Orbit Salvager (CGA graphics)

---- Gameplay ----

Play as long as you can and try to beat your own score.

Collect clothes dryers (to prevent them from eventually falling on cities below)
without missing any, and don't crash into the cities yourself!

The ship has very little fuel on-board, and every action (thrust, shots) use some fuel. Make more fuel by shooting asteroids, with your asteroid-to-fuel converter beam.

Tips: Use inertia to your advantage, and remember that if you accelerate to a high velocity, you will use as much fuel to decelerate.

The ship will bounce off the top of the screen, and will be given a push if it hits the left of the screen, used wisely you can save fuel!

---- The story so far ----

Year 2030 in a parallel universe.

At the end of the past's century "stainless rush", when all households finished replacing their perfectly good and still working white clothes dryers by new and shiny stainless vanity showpieces, disposing of the excess of boring ordinary clothes dryers became an alarming global concern.

But as it was also foreseen that the next century would be the "real" space age, where floating cities would finally become a reality, the world government came up with a most brilliant plan: All those discarded dryers will be the perfect raw material for building those cities! Let's kick those into orbit now, essentially "storing" them for later when we are finally ready to get there. But best of all, given the bureaucracy and rules governing on-planet junk disposal, sending those dryers off-world, even with disposable one-time-use rockets was in fact less expensive, as counter-intuitive as this may be.

Unfortunately this space city idea did not come to fruition. Developing those cities would have required a big investment, but any sacrifice today for the sake of tomorrow in those times was a career ending move - and potentially even life ending in extreme cases. So the world's political context in those decades simply failed to give birth to a leader willing to develop orbiting cities.

All those "space dryers" (as they became called) were left alone until they began to fall from the sky due to orbital decay. After one of those fell on a brewery, disturbing beer supply for weeks and leading to social unrest, the space cities plan was finally set into motion! (Use those dryers to stop them from raining down!)

This is where you come in! Your task is to collect those dryers (just ram into them with your ship) but it is a challenging and unforgiving job. You will NOT be forgiven if you fail to collect even one dryer, and you must spare your fuel (and make more using your asteroid-to-fuel converter beam)

---- Credits and thanks ----

The spaceship was drawn by VolcanLoup.

---- Tools used ----

This game was coded in pure x86 assembly using mycollection of graphics routines I developed for RATillery.

• nasm (compiler), alink (16-bit linker)
• vim (editor)
• gimp (graphics editor)
• dosbox (for testing)

---- Supported platforms ----

The Windows and Linux (64 bit) versions use a simple homemade PC emulator and SDL2 to run the game.

To run the original DOS version, will need a DOS system or an emulator (such as DOSbox). Simply start orbsalv.exe