It's about time to release to the wild a little mod I've been working on.
I started back in 2018 when Dave Footitt released his source code to Mountain Panic on github https://github.com/dave-f/panic.
I'd had fun converting Galaforce to the NuLA (viewtopic.php?f=1&t=13762) and fancied something else.
I redrew the sprites and did the palette switching work and it started to look quite nice, though I faced memory constraint problems (as did Dave originally) trying to fit the elaborated sprites all in. The game essentially worked but there was graphic corruption when decompressing and swapping between tilesets as you delved deeper into the mountain. My 6502 was really not well versed enough to dig me out. I'd asked for help a couple of times here and there but never got anywhere and it ended up shelved.
Roll on to the virtual ABUG on the 6th of June 2020. 0xC0DE did a session on his conversion of Mountain Panic for the Electron (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpus_5GERw). When he described how he'd found that not using any compression and loading in tilesets directly was in fact slightly smaller
it was game on again!. 0xC0DE kindly shared his optimisations with me and my project was unblocked!It was still a fair squeeze getting the palette adjustments included in the loader (and the fancy fade!), the story text seems to really push the poor Beeb's BASIC Interpreter, to the point of removing spaces and shortening variable names to avoid a dreaded 'No Room' message.
I've tested on emulation B2 and B-em as both have NuLA support, Models BBC B (Page&1900) and Master 128 (&E00) with standard DFS. Also tested on a real Master with a DFS/Gotek (Gotek's are great BTW!)
It's a shame Acorn didn't make the Master with an upgraded ULA BITD... a real shame....
Naturally thanks to Dave F (and his blessing) and the original team for writing the game and releasing code.
Special thanks to 0xC0DE (Kelvin) and his optimisation work, it wouldn't exist without that and him graciously sharing his work. Also thanks to Tom Seddon for his sneaky Video NuLA detection routine (and the recent NuLA support in B2). Dave M for my original copy of Mountain Panic in the first place!
A couple of pics from my CRT
