Boulder Dash on a VCS possible ???

[Lord-Chaos]

This was one of my favourite ATARI 800 games.

 

Thinking about an ATARI 2600 version , the main problem is that you have not enough RAM for the huge levels (about 4 times the size of the screen).

 

1-screen - digging games are possible , look at Dig Dug or Mr.Do for example.

 

But Boulder Dash has more features - boulders/diamonds , amoeba , walls , butterflies & the other enemies and magic walls , dirt , slime , extra Rockfords and "nothing".

You have to save every change in a level and movement of the enemies.128 bytes are not enough for this.

 

The size of the ATARI 800 screen is about 40*20 tiles (each 2*2 characters AFAIK) = 800.1 byte/tile would be far too much for the ATARI.

If you allow only 8 types of tiles in a level (dirt,diamonds,...) that means 3 bit/tile = 2400 bit=300 bytes.Still too much.

If you allow only 4 types of tiles (dirt,nothing,diamonds,boulders) - 800*2=1600 bit = 200 bytes.Too much.

 

This game would need more memory or smaller screens - a Boulder Dash on 1 screen based on the "Intermissions" in Boulder Dash 4 would be possible - similar to Dig Dug/Mr.Do .

 

Another problem would be the scrolling , but not all versions of Boulder Dash did use scrolling.The 800 and C64 versions scrolled , the Coleco and MS DOS versions did not scroll.It´s not necessary.

 

My question : is it possible to write larger games with emulators / is there a Supercharger emulator or an emulator that supports extra-RAM on carts ?

 

And would it be possible to create a cart with more memory.

 

Thimo

[Lumpbucket]

Although I don't really have enough time to write an Atari game at the moment, I did spend an evening trying to learn to program the Atari 7800. While constructing a tile-based display kernel, I drew some boulderdash style graphics. I don't know if I'll ever turn it into a game (i always intended to scrap my first few attempts anyway), but I might just do a boulderdash/repton style game for it.

 

As for a 2600 version... tricky... a good boulderdash game requires more tilespace than a 2600 could easily maintain, at least without RAM on the cart. Don't forget that in boulderdash, the level has to change, and therefore a copy of the current level has to be held in RAM.

[Albert]

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Boulder Dash is one of my favorite Atari 8-bit games (I seem to have many "favorite" 8-bit games!) I'm not sure I'd want to see it bastardized to fit on an Atari 2600, and I think it would be a very difficult game to pull off well due to its tile nature plus memory requirements. But doing it on the 7800 would certainly be cool.

 

..Al

[Lumpbucket]

But doing it on the 7800 would certainly be cool.  

 

Alright then... once i've FINALLY got all the PHP done for videobrewery.com, i guess I'll get back to my Atari coding... I think a boulderdash game would be a good "first project" for the 7800.