UnDUNE II – The Demaking of a Dynasty | Hacker News Reader

UnDUNE II – The Demaking of a Dynasty

lexaloffle.com

224 pointstosh33 comments

Reminds me of high school, when I found a surprisingly playable "port" of Command & Conquer for the Ti-89 graphing calculator to play during my less engaging classes (at least the ones where I could plausibly justify using a calculator). I think this is the one: https://www.calculatorti.com/ti-games/ti-89/asm/real-time-co...

I also remember this unfinished port of Dune II on TI-89 calculator! http://boccato.carru.free.fr/kgb/Dune2.gif

If you're a fan of demakes you should also check out some recent ones made for the Apple II: http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/demakes/

Well, this beats the version of Dune on my HP48GX that blew my mind in the 90s.

I wish there was a good dedicated portable Pico-8 device. The POCKET C.H.I.P. was a great idea but the keyboard and buttons were way too uncomfortable to play for more than a few minutes.

I agree! I’ve got a GBA, PSP, DS Lite and a PS Vita. Are there any pico-8 emulators out there for these platforms?

This emulator apparently has builds for the Vita, though it looks like it doesn't support the carts that rely on the latest pico-8 features (this is a common issue with pico-8 emulators).

https://github.com/jtothebell/fake-08

While not truly “dedicated” to Pico-8, it’s the best I’ve seen:

https://www.clockworkpi.com/gameshell

I tried my old retromini (RS90, I think) with (the surprisingly still updated) retroarch, but the core seem to crash when loading content.

And I don't want to figure out how to compile the stand-alone emulator (retro8) for it.

Check out the RG351M or any of the other ANERBNIC devices.

https://retrododo.com/rg351m/

Still remember sneaker-netting the original on 5 1/4" floppies... looked at it recently and was appalled at the amount of clicking required. It had literally no consideration for player ergonomics.

Remind me again where is the Musée de la Demoscene? Must be one in Finland, no? This sort of thing should be featured.

> looked at it recently and was appalled at the amount of clicking required

IMHO that's actually not a big deal. From a comment I made in 2020 [0]:

> That's what I was concerned about before I played through one of the three campaigns a few years ago — that the UI would seem unbearable after having played a lot of Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2. I found it actually quite OK after learning the keyboard shortcuts (of the Dos version). What actually ruined it for me and made me not want to play the other campaigns is the poor AI. Easy enemies would have been alright; I'm not that good at RTS games anyway and being able to finish each level on the first try was nice. But the opponents are so exceptionally stupid that it just got boring.

So, yes, the controls seem silly from a modern point of view, but they're far from the critical issue that prevents the game from being enjoyable.

By the way, there's a grave mistake in my old comment. I had written:

> Dune Legacy lets you play the campaigns, not just single-player skirmish, against its improved AIs. I just tried selecting ‘hard’ and (with game speed at maximum) got completely wrecked on the second map. Wonderful!

As I played more of the campaign in Dune Legacy, it turned out that the AI is even worse than in the original game. I only thought it was ‘wonderful’ because it attacked my base-under-construction with most of its preexisting army as soon as I gave my presence away too early on. But once I switched my strategy to build more stuff in secret before attacking, it turned out that the AI just sat there uselessly; no halfway decent build order, no scouting.

TL;DR: If you'd like to try multiplayer vs. humans, learn the controls and give it a try, it's really not bad! But if you want a good single-player RTS from the olden days … maybe try Plants vs. Zombies? Overcooked? Definitely not Dune 2.

Oh, and about UnDUNE II: that one really has poor ergonomics, judging from the 5 minutes I played it. It's an incredibly cool piece of art, but what it does particularly well is emulating the original game within the constraints of Pico-8. As opposed to imagining what Dune 2 would have been like in a world where Pico-8 were state of the art. It's like playing Doom on a digital pregnancy test: It's extremely cool that I could do it if I wanted to; but I really, really don't want to.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24487643

Thanks for sharing my demake, @tosh

Seems most ppl are appreciating it for what it is, which is nice to see/hear :)

This is incredible and I'm always delighted by the level of effort Pico 8 developers put into their work.

That demake brought to mind Warlocked, an RTS game for the Game Boy Color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSJ5oOmZnbE

This game was a favorite for me and my friends. It always blew my mind taking my low level game and cable-linking to my friends who had a Queen or wizards in their arsenal.

I've always wanted a chess client which provides dynamic heat maps to help you assess the board. Highlighted squares could represent threats from opponent pieces, colored by how many pieces that are attacking a square, or could attack a square within a move.

Obviously, this isn't really needed, but I think a little AI help which guides you towards better understanding of the board would be nice.

Your comment sounds like it is meant for the battleship thread, not this one?

Derp. No idea how that happened. Yesterday someone upvoted me and I thought, oh nice, someone agrees. I wonder what they were thinking.

Unrelated to this article, I clicked on the game on the pico-8 home page, while waiting for something to install and ended up playing three levels. Spectacular work.

This is really cool. Weirdly I find I have no desire to actually play it, but I'm glad it exists. Reminds me of playing it on a 386 as a kid. I wish something like pico8 existed back then!

If the goal was to recreate the original then that's fine I guess, but I don't see why anyone would want to actually play that game. My hand and arm hurt from playing for 25 mins.

I wonder if it has the walking tiles bug? Crazy, but it made the game kind of fun back in the day (if a little preposterous).

I remember playing this game in the early 90s. My main memory is hacking it by editing saved game files with a hex editor. :)

How does the Pico 8 work? You pay for the console and the games are included?

You pay for the console, and the games are open by design. You can load any pico game into the console, go into edit mode, and see / edit assets, music, levels. The console only supports lua, which gives you the advantage that every game you open to see the source code will be written in the same language. A wonderful little thing. I used it to introduce kids to game development with good results.

To add to this - each game is stored self contained into a png image file [0], where the assets and code take up predictable sections. Each image is the entire game.

It's pretty easy to build your own tools to generate the format, if you were inclined to build an IDE or something along those lines.

[0] https://pico-8.fandom.com/wiki/P8PNGFileFormat

The data is hidden in the image data itself, it seems(!) Does this mean that an accurate screenshot can be used to clone the cartridge? For fun, of course.

Unfortunately, no, I don't think that's possible. There's a few null bytes used here and there, like marking the Lua offset, and your screenshot can't capture those, no matter how accurate the rendering of the actual bytes is.

Yes all the data (source, sprites, sound) is encoded in the PNG. You can simply copy the PNG to clone it (screenshot won't work though):

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/cposts/un/undune2-3.p8.png

Also note that there is a "Code" button under the game window which shows the full source code.

There is no console, it's a virtual machine that computers can run.

There is a "virtual console" i.e just the virtual machine :) And yes, it's sold for a small sum.

I wonder what the legality of this is?

I hope they don't get a take down notice.

This is very much copyright infringement, just when the franchise started going huge again.

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