One of the things I love about the Commodore 64, is where developers try and convert titles from 16-bit+ platforms onto the machine, and this is another attempt at doing just that, with conversion of the classic Amiga title.
This focuses on the tunnel section in particular, which is very impressive overall. It doesn’t work on a stock C64, and requires a REU to be able to run, but it is still seriously impressive to look at.
There isn’t actually much to do in the preview at all, apart from move your ship around and admire the movement of the background. So, its a technical demo at best, and we can confirm that it never got any further than this. On CSDB, the developer had the following to say:
This requires (at least) 512k REU pre-loaded with the supplied ssd.reu image! Simple re-creation of a tunnel sequence in AGA Amiga game “Super Stardust”, without meteorites, enemies, ability to shoot, or basically anything else than animated pre-rendered tunnel & ability to move around with a ship.
Not trying to break any limits, or “doing something that was considered impossible until now” with this release. Was just looking for a simple project to try REU transfers in practice. Each frame, every screen row is copied from REU according to sprite position onscreen. If the sprite Id has changed since the last frame, new contents (for all 6 sprites forming the ship) will be copied over the old. The screen is also double buffered (as I wanted to try that).
Last but not least, I’m NOT going to do a “full Super Stardust port” or even “full tunnel”.
A huge shame, but who knows, maybe with the resurgence of new C64 games of late, this could get picked up again and finished – but it seems unlikely now after all this time.
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_SuperStardust (zip)
Gallery
Update history
19/04/24 – Tidy up of the page and fix of download.
