A fantastic Super Zelda clone written for the C64 by Crossbow/Crest and was a secret part to the demo Krestage 3 – More Weird Stuff. This awesome clone has to be seen to be believed. Unfortunately it seems we will never see a full version of this game anytime soon.
When you think about a Zelda conversion on the C64, you think of getting something which is fairly close to the NES versions in terms of graphics. Well, the C64 version does its best to blow you away by providing a conversion which looks almost identical to the 16-bit SNES version. A really fantastic achievement and a testament to the awesome graphical work which has been done.
The demo allows you to walk around a very accurate representation of Zelda’s map, with the ability to swish your sword and even chop the greenery of the map like in the original game. It seems that quite a big chunk of the map is in place, and the clone/conversion was well on its way to becoming a fully fledged game.
The game was ditched after Crossbow lost interest in the development and time was against him. This seems therefore to be a mere proof of concept. To complete a game of this scale would take so much blood and sweat for maybe only a thousand or so who may play it. We assume that the hidden part is all that was ever created, though there may be some small bits and pieces that Crossbow may show someday. This seems to be it, and all that may ever be sadly :(
We’d love this game to not be a GTW, but sadly it seems it indeed is and is another one to chuck into the archives. A fantastic C64 Super Zelda conversion… case closed…
TRIVIA: To access the hidden part in the demo, on the password area – you need to enter “no limit hold’em”.
Contributions: Paul Koller, Brian Bagnall, Paul Bearer, Jazzcat
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Mythos.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
22/06/21 – Updated credits and tidied up.
A little late to mention this, but when I added tile copying support to leissa’s c64 engine, I managed to include scrolling and got the whole map into RAM just like in the original. The top screen status bar with lives and such is missing though. See also here: https://github.com/leissa/c64engine/commit/7deb8403af2a5838e86742f63dc2de68100c002e
I E-mailed Crossbow after I saw this, asking what it would take to complete it and offering my help.
Since the world is a multicolor bitmap, the main problems are 1) the world consumes all available RAM and 2) the method used to scroll the world consumes all available CPU time, leaving nothing left for any actual gameplay mechanics.
So the only way this could be completed is by requiring a SuperCPU with SuperRAM.
That’s a shame Pegasus and thanks for taking a look to see if it could be picked up. Excuse my lack of technical knowledge in this area, but could perhaps some kind of EasyFlash/Cartridge version work with data look up tables and bank switching do you think or is the CPU enhancement definitely needed?