Celesteroids

Celesteroids is an Open Source Asteroids™ style retro game which may bring a dewy eyed of tear nostalgia to those who remember a life before the Internet, and who may have owned a Rolf Harris Stylophone.

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Download as Windows Setup
Download Zip File (No Setup)

Game Controls

L ARROW (or K) - Rotate Left

R ARROW (or L) - Rotate Right

UP ARROW (or A) - Thrust

CTRL (or SPACE) - Fire

ESC (or END) - Quit Game

S - Toggle Game Sounds, M - Toggle Music

"A top notch asteroids clone that is way better than the original imo."
Game Developers' Library

More About Celesteroids...

There are a number of differences between this game and the 1979 Atari classic; it was never intended to be an exact copy. Most notably, you will see asteroids collide and bounce off each other, unlike in the original where they would simply overlap. In addition, there is no "hyperspace jump" key in Celesteroids.

I began Celesteroids in 2004 for a bit fun--it being my first game development project since owning a Tatung Einstein as a kid. I initially started developing it using Borland C++ Builder 5 with the Visual Component Library (VCL). While I love C++ Builder and have spent many years using it, I realized that I could use this project to explore some alternatives...

I found the MinGW GCC compiler when used with wxWidgets to be viable. WxWidgets is an open source cross-platform GUI framework supporting, amongst others, Windows, Linux and Mac OS platforms. Because I had kept most of my Celesteroids source code independent of Borland's VCL, Celesteroids provided an excellent test-bed application with which to gain familiarity with wxWidgets--all I had to do was to port the front-end code. It is possible to port it to other platforms, including Linux and Mac. However, I just haven't had the time to do this yet, but others have--see screenshot.

The Source Code

You will find the complete C++ source code to this software in the installation directory, along with development projects for Microsoft Visual C++ 2005, "Code::Blocks" and "Dev-C". See Source Code Documentation for more information.

GNU General Public License

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

Other Legal Stuff

Music and sound effect files used by Celesteroids originated from "Golgotha" and are public domain.

Asteroids™ is a trademark of Atari Inc. Windows™ is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

And Finally...

Pressing "E" during the game is a cheat which adds an alien to the game. Press it multiple times for lots of aliens!

My highest ever score is 12,025. See if you can beat it!

Andy Thomas

BigAngryDog.com