Posted By
Csabo
on 2011-09-04
10:37:18
|  Re: Great Giana Sisters
The background and playing levels of the game can be converted with very little effort. It's just characters scrolling. The code is the same, only some registers and memory locations had to be changed.
Same thing with the SID music, it's more like a side effect that it still plays in emulators than a conscious effort on the part of the authors. The original code writes to the $D400 area and they didn't remove this.
When you said "not too much (is) needed to be a real good platformer"... nothing could be further from the truth! On the C64, the rest was done with sprites. The sprites' graphics is independent from the character set of course, and no effort is needed to "mix" them with the background. On the Plussy... Oh, do I even need to get into this? Basically massive code changes would be required just to display the sprites. Then you still have to write collision code, deal with color clashes, and the fact that a single 3x3 sprite takes up 16 characters from the character set - so the level graphics would have to be re-done.
So, to sum it up: releasing it like this is... well, almost useless. Maybe it's nice to watch the levels for a while, but you can't play. (And back in the day, you wouldn't have heard the music, my bet would be that the authors didn't know it was even there.) It definitely does not deserve a high score, I'd say even 5 is undeserved.
|
