Novatryne

A new vertical shooter for the Tatung Einstein from TatungBytes, written from scratch in Z80 assembly.

In 2045 a signal was detected in deep space. Its meaning was clear: Earth's destruction was coming. Earth's answer was NOVATRYNE, an orbiting fortress and foundry whose furnaces forge ships from enemy wreckage. Now they have arrived, and NOVATRYNE has chosen you to pilot its ships.

You launch from a docking arm on NOVATRYNE's hull and fight through six waves of the invasion, each of thirty attacks, with a mid-boss halfway and a boss at the end.

Play Novatryne in your browser in our Online Player, with nothing to install. To read how the game was made, see Novatryne: A New Shooter for the Einstein.

The Game

• Six waves, each with a hazard of its own: a debris field to shoot for salvage, curtains of enemy fire to find the gap in, an asteroid belt with rocks falling at different speeds, laser fences with a door to fly through, a gravity well that drags you towards its core, and EMP blasts, shielded ships and ships that cloak and vanish while still firing.
• Six bosses, each its own shape with its own attack, ending with a saucer mothership with four turrets to destroy before its core opens; and a mid-boss halfway through every wave.
• An upgrade bay between waves: spend the salvage your kills leave behind on rapid fire, thrusters, twin and triple guns, shields, missile strikes, EMP pulses, a salvage magnet, heavy bolts that punch through one ship into the next, and new hulls. You start with just one.
• A gun that overheats, so you fire in bursts.
• Ships that dive at you and gunships that hunt you from the third wave on.
• A secret salvage storm for players who let no ship escape.
• Its own music: a tune for the title, a long one for every wave, and one for the bosses, on the Einstein's AY sound chip.
• No flicker: the Einstein's video chip shows only four sprites on a line, and the whole game is built to keep within that.
• A high score table saved to the disc, a secret practice mode, and joystick support.

Controls

Joystick 1 also works: it switches on the first time its button is pressed. The menus are keyboard only.

Running It

The disc boots by itself, with no DOS. In MAME use the MFI image, so that the high score table is kept (MAME cannot write to an Einstein .dsk):

mame einstein -flop1 Novatryne.mfi

If you have not set MAME up yet, see emulating the Tatung Einstein. Or skip the setup and play it in the Online Player. The DSK image is the same disc, for writing to a real 3 inch disc or a floppy emulator. Novatryne has been tested in MAME.

Files in the Package