Rick Dangerous 2+

[RedAngel]

Here you are a CPC to Plus conversion, Rick Dangerous 2+ with these changes:
- All tiles and sprites have been retouched
- Plus palette
- Level 5 available in the menu
- Some bugs fixed
- Keys are now QAOP Space
- 60 hz mode
- Jump/Up with Fire 2 button
- Improved loading screen
- One aditional colour for backgrounds (there were two blacks)
- The disk has a special format (SyX could explain it)

Code by SyX, graphics and colours by RedAngel
Special thanks to Trocoloco for doing some test versions last year

You can grab it here:  Rick Dangerous II+ – Cepeceros Podcast


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[Gryzor]

Oh got to check this out. It would be nice if your had comparing screenshots...

[dodogildo]

Thanks for this version with the new palette. 
The linked blog article was so much fun to read too. Hope you guys would come up with a hardware-sprite version in near future as well. -Cheers

[Saberman]

How do I get this game up and running? Under which emulator does it run?

[RedAngel]

How do I get this game up and running? Under which emulator does it run?

You can use CPCE, Winape, Retro Virtual Machine and any other emulator with Amstrad CPC Plus feautures. It is a dsk and you have to type |cpm in order to load the game.

[GOB]

Hi, I tried the game quickly on emulator and it's really a beautiful work. However, I wanted to play it on my cpc+ thanks to my m4 and it's obviously not possible. It seems that drive A is forced...

[Saberman]

Thank you for the information and for your help!

[RedAngel]

Some screenshots for comparison:
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About M4 compatibility I will speak with SyX because I do not know this piece of hardware, can it load regular dsks?, can it load the normal CPC version?

[andycadley]

Looks really good. Impressive what can be achieved with a palette swap and some graphics retouching. Might not go as far as the 6128+ Rick Dangerous port but it's still a big improvement. 

[RedAngel]

Looks really good. Impressive what can be achieved with a palette swap and some graphics retouching. Might not go as far as the 6128+ Rick Dangerous port but it's still a big improvement.

Thanks, but I can assure you that it was more than a 'palette swap an some graphics retouching' . All tiles and all sprites were heavily retouched and I used different inks in different places than the normal CPC version. At the begining I used the Amiga version as a base but then I decided to give this version graphics their own character, I would dare to say that in some aspects they are better than the 16 bits versions.

We wanted to keep 64kb RAM compatibility and SyX has very limited time to dedicate to these kind of projects and to study the code so that means less changes and additions than Rick Dangerous 128+.

[Gryzor]

Yeah, the difference is huge. Well done guys.

[andycadley]

Oh sure, I didn't mean for it to come across as a minimization of the work involved. I think this is more what Amstrad had in mind when they said developers could put old games onto cartridge as long as they used some Plus features - if only we'd got more of this kind of care and attention rather than shovelware they just had a prettier title screen etc.

[OncleCed]

Hello ! Thank you for it.

Are you thinking of creating a GX4000 version, for example with just button 1 for 
start and therefore transferring it in CPR format ?

  

[trocoloco]

Congrats guys you did a great job! I wanna say thanks to @SyX for helping on the project that got stuck due to my lack of knowledge in some aspects, I wish I would have been of more help but I got A LOT to learn still. Props to you guys for this lovely version and looking forward to see in action the "600" project soon 

[GOB]

About M4 compatibility I will speak with SyX because I do not know this piece of hardware, can it load regular dsks?, can it load the normal CPC version?

I just test and no, original don't work on m4...

[kawickboy]

By the way, ¦cpm never worked on a B drive, that's an eternal cpc issue I'm afraid.
What about including the level intros and a trainer? 

[GOB]

A files version will be better. We have to wake up T&J or Twomag !!!

[kawickboy]

Or the Grees/Chany team.

[Nich]

Or the Grees/Chany team.

If Chany produces a crack, you'll probably need an X-MEM and at least 512KB of RAM to be able to play it, based on the requirements of some of his more recent cracks on CPCRulez.

[Anthony Flack]

It looks beautiful! I look forward to playing it, however I'm in the same situation; I have a Plus with M4 attached. Hopefully a version that is just files in a directory is possible, since it sounds like the M4 doesn't like the special disk format.

[kawickboy]

I mentioned this release in the cpcrulez Velu's topic.

[SyX]

Sorry I didn't have time to come here before. Although everything was already answered in the notes in the release page.

But I will try to answer all the doubts.

About the cartridge release, I am only interested in cartridges if we are using more cpc+ features than palette. At least:

* Hardware sprites for the player, enemies, platforms, ... (WIP) reducing or fixing the big slowdown problem in this game.

* Smoothier vertical scroll for the camera (WIP). Not necessarily a CPC+ feature, but for me the bigger playability problem in this game, the product of basing the conversion in ZX instead of c64 or 16 bits.

* DMA audio for samples. Being sincere I didn't take a look at this yet, only after finishing the two previous one.

* Reducing the use of RAM by having all the static data in the cartridge (this is already in the internal version, at least for static level data).

As you can see, my idea for a cpc+ game cartridge is that we can feel that it is a nice upgrade over the original version... in other cases floppy is more than enough. But feel free to make a cpr, go ahead, I will be glad to save my little free time

With respect to the disc format, there is nothing special at all, it is the same format used in the original release. The idea was because I can not justify a cartridge (yet), I wanted to release a game as it was a commercial game from the old days. I thought it was a funny idea to reuse the same disc format and make the smaller patch over the original release. And at least for me, it was really FUN to improve my tools for mastering the original disc using the new CPC+ graphics.

Of course,  I don't have an m4, and it is only tested in a floppy drive or a gotek. If it is not loading in m4, then sorry, but the FDC emulation in that device needs to improve.

But in the same way as before, feel free to crack the game, the same old cracks should be working with minimal changes, because as I have said it is exactly the same format as the original.

With respect to the reason that there is not a trainer included, in the release notes you can read that aside from patching and bug fixing the game, I discovered a nice cheat mode included in the original game (C+E+S+3), then no trainer is necessary.

And the last thing is about "|CPM never worked in a B drive, that is an eternal cpc issue". Sure, there is a bug in the original Amsdos rom, where CPM is hardcoded to boot from drive A and there is bad coded software that only works from A drive.

But being an "eternal problem", COME ON!!! In the old days the solution was easy and cheap making the second "expansion" that everybody made, after adding a reset switch, I am talking about ABBA switches... maybe it would be a nice feature to have in better floppy emulator expansions.

But again, this was an original release. For my own cracks, I always fix that, because I prefer software solutions. When I got my first rom board, so many many many years ago, I fixed the Amsdos bug for being able to load CP/M from the actual active drive. And in the same way I fixed Amsdos when I burned my first CPC+ cartridge.

That is all, I hope I didn't forget anything important.