Pushover

[VorticonCmdr]

I worked on another classic puzzle game: Pushover

You can find a HTML port of the game engine at Github and it's playable on Github pages but you need to have the original game files. (I bought the game for less than 5 Euros on gog.com not sure if you can extract the original game files from a Steam copy.)

I was able to RE the whole thing and even found two previously undocumented secrets:

• there is an unused tile set called "cavern" with no levels
• there is a cheat/debug code nobody seems to have written/published anything about. In the main menu you can enter the level code + BOWIE and then OK and the level will automatically play through following a "solution tape" included in every level file. (there are, interestingly enough, a handful of tapes which don't resolve)

[geoo]

Hey! Happy to see more Pushover fans here!

I haven't had the chance to dive into your HTML port yet, but did you disassemble the whole game and reproduce the physics?
Either way, this is really lovely, especially as there's a level editor out (well technically two), so maybe it could be another way to play custom levels!

Let me point you at a few other posts:
Topic: Someone made a fangame called IshiSoft Pushover with custom themes. Also, the level files contain demos of intended solutions that can be watched using an Alpha version of Pushover.
Topic: I made a crappy level editor back in the day.
I also made a good level editor now: https://github.com/geoo89/pushover-tiledextension
There's also another remake which I believe stays close to the original physics but does have differences: https://github.com/pushover/pushover.github.io Based on this there's also an Android version out.

[DragonsLover]

there is a cheat/debug code nobody seems to have written/published anything about. In the main menu you can enter the level code + BOWIE and then OK and the level will automatically play through following a "solution tape" included in every level file. (there are, interestingly enough, a handful of tapes which don't resolve)

Ah, so that's finally how you can get to play the solution of a level. I was always wondering how the solution data in level files would be read. Nice find!
The reason why some of these solutions wouldn't resolve was probably because of file limitation in some sort.

There's also an unused music track in the game as heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mn3xwZcKr0&t=2607s (Adlib)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekdaTpIHiTI&t=2644s (Roland)
This is the same track used for "Candy World" in the video game "Cool World" for SNES.

EDIT: The BOWIE cheat was documented actually, during the interview of Keith Watterson: https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/keith-watterson/

[VorticonCmdr]

Hey! Happy to see more Pushover fans here!

I haven't had the chance to dive into your HTML port yet, but did you disassemble the whole game and reproduce the physics?
Either way, this is really lovely, especially as there's a level editor out (well technically two), so maybe it could be another way to play custom levels!

Let me point you at a few other posts:
Topic: Someone made a fangame called IshiSoft Pushover with custom themes. Also, the level files contain demos of intended solutions that can be watched using an Alpha version of Pushover.
Topic: I made a crappy level editor back in the day.
I also made a good level editor now: https://github.com/geoo89/pushover-tiledextension
There's also another remake which I believe stays close to the original physics but does have differences: https://github.com/pushover/pushover.github.io Based on this there's also an Android version out.

Yes. I disassembled the whole thing using Ghidra. And tried to verify findings using Dosbox/debug.

Not sure if I got the physics perfect but I sure hope so. This is where replays came in very handy.

[VorticonCmdr]

there is a cheat/debug code nobody seems to have written/published anything about. In the main menu you can enter the level code + BOWIE and then OK and the level will automatically play through following a "solution tape" included in every level file. (there are, interestingly enough, a handful of tapes which don't resolve)

Ah, so that's finally how you can get to play the solution of a level. I was always wondering how the solution data in level files would be read. Nice find!
The reason why some of these solutions wouldn't resolve was probably because of file limitation in some sort.

There's also an unused music track in the game as heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Mn3xwZcKr0&t=2607s (Adlib)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekdaTpIHiTI&t=2644s (Roland)
This is the same track used for "Candy World" in the video game "Cool World" for SNES.

EDIT: The BOWIE cheat was documented actually, during the interview of Keith Watterson: https://codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/keith-watterson/

Ah. Thanks for the links. Somehow my searches didn't turn up those results.