| Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-03-23
20:34:04
|  An Enigmatic Map!
 Enigma, the '85 maze-shooter action game published by CBM now has a map! Ahem. That's it. You can look at it if you like.
Or perhaps, as long as we're talking about Enigma, we can dive deeper into this game. [ Read on ] for more.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-03-23
20:34:04
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Enigma was written by Mark J. Moore and Peter J. Bartlett. What a coincidence that both of them have "J" as their middle initial  We're tried to find these distinguished gentlemen over the years, but we could not - no interviews, or other notable mentions anywhere. Google mostly turns up their names on other aggregator sites such as MobyGames. (That said, if anyone knows them, I'm sure Plus/4 World visitors would love to read an interview.)
Mark J. Moore coded a total of 4 games in '85 and '86, and they are all great in my opinion! Project Nova, Rescue From Zylon and The Magician's Curse are beloved classics. He has a certain "neat", "clean" style, excellent use of color, mixing multicolor and hires modes, pixel-perfect sprites and flicker-free displays. (None of them are much for music or sound, though.) But most importantly, these games are fun! The other gentleman, Peter J. Bartlett also coded Robo Knight, another excellent game. Enigma does not give any hints about how the work might have been divided between the two of them. Their names simply appear on the title screen. Did one of them write the code, and the other did the graphics? Unfortunately we can only guess.
This game was featured in our Let's Play! initiative, as the last game of 2020. Chronos and Verona both did videos on it, so if you speak Hungarian, you might want to check those out.
The cover art is not too fancy but still pretty neat, it features a man in a white space suit stepping through the portal door. The blurb... well, let's see. "Endag's castle"? "Secret of Zor"? Clearly that is something that must have been written as an afterthought There's nothing referencing any of this in the game. You don't need much description anyway, any player can sit down and figure out what to do. Move, shoot, collect energy and keys. Simple!
The "ending" (or lack thereof) has been revealed here on Plus/4 World a long time ago as well: there isn't really one, other than a cryptic (and somewhat anticlimactic) message in the "final" room. Note that these final rooms have so many enemies, and they all move so quickly, that it's hard to imagine a casual player being able to reach this location.
With the use of this new map, one can see that the game has no less than 64 screens total! Did you ever wonder how that many screens were squeezed into the C16's memory? If so, now you can find out.
The game screens are made up of tiles. Each screen is divided into 15 tiles: 5 columns, 3 rows. The image below illustrates this:
As you can see, the same tile ($11) is used 4 times. Each tile only takes one byte, therefore the basic screen layout is defined by only 15 bytes. (This is padded to 16 bytes so that the offsets can be easily calculated.)
Each tile is made up of 8*7 characters. There are 32 tiles in total, as seen here:
The 8*7 size has been carefully chosen: each of the characters starting from the top/right can be indexed by a number less than 256. (The last character of the tile, 7 to the right and 6 down, is 247 ($F7) characters away.) This makes the code that displays one tile simple. The tiles take up 8*7 = 56 bytes, which are padded to 64 bytes, so that the offsets can be easily calculated.
The colors are stored per-screen: one color for the walls only, and one color for everything else. This means +2 bytes per screen.
There's additional data for the screens: the location of the energy item (if there is one), and the location of a door (there can only be one per room). The keys are stored separately from screens.
The total data for the map is approximately:
+ 64 screens * 16 bytes (layout)
+ 64 screens * 4 bytes (energy item and doors)
+ 32 tiles * 64 bytes
= 3328 ($D00)
The map data takes up a little less than a 3rd of the available space (assuming $3000 bytes) of the C16's memory. (For comparison, were the screens stored as "one byte per one character", the map would take about 53Kb).
I hope you enjoyed this little write-up, discussing the technical details of this game. Sometimes I think perhaps nobody is willing to read this much text, so as a test, if you are a human reading this who is going to respond to this post, kindly make the first word of your post the sound of a duck. Otherwise, Enigma is a fun little shooter, especially for a game written in 1985. It does reward more plays: one can learn enemy behaviour and the maze layout. It's worth picking up for a few rounds!
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Posted By
SukkoPera
on 2023-03-24
04:45:24
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
KWAAAAAK!
Yes, these posts are very interesting to read, at least for someone like me who is a programmer that can work in several contemporary languages but doesn't have many clues on how things used to be done back then, when resources were much more scarce and tools much more primitive.
Besides, I also work in the embedded environment, where resoucers are at a plus even today (though every day less so), and some of these resource-saving tricks will surely turn out useful one day  .
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Posted By
MIK
on 2023-03-24
05:11:04
 | Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Neat to see the whole game via a map! A shame it never came with the Plus/4 back in the day, maybe it missed the deadline. I can never make my mind up if I prefer this or Zodiac, both similar, if I play one I think of the other. 
Nice write-up as well Csabo!
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Posted By
Luca
on 2023-03-24
05:53:16
 | Re: An Enigmatic Map!
_
__(.)< QUACK!
\___)
Brilliant presentation about a real classic for C16, and a very intriguing analysis of the game! Hope to read more and more of these texts.
Enigma and Robo Knight – the latter being one of the C16 games I loved the most – share the same charset and the same rasterbars' coloured approach for the title logo, so the role of Peter J. Bartlett as the graphician of the duo doesn't look so far from a valid reality.
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Posted By
Lavina
on 2023-03-24
07:35:14
 | Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Háp-háp!
Well, funny thing is that I never knew this game even existed. It was a great read, indeed, so thanks for that.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-03-24
08:40:12
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
OMG, actual humans with reading comprehension? Well, there goes my theory that everyone on this site is a bot.
One thing I forgot to mention, big thanks to Rüdiger for double-checking the map's accuracy!
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Posted By
MMS
on 2023-03-24
09:59:35
 | Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Strange, that I've never heard about this game.
Especially, as I really think Mark J. Moore's games are technically outstanding from the mid 80 C16 games.
For a really long time, for me his games were the reference for the perfectly working and fast software sprites with good collision detection and precise movement. Not to mention the proper sprite priority on the bridges!
Just compare Magician's Curse and Booty! What a difference! I am sure, that even 3 or 4 sprites could be properly handled by this engine used in MC.
So thank you for the heads up, I will try this game too.
@Csabo thank you for the details on the handling of the maps. With a 16K machine all the tricks are required to get all those contents into the small memory we had.
Frankly speaking, it was a liberation when I got my 64KB internal upgrade, I could load all the demos, all the Pigmy, MB and Csory converted higher quality games, not to mention the (C64 based) Games Music, Music from C64 or the Micro-series. After that I never really looked back, and due to this, I missed some of those brilliant classic games. But now!
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Posted By
Luca
on 2023-03-24
11:37:08
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
MMS OMG this gonna turn into a darn nostalgic thread, probably Poüet.net did its best move when theu included the possibility to assign a coup de coeur to some prods: a coup de coeur is assigned to those productions which signifiy something special for any of us, unregarding its actual quality or importance.
Now you have cited "Music from C64", so I automatically remembered the hundreds times I've loaded Musics From 64 II only to listen to the Martin Galway's "Neverending Story"'s rendition, played thru a non-multiplexed FRQ converter, fading in!  Feelings, lads, big feelings!
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Posted By
orion70
on 2023-03-24
11:52:41
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
My two cents as a non-programmer, rare-C16-user, but a big nostalgic of those times. Well, the story about RAM optimization was a great read for me too - and surprisingly enough I could understand everything as well
Another way to surprise people was to use procedurally generated mazes / worlds, and this way always fascinated me TBH. Could you old 264 druids mention me examples in the C16/plussy games?
I'm an old VIC-20 guy, and I can think of Sorcery for the +16K white breadbin: http://www.kdef.com/geek/vic/vicbjsw.html
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-03-24
12:06:24
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
The only two games I can think of with procedural generation is Elite +4 and Whack. Both are conversions though.
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Posted By
Wayne !
on 2023-03-24
14:27:28
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Hi Guys ! Loving this "Behind the Scenes Info" - LOVE this kinda' Stuff - Much Respect and Admiration for ANYONE who puts this amount of Research into looking this Deep into a Game. I would like to offer some help / A Humble Suggestion if I may - One of the Programmers Flagged up for me when Mentioned early on in this Post - Mr Mark Moore - And I will tell you why - PURPLE TURTLES on the Commodore 64 is Coded by Mark J Moore... Or at least I'm sure it is the same Person ? Here is a Link to Lemon 64 - https://www.lemon64.com/game/purple-turtles
Maybe this might lead to him - It looks like him and his Brother (?) or some Connected Family Member did this Game.
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Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-03-24
14:48:31
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
As far as we know, Mark J. Moore did write Purple Turtles on C64 as well as Falcon Fighter for the VIC-20. These credits appear on MobyGames (which was the aggregator site I mentioned in the post). Unfortunately, there isn't much more info there :-/
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Posted By
MMS
on 2023-03-25
07:51:53
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
OFF
@Luca Well, the Musics from C64 II was also a miracle for me.
I listened to a lot of nice SID musics since then, but Bombo in that list has a special place in my heart. I've never heard before such sound bending on our +4 computer. Maybe these memories.
(frankly speaking, maybe I prefer the FRQ converted +4 version VS SID original, it sounds more pure and melodic, but maybe it is just me)
For me the second best in this music demo was the BMX Simulator from Mr.Whittaker.
Unfortunately the otherwise great game was never released with this epic music on our platform. (as it did not fit into the 16KB memory, I know).
BTW I made it like a PRO I recorded these musics on a Sony UX-S cassette, so I could listen to these musics even when I was banned from the C16 (yeah, I was not the best student in town...)
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Posted By
MIK
on 2023-03-24
19:40:59
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
Vampire (Codemasters) on C64, another most excellent tune from Mr Whittaker.
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Posted By
MMS
on 2023-03-27
13:20:28
| Re: An Enigmatic Map!
I tried it now and I was wrong. After few round I remember now. I know this game.
The enemies are simply too fast, and sometimes it is not fair, how close they appear.
In the ZX Spectrum games, just fast enemies are just draining you energy, but in this case you die instantly.
I do not know,how those demigods reached those very high scores in this game, but for me this game is simply too annoying (and it was in the past too), I die within minutes.
@MIK: thanks for the hint, really nice.
( BTW did I mention to you, that VLC Media player can play SID musics in good quality?)
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