|  Minesweeper Game Detected! | | Posted by Luca on 2023-03-31 |
 There's a new minesweeping galore to challenge in the city, and its name is Detector... MineDetector!
The powerful and long running LUMYDCTT IDE and compiler application created by Charlemagne shows its muscles again with a classic game where to avoid the mines buried in a field. A very laaarge field, this time!
Have some tries, have some more! |
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| | An Enigmatic Map! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-03-23 |
 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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| | Cracky! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-03-21 |
 Cracky is here! It's a new platformer game with an old-school look-and-feel, written by Japenese developer Inufuto. He writes his games using his own C compiler and assembler, and releases them on a multitude of 8-bit platforms (35+ and counting). Cracky is his 13th release.
Your task is simple: clear each level by collecting all the stars, while avoiding the baddies. The title refers to the floors, some parts crack when you walk over them once, creating holes in the platforms. Since there's no jumping, on most levels you must use this to your advantage to reach otherwise unreachable stars.
Check it out and enjoy! |
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| | Sumplete! | | Posted by Csabo on 2023-03-14 |
 A game invented and coded by ChatGPT? It sure says so! We have to jump on this bandwagon quick, we're gonna make millions!...
Or, at the very least, we shall have a small new math-based puzzle game for Commodore Plus/4. Meet Sumplete, a somewhat Sudoku-like puzzle game. Your task is to delete numbers, so that the rows/columns add up to the sums displayed on the right/bottom. It might be a fun distraction for a few rounds. Enjoy! |
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| | Galaxian - The classic arcade game by Atari that could have been but wasn't | | Posted by Gaia on 2023-03-09 |
 Atarisoft was a brand name used by Atari, Inc. in 1983 and 1984 to publish video games for non-Atari home computers and consoles. It used a distinctive colour for each platform. Atarisoft worked solely with contractors and had no developers on its payroll. Although only existed for about two years and stopped operations when Warner sold its consumer division to Jack Tramiel, it had several dozens of popular titles in its catalogue. Unfortunately, going out of business coincided with the launch of the TED series so these Atari ports never made it to our platform.
During the haydays of the Home Computer era, the ports of popular arcade games was a big business, so it was no wonder that Atarisoft also jumped into the bandwagon by publishing Galaxian for the Commodore 64. Galaxian is a classic arcade game released originally in 1979. It was Namco's answer to the immensely popular classic, Space Invaders by Taito, but it could only reach a decent second place in popularity behind that.
Galaxian spawned many ports and conversions, the Commodore 64 version was written by Bill Bogenreif (of Designer Software). Interestingly, his company is still around today but it's no longer publishing video games. The game was originally released as a cartridge.
Although the title screen suggests 1983 as release year, the hidden text around the memory address $9DF0 tells a different story: the game was apparently finished and released in 1984 only, during the final days of Atarisoft. Despite the very capable hardware and some unused code chunks, the Commodore 64 port does not use any HW sprites at all, everything runs in multicolor bitmap mode, which made a plus/4 port quite straightforward. Admittedly, the game is quite rough around the edges, has a meager 6.1 score at Lemon64, but it has some of that genuine old-school touch that newer games don't and some folks do appreciate to this day.
The player assumes control of the Galaxip starfighter to protect Earth from several, increasingly difficult waves of alien ships. Gameplay involves destroying each formation of aliens, who are - as opposed to Space Invaders - are continuously launching descending attacks towards the player's ship in an attempt to smash it.
To remain as authentic as possible, the Plus/4 conversion is released as a cartridge dump as well. Enjoy! |
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| | Hey HVTC, You've Been cRTED! | | Posted by Luca on 2023-03-08 |
 HVTC had seen the light something like a dozen years ago. Although gathering executable .prg files which need a real machine or an external emulator, soon the main target of the project has become clear: have a modern player and a vast, near complete, collection of TEDsound music to be played on any nowadays PC. A proper format would have been needed first, and passionate coders like Gaia (TedPlay) and Siz (SIzPlay) gave their contribute to reach a valid choice which could include all the possible variables and data to convert every given music in a common, generic, dedicated format.
Today we present a new milestone in this long lasting mission, one signed by Hermit, former author of the famous TEDzakker. cRTED is a PC based music player running on both Windows and Linux OSes, playing TEDsound music converted to the brand new .TED format. The latter is actually an enhancement of the .TMF format introduced by Siz with the possibility to have the header/metadata at the end of the file, and this means that the new format can be both recognized by the cRTED player, and run as a normal .PRG file on any real machine or emulator! There's the possibility to use it as a command line with several options to input, but it obviously shines when used thru its GUI, featuring all the useful options which can be requested for this tool: infos display, restart/pause, fast forward, repeat/advance, volume control, switchable channels, fast/slow playlist scrolling all mouse and/or shortcut keys driven. The playlist in .TEL format is basically an editable text which can easily be edited by anybody, and includes both single files and entire folders.
The whole suite comes with the HVTC-ted source files, where the actual HVTC-ted converter can be used to re-create the HVTC collection into the new format, and the HVTC-ted (2023-03-08), currently a good selection from the whole HVTC (soon to be swapped with the complete one!).
This represents the 1.0 version of the cRTED project, which already includes shared and static library forms for a better inclusion in other TED-playback projects, looking forward to be ported to the largely used RockBox like its C64 cousin cRSID which is now the main SID-playback engine in RockBox.
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|  | A tape turbo in 2023? Why not, it's the authentic retro feeling! Check out Speedy V3 by mc68k. | [ comments ] |
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