Beef Drop Construction Set

[jwierer]

I actually wrote this a couple years ago, but never got around to sharing. I'm on to a new project now and I re-discovered it and figured it's time to share it with the rest of the world. I actually wrote some detailed documentation and it's probably worth a read before getting started. This is what I used to create my xmas hack of Beef Drop back in 2006.

 

What’s Possible

The Beef Drop Construction Set is a graphical user interface for creating custom Atari Beef Drop roms, or binaries, and levels, or maps. The Design surface will allow you to modify existing Beef Drop rom images or create entirely new ones from scratch. The Beef Drop Construction Set can also be used to create standalone levels that can be used when compiling Ken Siders original Beef Drop source code. With the Beef Drop Construction Set you will be able to perform actions such as creating custom maps, setting enemy locations and a bunch of other settings. The following table summarizes the features of this release along with a brief explanation

 

Features

• Load Beef Drop Roms - Allow you to open an existing Beef Drop 32K Binary.
  
• Save Beef Drop Roms - Allow you to save a Beef Drop 32K Binary.
  
• Load Levels - Allow you to open a Normal, Compressed, or Extended map level (see file formats).
  
• Save Levels - Allow you to save a Normal, Compressed, or Extended map level (see file formats).
  
• Set Pepper Bonus Locations - Determine where the pepper bonus will appear per level.
  
• Set Pepper Bonus Triggers - Determine when pepper bonuses will appear per level.
  
• Set Chef Start Locations - Determine starting location of the chef per level.
  
• Set End of Level locations - Determine when all the burger parts have fallen ending the level.
  
• Set the Enemy Settings - Determine which enemies and their start locations per level.
  
• Number of Levels per game - By default Beef Drop has 6 levels per round. This can be custom set to be 1 to 10 levels.
  
• Number of starting Lives - Increase or decrease the number of lives granted at the beginning of the game
  
• Number of starting peppers - Increase or decrease the number of peppers granted at the beginning of the game
  

Screen shots

 

Prerequisites

• If you are not running Vista then you'll need to make sure the .NET Framework 2.0 is installed
  
• If you are running Vista you may need to RunAs Administrator. If you are logged in with admin privledges or have turned off UAC then it should just work
  

Downloads

BDCS_Setup.zip BDCS_Help.zip

Thanks for Ken Siders for creating Beef Drop, sharing the source code, and providing additional technical support to help me create this.

 

-Jeff