Update [Mon 13th Nov, 2023 13:10 GMT]: Fresh off porting Stunt Car Racer to the Commodore Plus/4, Cobbpg has released yet another incredible port of the game. This time, it's for the Apple II computer, which was originally released all the way back in 1977.
Cobbpg writes the following about his latest project:
"After porting this game to the Commodore Plus/4, I wanted to see if we can go back even further in time and get it to run on the original Apple II. It took some heroic effort, but I managed to squeeze the game into 48K by removing a few non-essential features like multiplayer championships or the ability to save the season on disk."
You can download the port from the description of the video below if you want to give it a try:
Original Story [Fri 25th Aug, 2023 13:30 BST]: Geoff Crammond's classic racing title Stunt Car Racer has just received an impressive new port for the Commodore Plus/4 (as spotted by the folks over at CommodoreBlog).
The acclaimed racer was originally released on various platforms such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Amstrad CPC, and DOS back in 1989. However, now thanks to a homebrew developer named Cobbpg, players will be able to experience a brand-new port, for the Commodore Plus/4 computer.
This version is based on the Commodore 64 release of the game and was announced earlier this month along with a demo on the Plus/4 World forums. Since then, the finished version has now been released, with Cobbpg describing it as somewhere halfway "between the Amiga and the C64 visually".
Cobbpg said the following about the port in his original announcement:
"After reverse engineering SCR to modify its physics so it can run at 50 FPS I started looking around and quickly realised that this game hadn't been ported to the Plus/4 yet. Since the TED is in many ways similar to the VIC-II, especially in the absence of sprites, I figured this might be an interesting challenge. And so it was!
"The biggest limitation was RAM space. The original game doesn't leave much of the C64's memory untouched, and the Plus/4 has less accessible RAM while needing an extra 1K for colour information. For the time being, my solution was to remove load/save functionality and the ability to change key bindings, so I'd be able to get a working game and have some breathing room to shuffle things around. At the moment I have a bit over 2K memory left, so I should be able to restore some of the missing bits.
"I really like the way the game looks with the rich TED palette, even if the multicolour mode limitations (i.e. only two unique colours per block available) were sometimes difficult to deal with."
You can download the port now from Plus/4 World, or check out a video of it in action below: