Any recently dumped a game called Fruit Land which was interesting since it was a small board with a complete 486 PC on a single chip that boots MS-DOS and the game off of an 8 MB Compact Flash card. After some help from PC expert Carl, we have it working except for sound. It has no obvious signs of who made it, but we believe it’s of Italian origin. UPDATE: As several people have pointed out, it appears to be an adaptation of this open source game by “MesSoft”.
It starts up like so, with a custom BIOS:
You then get an oddly MS Paint-looking title screen:
The first level starts out like this:
You’re the Pac-Man. You need to collect all the cherries to finish the level, and you’ll want to grab the 100 point diamonds for a higher score. The round gray things which look sort of like a worm with teeth are a single-use teleporter: you step on one, you’ll appear on the other, and they will then disappear. The up/down arrows flip the level vertically, causing loose objects (like the pinballs) to fall.
The first level after you hit one of the flip arrows:
And then finish it:
The problem with the game is that unless I’m missing something it’s quite easy to end up in a no-win scenario and then you have to wait minutes for the timer to kill you. (UPDATE: if you get stuck, you can press START to retry the level. Thanks to MW user wolf676 for the tip!). For instance, on the first level, if you hit the teleporter right away you’re stuck in that small hallway with no way to get back out. So while this is another interesting piece of arcade history, and it was fun to get running, it’s not likely to be a favorite to actually play.
