A nostalgic piece of gaming history from 25 years ago

Back in 2000, a group of friends spent their afternoons creating this simple but fun fighting game. Armed with a video capture card, DIV Games Studio 2, and plenty of enthusiasm, we digitized ourselves and created our own Mortal Kombat-style game.

Development period: May 6, 2000 - June 5, 2000 Development style: A few hours in the afternoons between studying and other activities Inspiration: Mortal Kombat's digitized character style Reality: Much more... let's say "humble" than our inspiration 😄

This wasn't an intensive month-long project - it was a fun side project made during free time, and it shows! But that's part of its charm.

HITS is a 2-player fighting game where you can choose from 4 characters (all of them us, the developers and friends):

• CrowDat
• Jonas
• P.J.
• Hair-Do

Each character features digitized sprites captured from real people using a video capture card - a pretty cool technology for the year 2000!

• ⚔️ 2-player local versus mode
• 🎭 4 playable characters (all real people!)
• 🎵 4 original music tracks (S3M modules)
• ⏱️ 99-second timer per round
• 🏆 Best of 3 rounds system
• 💥 Multiple attacks and defense moves
• 🎨 Custom digitized graphics

Player 1:

• J / K - Move left/right
• A, S, D, Z, X, C - Different attacks

Player 2:

• ← / → - Move left/right
• Insert, Home, Page Up, Delete, End, Page Down - Different attacks

General:

• Enter - Start game (after character selection)
• ESC - Exit to menu

• Original: MS-DOS with VGA graphics
• Modern: DOSBox 0.74 or higher

• Engine: DIV Games Studio 2
• Language: DIV (Pascal-like)
• Resolution: 1024x768 (menus), 640x480 (character select), 1024x768 (gameplay)
• Frame Rate: 20 FPS (gameplay), 10 FPS (character select)
• Sound: PCM samples + S3M tracker music
• Code: 597 lines

Avalon/
├── HITS/
│   └── Hits.exe          # Main DOS executable (4.2 MB)
└── Genera/               # Game resources
    ├── FPG/              # Graphics files (~6 MB)
    ├── MOD/              # Music files (S3M format, ~1.7 MB)
    ├── PCM/              # Sound effects
    ├── MAP/              # Background images
    ├── FNT/              # Fonts
    └── PRG/              # Source code
        └── HITS.PRG      # Main program source

1. Install DOSBox
2. Run DOSBox
3. Mount the game directory:

   mount c C:\path\to\Avalon
   c:
   cd HITS
   Hits.exe
   

dosbox -c "mount c C:\path\to\Avalon" -c "c:" -c "cd HITS" -c "Hits.exe"

For the best experience, you might want to adjust DOSBox settings:

• cycles=auto or cycles=10000 for appropriate speed
• fullscreen=true for immersive retro experience

The game features original music composed specifically for the game:

• JONAS08.S3M (696 KB)
• JONAS11.S3M (836 KB)
• MOD.S3M (124 KB)
• HMM.S3M (108 KB)

All tracks are in S3M (Scream Tracker 3 Module) format, a popular tracker format of the era.

Programming & Design: Jordi Corrales Jiménez & friends

Characters (Digitized Actors):

• CrowDat
• Jonas
• P.J.
• Hair-Do

All character sprites were created by digitizing real video footage of the developers and friends - a technique popularized by Mortal Kombat.

The complete source code is included in Genera/PRG/Hits/HITS.PRG. The game is written in DIV language, which is similar to Pascal. The code includes:

• Main game loop and state management
• 2-player input handling
• Collision detection system
• Animation system (9 frames per character)
• Health bar mechanics
• Sound and music management

Feel free to explore and learn from it!

This game was created in the year 2000, when:

• Windows ME and Windows 2000 were the latest operating systems
• DIV Games Studio 2 was a popular game creation tool in Spain
• Digitized graphics in games were still considered cutting-edge
• Most people were still using CRT monitors
• Game development tools were far less accessible than today

Creating a game with digitized characters required actual video capture hardware, which made this project quite ambitious for a group of students!

This is a personal project from 2000, shared for historical and educational purposes.

Feel free to:

• Play it and enjoy the nostalgia
• Learn from the source code
• Share it with others interested in retro gaming

• The entire game was made in just one month (with lots of other life happening in between)
• We used a real video capture card to digitize ourselves - pretty high-tech for 2000!
• The game runs at 20 FPS, which was perfectly acceptable for DOS games
• The executable is 4.2 MB - quite large for a DOS game, mostly due to the digitized graphics
• The original development paths were on the D: drive (D:\DIV2\...)

Thanks to:

• Hammer Technologies for creating DIV Games Studio
• Our friends and families who let us capture their embarrassing fighting poses
• The Spanish DIV community of the early 2000s
• Everyone who remembers the golden age of amateur game development

Made with ❤️ and teenage enthusiasm in the year 2000

This project is preserved as a digital artifact of early 2000s amateur game development. It represents a moment in time when a group of friends learned programming, game design, and digital media production by actually doing it.