The game

What is it?

Babal 2.0 is an arcade game on HP48. One could say it's an adaptation of TrailBlazer , a game which existed long time ago on Amstrad CPC464. At least TrailBlazer is where I got the Idea from, that's all.

Besides the general informations contained on this page, you can read the user's manual and download the game.

Author

It's me, U-Foot ! I programmed babal all by myself, and was quite pleased with it for it was my first fully playable game. Too bad I did not have an e-mail at the time Babal has been released, for I would have loved to have feedback from players... Still, if you have any comment or remark about Babal, please send me a mail.

History

This game is named babal because one can write it with only 5 ASCII characters, and it fits perfectly in an HP48 label :-)

The first version (1.0) was ready at the end of december 1994, and the actual release, 2.0, was ready a few weeks later.

After that I lost all my docs about the HP48, and was unable to do anything else. It didn't really matter for I guess would not have wasted a lot more time programming games on HP48 if I had not lost them.

Projects

Before programming Babal I tried to develop a remake of (the famous) Gauntlet. Project name was supposed to be "SQR". But I gave up and did Babal instead. Now it is sure that I will never do anything (except a few divisions) on my HP48. I used an incredible number of batteries (I think I almost payed the price of the HP48 just buying batteries to feed it) and enough is enough.

Now years after Babal was intially released, I'm involved in Free Software developpement, and developped a bunch of software absolutely not HP48-related, including Liquid War. I really stopped investing time on the HP48 platform, still I have plans for Babal .

Contrib

Babal is now available on HP49G, for Jean Marc Arsan has kindly ported it.

Emanuel Borsboom also made a nice Java applet of Babal.

License

Since there's no precise license specified in the .zip files, let me clarify things: "Babal 2.0 by U-Foot for HP48 is public domain". Final dot.

Why should one program on a HP48?

Because it's really funny to program an action game on a small calculator which comes with one single (ridiculous?) miner game.

Quick download

More files (extra levels, rare ports) might be available on the complete download page .