Boulder Dash | Hacker News Reader

Boulder Dash

lutzroeder.github.io

193 pointsrazodactyl74 comments

Ooooh, the most famous and playable game for the East German KC85/3!

Looks like this is a re-implementation in Javascript.

Alternatively, here's the original KC85/3 version in an emulator:

https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/kc853.html?mod=m022&file=k...

...to start a game round, you first need to press Enter before the arrow keys can be used to move the little chap around.

There were also other Boulderdash clones for the KC85, which were a bit closer to the original, like: https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/kc853.html?mod=m022&file=k...

That scrolling effects in the diamonds is actually a very clever hack using the KC85/3 color blinking feature where the blink frequency was controlled by a CTC counter. When I finally figured out how it works I was so excited that I wrote a whole blog post about it: https://floooh.github.io/2017/01/14/yakc-diamond-scroll.html

It's a great game, too!

Well, the original was on the Atari 400/800 in 1984, but ok.

I never said that KC85/3 Digger was an original game (but I would assume it's more inspired by Boulderdash than the Atari Digger version, but I guess only the author knows that).

I only said that the original of the OP's Javascript "re-implementation" was the KC85/3 game Digger (e.g. the gameplay, graphics and audio is exactly the same).

Good catch. I knew right away that it wasn't an exact likeness of the Atari game but didn't know what it drew from. Boulder Dash has really gotten around in terms of clones and remakes(even official releases have been relatively frequent over the years, if not widely acknowledged). And all of them play slightly differently from each other, sort of like different versions of patience solitaire.

Have you considered submitting your blog post to HN? I enjoyed reading it, but I'm not going to steal any karma from you.

A family friend bought this for our family on the C64 and then my dad got super addicted to it, he was up until 2am most nights trying to crack the game. He would leave work early (he ran his own business) to come home and play it. It also meant no-one else could play the computer or watch TV.

Eventually, I took a biro to the tape, sorry dad, and scribbled across it, which seemed to break it. Finally we were free.

> Eventually, I took a biro to the tape, sorry dad, and scribbled across it, which seemed to break it. Finally we were free.

How did he react? This sounds like the beginning to a Netflix true crime miniseries

That cassette tape had been played and played and played so he thought it had worn down.

We ended up getting an Amiga and he completed it on that at a more measured pace and once he was done he was done.

Wait... could I be your dad??

This comment gave me a sense of nostalgia in two weird ways. My dad used get addicted to a few select games too and play them through. I remember him playing Zelda and Metroid obsessively. The other thing was how communal playing video games was, when there was only one tv and everyone watched others play, while awaiting their turn.

Looks great! Just had a go and the "physics" are off, at least compared to the original Boulderdash. Roughly 20 years ago when I wrote a Boulderdash clone, there was a test level floating around that you could use to verify your engine. A cursory Google search fails to find it, now, but I'm sure it's still out there.

This is digger not boulderdash.

This is not the Digger that I'm familiar with, which was more of a Mr. Doh clone for the IBM PC back in the 80's.

http://mpm-kc85.de/html/C0169_Spl_07.htm

My mistake. Of course the submitter did submit it as "Boulder Dash."

No worries, glad you wrote a version of your own way back when, cheers. The scrolling in bd was impressive.

I remember playing it on the Atari 8-bit machines. I liked how if you stop for a while the guy taps his foot waiting for you to get on with it. A friend and I made a game on the Atari inspired by it that was more challenging as a puzzle rather than fast-paced.

[0] https://youtu.be/n9zf510_9gU?t=105

Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. When replaying the C64 version I realized it was a lot twitchier than I remember.

I'm on mobile now right now and can't really test, but one thing that a lot of versions of this game gets wrong is that they omit the feature to be able to dig without moving. On the C64 this is done by pressing the button while moving in a direction.

I think a lot of people simply didn't know you could do this, which made it pretty much impossible to complete certain levels.

I just looked at the code for the keyboard event handler, and it appears that this version DOES NOT allow you to dig without moving.

The original Boulder Dash, made by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray was an amazingly made game for its time.

The most astonishing part was how much "physics" and enemies the game was able to animate at the same time, several screens of elements, rocks, diamonds and enemies, there was no apparent limits on the number of animated stuff, on a 8 bit machine running as low as 1Mhz that was impressive.

The clever trick was the use of cellular automata. The next state of all cells (including badguys and lava) can be computed by looking at the 8 neighbors cells, a simple double buffer to avoid overwriting updates and voilà.

The level storage system was also interesting.

Each level was generated from a random seed and then patched with rectangles of constants, all stored in a kind of RLE style encoding, it was very memory efficient.

Where I'm from this was called Repton

edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxzv1o1ngRw

full screen scroll on a 6502-powered BBC Model B

Repton was much nicer. The levels were harder and the graphics were wonderful.

It's on the Play and App stores:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superiorin...

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/repton-3-free/id895768027

It was one of my favourite games on our family's Acorn Archimedes in the early 1990s. I could play the first couple of screens on each of the ~40 themed level sets at age 7-8 or so, and sometimes the third screen, but then they became too difficult. I found it again at age 20 or so, and I could complete some of the level sets (8 screens in each), and I've gone back to it every 5 years or so, but there are still some puzzles I haven't solved.

Here's an early map (Finale screen B) from Repton 3 showing the complexity of the puzzles: https://www.reptonresourcepage.co.uk/GetMap.php?level=2&game... (via https://www.reptonresourcepage.co.uk/ )

A key difference with Boulderdash is in Repton, the diamonds don't fall if they're unsupported.

ooo they have PC version too https://superiorinteractive.com/

Original publisher in the 80s was 'Superior Software', I'd be interested to know if this is the same people 40 years later

edit: yes its the same people!

I also first knew this as repton. Massive nostalgia from even playing this.

Very cool. We had a bootleg version of this on the Amiga 500 called Emerald Mine, it evokes very strong nostalgia!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7l9pf-SdCM8&t=72s

Hands down, Emerald Mine was the most fun game on the Amiga. The prerelease version had the nice "Yum!" sound for the orange monsters, which made the game even more exciting.

I tuned my Competition Pro joystick to have shorter travel for Emerald Mine, because milliseconds did matter.

I played this on the Atari 800. My dad and brother somehow wrote mods for the game to do things like make Rockford invulnerable, or make it so that Rockford could dig through anything (solid walls, boulders, slime, etc).

I think they learned how to do the mods from a computing magazine to which my dad had a subscription. I remember this magazine would have whole programs printed in it that you would have to type by hand. My memory is fuzzy as I was very young, maybe 7-years-old. I'm not sure if the mods were typed out in the magazine, or if it just gave the general theory and they figured out the rest.

I typed in a lot of those programs on my Atari 800. One magazine had an editor mod that would checksum the line after you typed it in (some programs were pages of hex data, the compiled program; others were regular BASIC).

I remember the BASIC and hex code. It's wild to think that software was once distributed on a printed page.

Was it Antic magazine? I did the same. And the editor mod was called Typo. Good times back then.

I subscribed to both Analog and Antic; I honestly couldn’t say which it was but remember my dream was to get good enough to get one of my programs published in a magazine. (I never did.) Little did I know where that would take me.

Edit to add: your question sparked my curiosity, so I looked it up. It was Typo II: https://www.atarimagazines.com/v3n9/TYPOII.html

I think the one that we had was Analog, that sounds familiar.

Played it now, but the controls, for me at least, are a little inconsistent. Sometimes a key registers, sometimes it doesn't, and other times a single keypress results in 2 moves.

Same. Macbook Pro 2017 laptop Chrome browser.

This is pretty neat. As an C64 scene veteran I gonna crack this game now and install a trainer menu with level selector. ;)

It's labeled "Digger", and I thought for a minute it was http://www.digger.org/ (Windmill Software's classic)- but no. Both the digger.org ports and the one I've found online (https://www.playdosgames.com/play/digger/#) suffer from inability to properly fullscreen, and also seem less performant than the game originally was. Would love to see those issues ironed out.

The original game from 1988 was actually called 'Digger', not Boulder Dash (although it clearly draws inspiration from BD), and it was quite legendary in the East German computing scene, because it was one of few very well designed and polished games on the KC85/3.

Here's the web page of the original author Alexander Lang (who AFAIK lives in Berlin now): https://web.archive.org/web/20230101011143/https://www.lanal...

Ah, Lutz, original author of .NET Reflector. I didn't know he was into making games too.

Used to play this back in the day on my ZX Spectrum. It's such a simple concept but, if you're not paying attention, it's way too easy to accidentally squash yourself with a falling boulder. Also played the somewhat similar Repton on the BBC series of microcomputers.

Such a great game!

Wow, that brought me back, thanks. My final project in my college computer graphics course was a Boulder Dash clone from the version I had on my Commodore 64 growing up. I brought in the C=64 to compare and contrast the two versions. Wrote a level editor and everything. It's still a fun puzzle game.

Ooooh, I used to play that on our MSX. Good memories :) I kept dying though...

https://github.com/lutzroeder/digger

I played something similar called Felix, https://archive.org/details/msdos_Felix_1991

I'd be curious if anyone else had played it

Yes, on a PC, although it wasn't much good in comparison to Repton (see other comment) on the Acorn Archimedes.

Oh sweet memories. Thank you so much. One of the very few games I used to play.

http://www.elmerproductions.com/sp/peterb/ is a great resource about Boulder Dash.

I always loved the world map theme from the NES version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVUO1Zc1T_c

This was my fav "fork": https://www.idreams.pl/super_miners.html

The graphics and style kind of reminds me of Chips Challenge.

There’s one on steam now. “Chucks challenge” is the sequel named after Chuck Somerville one of the authors. The old right ended up owned by a religious group so it’s a little bit of a miracle it came out.

The “apple time warp podcast” interviews him. It’s pretty fun. Thes podcasts seem to be archived on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/cekAxSTHGN4

I swear I was better at this game 30 years ago than I am now.

played this way back, cannot remember the rules - help?

Collect all the diamonds and finally reach the green exit door without being killed by falling stones (or falling diamonds).

For those who never played Boulder Dash, or haven't played it in a long time, the game is particularly uninviting. There are no instructions or key guide. Not even an indication for what the goal is.

Speaking of keys, I vaguely remember there being a key which, when held down and a direction key pressed along with it, would make the digger dig on the square adjacent in that direction. If the target tile was soil or diamonds, it would disappear, while the action would not have any effect on the other types of tiles. I tried the usual SPC/CTRL/ALT, but they don't seem to work in this way. Am I misremembering this feature, or is it simply not part of this implementation?

I have that memory too. I think it was holding joystick firebutton on C-64. But that's probably part of Boulder Dash, not Digger.

http://mpm-kc85.de/html/C0169_Spl_07.htm vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder_Dash

if you just play around a little bit it's not that hard to figure out

> the game is particularly uninviting

This is what made games so much more interesting back in the day.

Games that tell you what to do the entire time aren't more "inviting." They just want your time so you'll buy horse armor when they offer it.

You just described a majority of games from this era.

I have such a strong feeling of having read about Boulder Dash recently and I can't quite put my finger on where. It's driving me crazy.

Obligatory http://www.autofish.net/shrines/rox/

modern (okay, 1990s) clone, multiplatform: https://www.artsoft.org/rocksndiamonds/

The game has over 50 different elements, including several that have a secret or concealed effect.

Puzzle games are generally better when they make creative use of a small set of elements, and when there aren't hidden surprises.

Loved Boulder Dash to bits. What a great little port. Thanks!

So good, and not so easy at all esp. on mobile. Thanks!

Could diamonds kill you in the original Boulder Dash?

Yes, as far as I can remember.

Yes

It was like a punishment for the sin of greed, because it happened first when you were on a level with a lot of diamonds.

It's great to play the predecessor to Supaplex

Room 7?

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