Discussion
simonw: Those backgrounds look so good. I wonder if they'll be able to do anything with the iconic music.
classichasclass: With a SID? No problem. I think the title track could be arranged very easily for three voices.
p0w3n3d: I wonder how do they want to overcome the memory limit? Or will it be using cartridge extensively?
nnevatie: Seriously good-looking gfx - kudos!
jonny_eh: The EGA version is the original version of the game, and is gorgeous. Most people don't realize that by playing the more colorful VGA version, they're experiencing an inferior redrawn remake.More: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26446738
eru: You can load from disk (or tape) on-demand?
qmr: Ambitious.I wonder how many floppies it will be.
classichasclass: Modern flash carts like EasyFlash and clones allow for absolutely cavernous cartridge images. As good examples, see the C64 ports of Prince of Persia and Eye of the Beholder, which run entirely from massive cartridge ROMs.
no-name-here: Comparison: https://youtube.com/v/86O3PxdLrg8Personally I think the VGA version often looks better at least post-intro, but opinions may differ.
wk_end: Well, I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version. The rest of the game seems a bit of a wash; some of the backgrounds are a little more striking in EGA, some look much more refined in VGA. And the sprites look much better and more colourful in VGA. I don't think it suffered as much moving to 256 colours as Loom did (what that original thread was about).And we should also remember that looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRT; neither of them really looked the way that video suggests, so it might be a bit misleading.
b112: A very wise move! With the current state of AI, the loss and cost of RAM, with GPUs and CPUs being eaten up, we'll all need to move back to C64s soon.Really, and I mean this honestly, I had immense fun on my C64 using BBSes, playing games. It wouldn't be the worst fate, if everyone moved back to BBSes + games like this on the C64.A neat project.
the_af: I must be in the minority, but I really prefer the EGA versions of many of those games. Probably nostalgia.Even less defensible, I've come to appreciate the (awful to me at the time) CGA 4-color palette. You know, the games that were either cyan-magenta-white-black or red-yellow-green-black? I hated it at the time, but now I look back on that time with my rose-tinted (or should I say, magenta-tinted?) glasses firmly on.I even bought the fake retroremake Eternal Castle, which is a loving homage to that era.
no-name-here: > I think I prefer the slightly less...uncanny character portraits in the EGA version.Personally, I would have said the EGA portraits are far more uncanny and seem like early CGI, whereas the VGA version looks more like a hand-drawn book illustration, although again, opinions can differ. https://youtu.be/86O3PxdLrg8?t=181> looking at it unfiltered on a modern display isn't really giving a great sense of the warm glow either version would've had on a CRTThat may be true, yes.
_the_inflator: I don’t get your concern. Could you please be a bit more specific?The artist and its partner are two high profile guys from the demo scene. They know what they are doing and the game logic ain’t that complicated since point and click is deterministic and finite. This ain’t no open world game.The challenges evolve around the graphics. Interlaced multi screen multi color pixel art is the bottleneck here. IRQ loaders are bound to available cycle time so there won’t be any usage of FLI.Since no ascii graphics compression is possible the designers need to consider the amount of branches you can take to several local views when walking around the huge map. Too many graphic details will amount to huge loading times - a problem the later Monkey Island games back then already faced.Since the C64 graphics modes are not dynamic you can predetermine them by a simple formula: more beauty amounts to more memory usage alias overall loading times.Using not the full screen is a slight advantage here.I believe the guys will come up with a great game. It won’t be fast paced this is for sure but it won’t be a beauty killed by its loading times like it is 1987 either.
