BloodCash

BloodCash

BloodCash is a free, open-source port of the Amiga shoot-'em-up Blood Money (DMA Design / Psygnosis, 1989) to Windows and Linux. It runs the original game, unchanged, on a small Amiga 500 written in C++, with sharp integer or full-screen scaling with CRT filters, configurable control ports, fullscreen and translatable texts.

No part of the original game is included in this project. BloodCash contains no game code, graphics, sound, text, ROM or disk image. To play you need your own copy of Blood Money (see Game files). Blood Money and all its contents are the property of their respective owners. The author of BloodCash claims no rights over the game. BloodCash is not affiliated with or endorsed by DMA Design, Psygnosis or any rights holder.

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Made largely with AI. Most of BloodCash (the analysis of the original game, the code and the documentation) was written by an AI assistant (Anthropic's Claude), directed, tested and reviewed by the author.

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Features

• The original game, as it was. The original 68000 code runs on an emulated Amiga 500 (CPU, copper, blitter, bitplanes, sprites, Paula audio, CIAs, keyboard and joystick ports). No Kickstart ROM is needed.
• No disk drive. The game's own track loaders are replaced: the tracks come straight from the disk images, without loading times; the "insert disk 2" request is skipped.
• The intro keeps its timing (it used to wait for the disk), and can be skipped from the options menu.
• High scores are saved in BloodCash.high, next to the executable (not when a cheat is on).
• Each screen shown as its display window (320×200 in the game, 320×256 in the first intro pictures), centred, in a window (half the desktop, resizable) or fullscreen; lossless screenshots; frames per second in the window title.
• Picture modes (options menu, PICTURE): PIXEL PERFECT = the largest integer scale that fits the window or the desktop, black borders, with the CRT-Pixie filter computed exactly at that scale; FILL = the full height of the window or screen at any scale, with sharp pixels (sharp bilinear: no uneven pixels) or a CRT filter made for non-integer scales (every scanline gets the same light). Both start with their CRT filter on; F5 switches it off and on. Windows display scaling (125%, 150%) no longer blurs or shrinks the picture.
• The intro can be skipped with Space, Return, Right Ctrl or fire (A) on a controller.
• Both Amiga control ports configurable: keyboard, mouse or any joystick or game controller.
• The game texts can be replaced by a text file (for example a translation, see Texts).
• One fix of the original: in the music code a byte was stored into a word and left its upper half undefined.

Game files

BloodCash needs Disk.1 and Disk.2 of the WHDLoad installation of Blood Money (by Wepl and StingRay, versions 1.4 and 1.5a; 979,600 bytes each). They are recognised by their SHA-256 digests.

By default BloodCash looks for them in the folder of the executable (also in a BloodMoney or data subfolder): copy the two files next to bloodcash.exe and start it. To keep them somewhere else, set the folder in bloodcash.ini (next to the executable), relative to the executable or absolute:

game_path=.                      # default: next to the executable
game_path=BloodMoney             # a folder next to the executable
game_path=D:/Games/Amiga/BloodMoney

If the files are not there, BloodCash opens the system's folder picker and saves the choice in game_path (on Linux the picker needs zenity or kdialog). The command line option --data <folder> overrides the setting.

Controls

Key	Action
F1 / F2	1 / 2 players (title screen)
F3 / F4	music or sound effects / "patient" or "impatient" (title screen, as in the original)
Joystick in port 2	player 1 (as on the Amiga)
Joystick in port 1	player 2
Keyboard joystick	numeric keypad 8 4 6 2 (7 9 1 3 diagonals), Right Ctrl = fire
Escape	options menu (the game is paused)
F5	CRT filter on / off
Space / Return / Right Ctrl / A	skip the intro
F11	window / fullscreen
F12	screenshot (PNG next to the executable)
Game controller	stick or d-pad = joystick, A = fire, Start = options menu (one controller per player)

The options menu sets: window or fullscreen, the picture (pixel perfect or fill), the CRT filter, the device in each control port (nothing, keyboard, mouse or any joystick), the intro (play or skip); it can restart the game or quit. The settings are kept in bloodcash.ini. On the first start port 2 (player 1) gets the first controller (or the keyboard), port 1 (player 2) the second controller, or the keyboard when player 1 has a controller.

Texts

bloodcash --export-texts texts.txt writes the texts of the game (title, shop, game over, high scores) into a UTF-8 file, one line per text:

7DA0 "BLOOD MONEY" = "BLOOD MONEY"

Change the text after = and save the file as bloodcash_texts.txt next to the executable (or start with --texts <file>). The game font has upper case letters, digits, space and . , $ @ only, and a text cannot be longer than the original (shorter texts are centred); score fields such as $0000 must stay in place. Texts that break a rule are left in English and reported on the console. The file contains the original texts: keep it private.

Command line

bloodcash [--data <folder>] [--fullscreen] [--texts <file>] [--export-texts <file>] [--custom1 N]

--custom1 takes the sum of: 1 skip the intro, 2 unlimited lives, 4 unlimited energy, 8 unlimited money, 16 start with the most money (testing; high scores are not saved with a cheat on).

Building

C++20 and SDL2. The Amiga core (68000 CPU from Moira by Dirk W. Hoffmann, MIT licence, and the chipset) is in core/.

• Windows (Visual Studio 2022 + vcpkg): cmake --preset windows-vcpkg then cmake --build --preset release; the result is a single bloodcash.exe with SDL2 linked in. scripts/package.ps1 makes the zip.
• Linux / macOS: install SDL2 (libsdl2-dev, brew install sdl2), then cmake --preset linux and cmake --build build -j. -DBC_LINUX_PORTABLE=ON makes an executable for other distributions (glibc 2.34+).
• -DBC_BUILD_TOOLS=ON adds bcrun, the game without a window for tests (screenshots, keys, joystick scripts).

The GitHub workflow builds Windows, Linux and macOS at every push and attaches the packages to a release for every v* tag.

Roadmap

• Widescreen view: the level redrawn in C++ from the state of the game, wider than the original screen.
• More of the original routines translated to C++.
• macOS and Android packages: open to the community (the code builds on macOS; nobody tests it yet).
• Support for other versions of the game (original disks as ADF images).

Licence

BloodCash is © Lorenzo Castelletta and released under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later (see LICENSE). Moira (in core/ext/moira) is under the MIT licence.