic arcade shooter Galaforce. Edwards says:

“In 1987 I began writing this sequel to the successful ‘Galaforce’ shoot-em-up game for the BBC Micro and Electron home computers. Galaforce 2 was published by Superior Software in 1988 on a compilation tape/disc with three other titles ( Play It Again Sam 6 ). Sadly, many people didn’t know of this games existence as it didn’t get the publicity that the first one was fortunate enough to have. Also, the BBC Micro was in decline and very few full price games were around as compilation titles dominated the charts. As a consequence sales were much lower.

The game is written entirely in 6502 assembly language. The BBC Micro had only 32K Bytes of RAM so software had to be carefully crafted to fit into memory.

The original BBC Micro Galaforce was missing important game-play elements that I was unable to add due to lack of memory. It used screen MODE 2 which took away 20K of the 32K RAM available – and the OS took a bit more away too! So to implement these important features I changed the game to use MODE 5 which had the same screen resolution as MODE 2, but had only 4 colours available compared with 16.”

Edwards previously released the source code for the original Galaforce in 2016 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the game.

You can find the source code for Galaforce 2 on GitHub here