B.A.D.

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A web remaster of B.A.D. — Blasting, Annihilation & Destruction, the 1997 DOS shoot-'em-up by Pseudos Software, published by Webfoot Technologies.

Play it

The original is hard to run on anything made this century. This is the same game, rebuilt to open in a browser.

Playing

Arrows or WASD to move, Space or J to fire.

B	the shop, mid-level
Esc	pause
M	sound on and off
H	upscaled sprites on and off

Both switches are also in the header, and both are remembered between visits.

What it is

The simulation is transcribed from the original rather than reinterpreted: fixed-point motion, the game's own collision silhouettes, and its 70.0863 Hz tick — the vertical retrace of the tweaked VGA mode every speed in the game is denominated in. The renderer interpolates between ticks, so 60, 144 and 240 Hz all look right and none of them change the game.

The shell around it is new. The menu, the HUD, the shop and the score table are not ports of the original's — they keep its manner and nothing else.

Three things are settings a query string away:

• ?hi=1 turns off the upscaled sprites. They are baked at 2x by a pixel-art network and mixed back toward the hard nearest scale, so the dither survives.
• ?crt=0 takes off the scanline veil, ?crt=3 lays it on thickly. The default is 1.5, and the line pitch follows one row of the original's 350.
• ?stats=1 puts a counter line under the field -- tick, entities, shots, drops, frame rate. It is a developer's readout, off by default.

Three rules are deliberately not the original's:

• " SIDE SPEED UP " stops at four times the starting speed. sub_1e8b has no ceiling at all, and a long enough run ends with a ship that crosses the field faster than it can be aimed.

• A pickup with nothing left to give is worth 50 credits. A full magazine, a gun already at its damage cap, a reload at its floor, full hull, top speed — the original drops all of those on the floor. Being punished for doing well is not a mechanic worth preserving. The compensation is the game's own " 50 CREDITS " pickup, announced as such. Buying one in the shop still pays nothing back.

• Giving up a gun pays a quarter of it back. A gun at its damage cap with a full magazine is four boosts and a dozen rounds on top of the gun itself, and the original's only way to take the better weapon lying on the floor is to throw all of that away — so the honest answer is usually "keep the one you have", which makes the top of the ladder a trap and every later weapon drop something to steer around. A quarter of what went in comes back, valued at the shop's own prices and capped at what the shop charges for the gun being given up: an annihilator built all the way to its cap returns 900, which buys another one. The cannon is in no catalogue and is capped at the phaser's 300. Nothing is paid when the gun is taken from you — the rung a death costs (sub_327a) and the confiscator are punishments, and a punishment that pays is not one.

Build

npm install
npm run dev        # http://127.0.0.1:5173
npm run build      # -> dist/
npm run preview    # serve the build
npm test           # the simulation, headless, no browser

Nothing but Node is needed: the decoded game data is in public/data.

Licence, and the assets

The code is MIT — see LICENSE.

The game's assets are not mine and are not covered by it. The art, music, sound, level data and the name B.A.D. are Copyright © 1997 Pseudos Software and Webfoot Technologies, Inc. They are decoded from the original release and are here for preservation: free, no advertising, nothing to buy, no claim of ownership. If you hold those rights and would rather this did not exist, say so and it comes down.

No individual is named anywhere in the original's files — that was checked, resource by resource, across every archive and every executable it shipped with. If you worked on B.A.D., the credits screen has a seat waiting.