Well this is glorious news for an early morning heads up, as the classic ZX Spectrum 3D forest chase game Deathchase has been successfully ported to the Commodore VIC-20 (8K RAM expansion) by Kweepa, the talented creator behind the VIC-20 Jet Set Willy port. To overcome the VIC-20's lack of per-cell background colours, Kweepa implemented a clever raster split technique to dynamically change the background from sky to ground colour mid-frame. Furthermore, the game optimizes performance by ditching the original Spectrum version's slow two- or three-pass rendering system. Instead, it utilizes a custom lookup table that scans ahead in the map to pull trees forward and outward. This mathematical approach speeds up gameplay significantly while ensuring highly accurate 3D perspective scaling.
