The MSX community are certainly no strangers to quality releases on the MSX, especially with so many great games released through the MSXdev competition. Well today's news is equally special for the MSX community, as we've recently found out through Liqmatrix, that you can download an early alpha version of the work in progress game of '3D Deathchase' by The Retro Programmer; A homage to a classic ZX Spectrum game that was rated the number 1 on Your Sinclair top 100 back in the day.
Here is what the creator says about his/her latest game which is still in at an alpha stage of development "I was fascinated by how such a playable title was put into a 16k game. Having finally had time to look into that, what better way of paying homage to it than creating versions for new platforms. I decided the MSX was first largely because I had never programmed for MSX prior and I felt I may be able to make slight improvements."
"The MSX version is faster. I originally developed a similar bitmap-based implementation but the game draws and overdraws quite a lot - for every 9 bytes of data (a character and its color) written to the screen on the Spectrum, required 16 bytes on MSX. For the same CPU, same speed the MSX version was slower. Therefore the only choice was to optimize it for MSX hardware and in doing so, I managed to keep all graphics intact AND still meet the original goal of a more colorful version". So there we have it, if you loved this game back in the day and wanted to see what it might have looked like on an MSX, now's your chance!
Links :1) Source
Other systems? Like the C64?
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