I am assuming this will demand REU or an ultimate 64 to run it? Hard to believe they would be able to package this and make the game fluent without more ram.
Good question! Since the game is mostly scene-based, it should be possible to play it scene by scene with lots of reading from disk. However the original game also had some larger scenes that used quite a lot of horizontal scrolling (some backgrounds for those scenes can be seen under "A collection of backgrounds from the game" in the article), not so sure about those...
Speaking of that, I'm really curious how many 170 KB C64 floppies it would need to store the whole game.
The large scenes looks like about 4 screens wide? But they're not full height - looks like about 2/3, so let's say ~24KB total including color data. I don't think it should be a problem. The walk + scroll is slow enough that if you had to (and I don't think you do) you ought to be able to time things so you can load the next screen while the player is walking.
Similarly, e.g. slow down the door animation, and a fade, and you ought to have enough time for a decent fast loader to load the next screen (~2-3 seconds assuming you're loading 2/3 of the screen)
You really benefit from the low amount of action on screen here.
If you want to actually compress the data to reduce the number of floppies, you'd slow it down quite a bit. If you were doing it for a real C64 or cartridges constrained to what was viable at the time, that might well be preferable to more floppies. If you're doing it for a modern cartridge or an emulator, it won't matter.
Looking forward to play the MP version with my son who also loves the game. I worry that the game will get heavier and maybe no longer work of the steamdeck, will it?
While it's getting harder and more expensive to cheat in games, the people making money out of video games (cheat resellers, streamers and competitive gamers) regain that cash very fast if they can keep "preforming" on stream. I don't see this trend slowing down anytime soon, there is just too much money and interest in cheats.
I wish demo crews and their production got a larger spotlight than they currently do. I work with ~80 devs and most are surprised and mindblown when i show them some demo.
If you haven't already, check out https://pouet.net/ . It's almost certainly got the demos that you're interested in.
Now, remembering the titles of these demos might be another matter, but there are people who might be able to help with that too. Do you remember some scenes/effects from the demos that you were interested in?
I also wrote a Android app that allows OTG connecting the WCH BLE Analyzer to a Android phone. Waiting for the OTG adapter to test it properly, if anyone is interested.
I also wrote an extraction tool that;
extracts all pictures to files names associated with what pdf they came from
ocr the jpg for text, and if more than 8 characters extracts the text to a txt file
leaves the org files should you need to revisit them
makes the dump searchable locally.
Ill like the repo if anyone from the media is interested, but didn't have the manpower to do this manually.
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