About Coverdisk

Why Coverdisk?

In the days of the Amiga, every games magazine came with a floppy disk taped to the front: the coverdisk. Peeling it off and loading it up was the best moment of the month, with free games, playable demos and the odd surprise. Coverdisk brings that feeling back: free, original games from Star Soft in the spirit of the Amiga 500, ready to play in your web browser. No disk drive needed.

Coverdisk is the website; Star Soft is the label that makes the games, like a publisher whose games arrive on a magazine's cover disk.

What is Star Soft?

Star Soft is a collection of original games that run in your web browser, each one inspired by a classic from the golden age of the Commodore Amiga.

The games aren't copies. Each one has its own name, characters, art, levels and music, and sets out to capture what made the originals so much fun: the sense of speed in a road racer, the little workers carrying goods along the roads of a settlement, the detailed, shaded art and the sampled soundtracks. The classic named in brackets after each game is the one that inspired it.

Every game plays on a computer with a keyboard, mouse or gamepad. The ones that suit a touch screen play on phones and tablets too, with controls designed for fingers.

Vibe coded with Claude

Star Soft is vibe coded. Its creator isn't a programmer: every game is described in plain English, in conversation with Claude, and Claude writes all the code. That includes the art, which is drawn in code, and the music, which is written out note by note and played on sampled instruments, the way Amiga musicians worked in their trackers.

The process goes round in a loop:

1. Describe the game, or what to change: “it doesn't feel fast enough”, “hills should slow you down”, “add a race from Cornwall to John o' Groats”.
2. Claude writes the code, tests it in a browser with a computer-controlled driver or player, and explains what it changed.
3. Play it, on a PC and on a phone, and say what feels right and what doesn't.
4. Repeat until it feels like the games we remember.

How it's built

• Plain web technology: HTML5, JavaScript and the Canvas. No frameworks, no plug-ins and nothing to install. The website is just files, so it runs on any ordinary web host.
• A shared engine: every game is built on the same small engine, which handles the steady 60-updates-a-second game loop, a smooth Amiga-monitor display on any screen, keyboard, gamepad and touch controls, sampled sound effects and speech, a music player with a library of sampled instruments, and saved games. Each new game gets a head start from the last.
• Amiga resolution, monitor smooth: games draw at an Amiga-like resolution such as 320×256 (shape-based 3D games draw finer still), and the engine shows them the way an Amiga monitor did: smooth and solid, with soft scanlines, rather than as big square pixels. Press F8 in any game to switch between AMIGA, SMOOTH and SHARP.
• Like a professional studio: the code lives in a GitHub repository. Every change arrives as a pull request that's reviewed and merged, so there's a full history of how each game grew. Games are tested in Visual Studio Code and on a real Android phone before going live.

The Star Soft intro

Every game opens with the Star Soft intro, in the tradition of the publisher screens that greeted you as an Amiga game loaded. A little line rocket launches, the screen fills with stars typed in one at a time, and the camera dives into a star's flame and pulls back out of a rocket's booster as it climbs away from the Earth. The music is the opening of Holst's Mars, the Bringer of War, arranged from the public-domain 1921 score and played with free orchestral samples.

Where it came from: the first half of the intro, where the screen fills up with a starfield of asterisks, is a recreation of something Star Soft's creator wrote as a child, in BASIC on an Acorn Electron. The Electron was an 8-bit machine, a few years before the Amiga, but that little program is as much a part of growing up as the games that inspired this collection, so it opens every one of them. The intro then switches to full 16-bit Amiga style for the second half: the jump from one era of home computer to the next.

Credits

Code, art, sound and music are written by Claude (Anthropic) for Star Soft. Each game lists what else it uses, and the licences, under Credits on its own page (About & controls on the home page).

The longer versions of the intro music have their credits on the MUSIC page.

Licence

The code is shared under the Star Soft Non-Commercial Licence: anyone may play, study, change and share it for free, as long as nobody makes money from it and Star Soft gets clear, prominent credit.

Contact

Questions, ideas, or asking permission to use the code commercially: email hello@coverdisk.com.