The 1984 game of Tetris has been mentioned many times on Indie Retro News, with new versions of the game being re-released on the Amstrad CPC, C16, Plus/4 and ZX Spectrum. Well here's another version of the game that is sure to be enjoyed by many that still love this game even today, as JOTD is developing Tetris for the Commodore 1200 as a port from the 1988 Arcade game by Atari Games. To coincide with this news, not only can you play a very early Alpha demo that's missing sound, but Saberman has provided a video of this early development.
Here's the latest from JOTD. "I consider Tetris Arcade version by Atari the best Tetris version around. It's colored and the music is great. The game used a 6502 CPU and not a Z80. I wrote a converting source tool for 6502 to 68000 as well. Not a lot of reverse-engineering has been done on that one by anyone (including me) but with so little RE I could make the game start & display the first screens. Thanks to MAME I could workaround the nasty protection (constant bank switching caused by "slapstic" chip) and unlike my other ports, the project is more a fast emulator than a re-coding. It requires AGA because the original game has 16 banks of 16 colors and a 256 color palette which is - added - dynamic. So ECS port would be quite tricky without rewriting the whole game. ATM it produces a 1:1 graphical arcade port. Sound will be added later".
Quick, clean , simple port. Nice!
ReplyDeleteBuggy, crashes (gurus) a lot. Need to make a robust conversion of this "simple" game that actually loads and runs reliably. I found it frustrating, I hope they spend more time on it getting it right.
DeleteIt's the first release dude and also as stated "Early Alpha", some Alpha's in the past don't even start! lol ;) - Give it time, it will be awesome!
DeleteNo .adf ?
ReplyDeleteThank you! Please complete it !!!
ReplyDeletevery nice, but also sad noting that an AGA machine is needed to replicate faithfully such old and simple 80's arcades. Amiga is a nice machine but also has strong limitations with hardware sprites, colours, dual playfield... (not considering coding tricks)
ReplyDeleteWell Amiga is from 1985, the arcade machine from 1988, arcade machines cost like 3 Amigas if not more. But because of that, I agree that AGA would’ve been great in 1998, less so in 1992.
DeleteAmiga 500 can eat the original Tetris for breakfast... if ported from scratch that is. As JOTD himself noted (and also mentioned in this very article), this is more of an emulation rather than a classic port, hence the AGA requirements. The fact that the arcade is from 1988 has nothing to do with whether it is actually doable on a500 (hint: it is). ;)
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