About
Wizball is a 1987 horizontally scrolling shooter for the Commodore 64 by Jon Hare and Chris Yates, later ported to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Amiga, Atari ST, IBM PC compatibles, and the Thomson MO5. This repository preserves the recovered source code of a 2007 PC/Mac remake of Wizball by Graham Goring and collaborators, updated in 2026 to build and run on modern Linux via SDL2 and to package for PortMaster handhelds. It uses a CMake build system with both a standard SDL2 desktop renderer and a GLES2 renderer for handheld/PortMaster targets.
Getting started
Development builds are made with CMake, requiring SDL2, SDL2_mixer, and SDL2_image (PhysFS is vendored and built automatically); after building, run the game from the wizball/ data directory, or use the project's Docker-based build script to produce a PortMaster package for handheld devices.
History
The original 2007 Retrospec/Smila remake was made by Graham Goring, Trevor Storey, and collaborators for Windows and Mac. Its source was believed lost until February 2026, when the current maintainer contacted Graham Goring, who located a surviving copy — including some Mac-specific code — through the remake's original Mac porter, Peter Hull. The recovered codebase was then revived for modern Linux and PortMaster handhelds, migrating its old Allegro/OpenGL/FMOD-based runtime to SDL2.
Additional notes
- License
- The original remake's author, Graham Goring, gave explicit email permission for the recovered source to be published; it's released under the MIT License.
- Trivia
- The recovered codebase reportedly also contains code capable of producing an Exolon remake, which the maintainer has not yet built out.