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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5051
Author: Alexandra
Date: 15/11/2005
Subject: Re: Digest Number 772
Another good example of excellent porting of a retro game to Windows
is the Zelda Classic system. It's basically Zelda for windows, and it
plays just like the NES game. You'd easily be conned into thinking it
was running on a NES, but it has built in editing and scripting,
graphics importing etc.
In terms of adding new features and tidying bugs, 'quirky' and older
features of the game engine, and many additional options for design,
can be switched on or off at will on a huge menu spanning eight (I
think) pages! So the resulting quests can be anything from minimal NES
style to a sophisticated SNES-type game.
If a programmer could make a JSW emulator for windows I think it would
be excellent. It would have to be able to reproduce speccy gameplay
down to colour-clash and quirky features, all of which could be
switched on and off by the author, plus it would have everything John
mentioned.
Sendy
--- In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, john_elliott_uk
>
> --- In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, "Jeremy Cooper"
>
> > The original engines (including the 64 variant) are just fine.
> > Those pixel-perfect jumps you have to sometimes perform, that
> > unmistakeable jumping sound. A modernized PC game would only
> > take away everything that make's this retro-feeling so enjoyable.
> > And conversely, if you tried to make it identical, then there
> > wouldn't be much point in making it in the first place.
>
> If I decided to port JSW to a newer platform, my reasons for so
> doing would be:
>
> i) More memory. The 128k engines alleviate this problem to some
> extent, but not entirely. It would be possible to improve matters a
> little more without going outside the bounds of the Spectrum, by
> targeting the +3 exclusively.
> ii) More colours. The Spectrum's only got 15.
> iii) More tile types. To some extent this ties in to (i), because
> simple combinations like crumbling ramps or conveyor trampolines are
> just a matter of adding the code (at the expense of, say, a page of
> sprites). But at most there can be 16, and there are already 10.
> iv) More guardian behaviours (including non-lethal guardians). As
> above, simple ones could be added to JSW64 (the data format allows 7
> more guardian types) at the expense of memory for sprites. More
> complex designs (such as a proper circular path rather than the fake
> one in the JSW64 Clock Tower) would want more processing horsepower.
> v) An easier scripting language. Currently anyone wanting to extend a
> game with custom logic has to do it in Z80 machine code and a lot of
> people don't seem to get on very well with it.
> vi) Copyright. If the current rights owners did decide to suppress
> distribution of the original JSW, there's not a lot we could do.
> Unfortunately, if we want to be legally bomb-proof, then no-one who's
> seen disassembly of the original could work on the copy. Good luck,
> guys, sorry I can't help :-)
>
> > They have made new versions in the past, for the Amiga, the
> > Gameboy and some for Windows. But we all keep coming back
> > to the original engine because we are so familiar with it
> > and fond of it.
>
> And in order for a PC game to match the success of the original, it
> would need to match the original in the areas of:
> * Customisability. The internals of JSW are very well understood, and
> creating new levels should be no harder than it is now with JSWED.
> Most of the existing ports only play the original levels or at most a
> few alternate sets.
> * Bug-for-bug compatibility. The hypothetical new system would have to
> match just about every characteristic of Spectrum JSW; even getting as
> close as JSW2 does wouldn't cut it. Being able to import and play an
> untouched copy of 'We Pretty' OTOH...
>
> It's been done for other games. The example I'm thinking of is Tile
> World, an open-source clone of Chip's Challenge. A lot of custom
> levels had already been written for CC, and several of them depended
> on quirks in Microsoft's version of the game engine (which bears
> rather less relation to the original Lynx version than JSW2 does to
> JSW). Tile World, as well as replicating both the Microsoft and the
> original Lynx game engines, also has 256-colour graphics where the
> original had 16.
>
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