An early morning heads up for you all, as we've recently been informed that Rob Rafac has released a work in progress version of the upcoming Atari XL/XE to Commodore 64 port of Schreckenstein. As in the words of the creator. "I have been working on a port of the fabulous Atari 800/XL-exclusive game Schreckenstein by Peter Finzel (not to be confused with the several C64 games with similar names) and it's at the point where it is completely playable, so I want to turn it loose on the community here". To coincide with this news, Saberman has provided a video showing the current state of the game.
Here's the latest technical blurb about this release from the info file provided. "This is a work in progress porting of Peter Finzel's Atari 8bit split screen puzzle platform game to the Commodore 64. All levels are playable but somewhat slower than the original due to the difference in clock speeds (1.8 vs 1.0mhz) + the cost of bit hanging the VIC while CPU blitting the map tiles and sprite patterns which is stuff handled easily by the ANTIC. Further optimization is probably possible. Sound effect gating and deconfliction needs work. The original was developed in 1985 by Axis Komputerkunst and published by Ariolasoft, with a plan to release the source coded as a study to reverse engineer Atari-Antic coding".
Very hectic game ...
ReplyDeleteUltra hectic atmosphere !!!
DeleteAuthor of the port R^2 here. It looks like the video is based on the O'Dog/LAXITY crack which is broken. The most obvious defect in the crack is the green player's sprite animation for which the pointers are borked. I didn't look in much detail but saw some things that looked like some of the game engines zeropage stuff could be getting corrupted. I do need playtesting/feedback but preferably from either the free original on github linked here, or wait for a crack that isn't buggy. Have fun (and if you think this is hectic, the original Atari 800 version is around 30% faster!)
ReplyDeleteHi there! I made sure not to source the cracked version only the github, also the discussion as well via lemon. Even though I have no control over his videos, I'll give Saberman the message about the issue and hopefully he can change the video too :D - Nice game dude! Cheers
Deleteand FIXED :) - New Video
DeleteFor some reason I couldn't get this to work in either VICE or HOX. anyone else?
ReplyDeleteR^2 here again. Thanks for the feedback! In the video I can see an emulation problem (junk appearing in green statusbar when top player YSCROLL=6). This happens in VICE prior to v3.7; 3.7 and 3.8 GTK3 work fine. If I fix it it won't work on a real machine. So far I tested on VICE 3.7, 3.8, RetroDebugger/C64 Debugger, and 5 real machines with different VICs and Kawari. Other emulators I don't know but is sensitive to 1 cycle timing at that statusbar (2 badlines in a row when Y=6, and 7 sprites there!) I can make other timings but would be specific to each emulator (i.e. VICE 3.6 needs +1 cycle) at assembly time.
ReplyDeleteR^2 hopefully final comment: The glitches in the green statusbar mentioned above probably happen with the less accurate (fast) variant of VICE "x64.exe" and not the most accurate variant "x64sc.exe" Thanks to Tobias on for pointing that out on lemon64; I had totally forgotten! Since VICE 3.7, "x64.exe" is not even an option or not in the main /bin directory. You only get the "sc" variant that this is compatible with in recent VICE distros.
ReplyDelete