Knight Lore V1.10 - Ultimate Play the Game classic as a C64, Plus4, C128 Vic-II & VDC port gets UPDATED!

Only just last year towards October 2018 we shocked the retro community with an announcement that the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Famicom Disk System game of ' Knight Lore ' by Ultimate Play the Game, had been released on the C64 as a full Z80 conversion to the C64 by Rod and Emu with an awesome loading screen by STE. Well fast forward to today and Knight Lore has had noticable improvements, as thanks to the same team we now have a V1.10 version that is now available for the C64, Plus4 and C128 Vic-II & VDC!

From our previous big article there were a number of people behind this port, such as Mariusz who did the re-complier and optimisations, Saul who did the awesome music, and STE that did the cool loading screen you see in the first screenshot above. As for the main developments which includes this being the first full Z80 to 6502 conversion of Knight Lore including all the features from the original Spectrum game. Emu has also mentioned the performance of the game is very good if not better than many of the 8-bit versions which are listed in the older comments section of CSDb.

Release Notes : 

• Updated version of Knight Lore (V1.10) now available for C64, Plus4 and C128 Vic-II & VDC.
• A number of cosmetic changes have been made to the C64 version based on feedback and also new C128 native versions (Vic-ii & VDC) and Plus4 versions (Ted sound & Sid Card sound) have been completed.
• The game engine is untouched and performance is identical to the last version.
• Many thanks to Mariusz, Saul, STE and also Excess for the EasyFlash version, Luca for the Plus4 picture conversion, whoever wrote the SID-TED sound frequency converter used in the Plus4 Ted sound version (mconv) and Tape Master Pro was used for the C64 tape version.
• Version V1.10 Updates:
• - New Game Starting tune added by Saul. This has been made to sound like the original Knight Lore tune as it's "iconic" I'm told.
• - Added sound fx cue that was missing for push item.
• - Added sound fx cue that was missing for the game completed animation sequence.
• - Changed the colour flasher that runs when you drop an item into the cauldron to make the colours identical to the original version.
• - Changed the colour of the moon sprite and bottle item from light grey to white to make it same as the original version.
• - Original loading screen added into the front end. (Displayed when you exit the front end to start the game)
• - Pause key now on the F7 key to get it out of the way.
• - From pause mode you now need to hold down the F1 or F3 key for one second to activate game quit or man die functions.
• (This was changed as I noticed one of the YouTube reviewers accidentally paused the game and then hit F1 and couldn't understand why the game quit!)
• - New "Game Only" version added to the Disk version. Called: KL GAME ONLY. This allows for a quicker loading version that doesn't have a front end (just the game). All settings are set to default.
• - New "Game Only with load settings" version added to the Disk version. Called: KL GAME ONLY LS. This allows for a quicker loading version that doesn't have a front end (just the game). It will attempt to load any already created settings file once the main game has loaded.
• - Small improvements made to the front end.
• - New Easyflash version with save game settings to cart option by Excess.
• - New turbo tape loader version.
• - New native C128 VDC and Vic-II versions.
• - New Plus4 version – Ted Sound and Sid Card versions.
• Please note that if you play the C128 VDC version with WinVice then please turn off Video cache in the Video settings/VDC render box, as you might get video corruption if you don’t.

Links :1) Main Article 2) CSdb 3) Excess Trainer