M.U.L.E. and Master

[VDU23]

You'll probably know M.U.L.E.
If you don't you should anyway. Is quoted as one of the best designed game ever.
It was released for Atari 800 and later for CBM64, Apple and NES.

Strangely enough, the "best 8bit game ever" was never ported to Beeb.

I was toying with the idea of making a port/revamp, until I've stumbled onto some tech issue.
Apparently, the best mode to use is MODE 2, as you forcily need 5 colors (players are identified by colors alone). It leave me with 9kb, anyway it doesn't seems such an issue as the Atari version ran on around 7kb.
2kb should be spent on the graphics, while probably a number of stuff is made by plotting (the squares, I suppose, are bitwise operations).

Another subject that probably will create some issue is the dragging of sprites. Both A800 and C64 had hardware sprites, so the game phase where you drag the MULE on a plot was quite cheap on bytes. I dunno how much such routine could cost on the beeb. XOR is probably out of question as colors are used to identify stuff and when corrupted the info will be badly conveyed.

Considering the above and each of 8 species own 4 large sprites + 8 small sprites... + the mules...+structures... no gain in redefining font characters...

... it look like MULE cannot be ported to a default Beeb.

If I'm babbling mud feel free to punish me severely.

In the end, it does look that only the Master can manage the game, not 'cause the game is so heavy, but 'cause of some incompatibility with the game design (colors, sprites, map data) and the hardware. Master is a bit too much, but cover the gap.

My question is:
Coding a game for the Master alone is somehow "cheating"?
What's the common sense in the community about a Master only release?

[SteveF]

I've never played M.U.L.E. but I read Jimmy Maher's write-up of it a while back and it sounded really cool.

I suspect the experts are drafting comprehensive posts even as I type this, but FWIW:

• I think you could save a bit of memory by shrinking the mode 2 screen. A quick look on Wikipedia suggests the Atari 800's highest resolution mode is 320x192. Mode 2 is only 160 pixels across, but we can't do anything about that. Looking just at the vertical resolution, mode 2 is 256 pixels so you could chop off 8 8-pixel lines to save 5K.
• You make it sound tight, but not *that* tight. If you required a single 16K bank of sideways RAM - which is quite a common upgrade on the B or B+ - you wouldn't need to restrict yourself to the Master.
• Ultimately it's your game and everyone at least has the option of running it in an emulator, so if you really did feel you wanted to or had to make it Master-only, go for it!