Posted By
Csabo
on 2023-11-03
16:26:34
|  Re: A "Dex"citing Map!
Not commercial
If a casual Plus/4 fan were to visit Plus/4 World before today, and they were to look up Dex in our database, they would have seen this:
"Novotrade? Commercially released? Original program? If such a thing exists, why has no one ever heard of it?" The truth is simple: that information is wrong (unthinkable!). The game was never commercially released. The page has since been updated, and we have some info coming straight from TCFS (who wrote the game's intro).
Without further ado, let's give Dex some Retro Justice(tm), starting with the author.
About WIT
Dex was written by WIT (his real name appears on the game's title screen), and he is a lost scener. He attended the same vocational school as TCFS (one year older) and he was active until the end of 1990. His waveconverter is nothing short of revolutionary, era-defining. Where is he today? Unfortunately, his current whereabouts are unknown as we have lost touch with him. (WIT, in case you're lurking and reading this, please get in touch :-)). One more interesting tidbit that will delight hardcore scene members; according to TCFS, WIT's name is in fact an acronym, and it stands for something like Wise I____ Thought (the middle word is unknown). Dex is his first game (and might be the only one, we're not sure about the authorship of Dex II).
The intro
There's a nice shiny ("Dex"cellent?) intro before the game, which bears the text: "FINAL CRACKING VERSION V1.2". Whoa, this game had such complex copy protection that it had to be cracked more than once? Nope! TCFS recalls: "WIT wanted his program to look more serious. So he left the Novotrade reference in and had us create a cracktro to make it look like it was officially released (and officially cracked :-)) game. The "crack's version number" is just a gag as well, it's only there to make it look more legit."
The title screen
Elements of the title screen are from Armalyte:
Interestingly, WIT left in the RJL (Robin Levy) signature in the corner. The spaceship itself might be a copy from another game's title screen, although so far we have not been able to locate it.
The scroll at the top of the screen details the game in a single short sentence: "Dex is the adventuring spaceship whose pilot... is YOU!"
The game (Let's talk about Dex, baby!)
After a "Novotrade" screen, we get a second intro. The scroll here is a bit more informative: "You set off in your spaceship from Earth, to find the Poseidon Empire, which you know hides some valuable treasures for you. The Empire is several hundred light-years away. Your goal is to pick up the moving objects in the labyrinth and escape with them." So, labyrinth, pick up objects, got it. Simple enough, let's do some "Dex"ploring :-)
And we're off! Our spaceship can't shoot, we can only navigate. When we get close to any obstacle, the ship "pulverizes" the level. TCFS recalls: "WIT wasn't able to add proper sprite masking into the game due to lack of raster time (CPU). He said he would make it part of the game's backstory :-) It's a copout, but it works, we teased him about it."
The graphics are the usual 3-shade monochrome (characteristic for 90s scene releases). There's a good reason for it: by having the same color on the entire screen, the game can get away with scrolling only the character memory. However, it does look a lot better than other contemporary homebrew games. No wonder; it's "borrowed" from Antiriad:
 
The entire font that makes up the level is copied, with some minor modifications. The statue is perhaps the most recognizable part. WIT cleverly re-drew the bottom part to be a fin, turning the statue into a mermaid, which is in line with the Poseidon theme. The head's placement is questionable, however (see above, right).
The player's spaceship and the collectible objects are sprites taken from the C64 game Delta:
What awaits us as we travel? Here's the brand-new game map:
A closer look at this reveals some odd item placements:
How is the player supposed to collect both of these items? Simple: after collecting the top item, the player will inevitably crash into the wall and lose a life. The game, however never redraws parts of the level that have already been scrolled by, which effectively opens up a new path for the player to move down and collect the lower item as well. This is much more obvious during gameplay :-) There are more items placed like this throughout the map, in "troll" fashion, e.g. immediately after impassable walls.
While the game has a simple horizontally linear layout, displaying the map in that format would be a 24,576 x 152 size image, which is very difficult to view. Instead, the 3 "levels" are placed below each other.
Internally, the game uses a very simple tile system; each byte in the map data specifies a 4x1 character area. The level is laid out as a 256 * 18 byte array. When the player reaches the end of those 256 bytes, the game adds 256 * 18 to the map pointer, effectively having internal "levels". This code also checks if the player reached the end of the 3rd level. If so, the game ends.
In the end
"Wait, the game simply ends when you reach the end? What about collecting all the items?" Checking the game's code reveals that nothing is done with the item count, there's no scoring or any other types of checks. Once the player manages to reach the rightmost point on the map, the game ends... in an odd way. The second intro returns with a different message, which boils down to "Tell the cracker who cracked this game to pay closer attention next time." (There's a funny bug here though, the game has two separate scrolls, one for the letters, and a separate one on top for the Hungarian accents. WIT forgot to create the accents for the ending message, which results in displaying letters such as an M with an umlaut.) Therefore we can conclude that it was never intended for players to reach the end without the "crack's" cheat.
Was this a "Dex"hausting read? In conclusion; we've taken a look at this game's history, map and gameplay. We confirmed that it was never commercially released. What about some Hungarian games that were released commercially? That's the perfect segue to Rachy's new blog post (in Hungarian) :-)
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