Crystal Caves for NES

[Dr. Kylstein]

(Sorry about the NTSC filter.)

Find the latest version here

A totally unauthorized recreation by me. It should be playable from start to finish, but the final scene and some music and sounds are missing.

[Commander Spleen]

waht

this is allowed

[MoffD]

Next do secret agent... owait

[ScarletFlame]

Pretty good.

[Roobar]

Wow that's amazing! How did you do that?

[Napalm]

Just played this on the Nestopia emulator. Wow what can I say... really impressive! lots of love went into making this. Especially in 6502 assembler, that. Puts my Javascript port to real shame.

Apart from what you said. I found some glitches in sprite rendering. The game slowed down when too many sprites were on the screen. This was visible when all the snakes in E1L10 are visible. Also all sprites seem to glitch out including the player when they are being drawn on the same lines. I think there might be an optimization to be done here. I'll have to play through some more.

I really like this, a very faithful recreation. Well done. I'd really like to chat with you about the project. You can catch me on the IRC channel.

Video of bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_vHHKjgFQI


Napalm

[Lunick]

This is amazing!

[Roobar]

I think that's not a bug, but rather a limitation of NES itself. You can't expect much from decades old console.

A bug, for example, is if you try to jump out of the world map on the top right. You'll get stuck in there.

[Levellass]

Utterly glorious.I could just bask in it.

[Dr. Kylstein]

I think that's not a bug, but rather a limitation of NES itself. You can't expect much from decades old console.

A bug, for example, is if you try to jump out of the world map on the top right. You'll get stuck in there.

Quite right. It's like trying to fit a house-full of stuff into a studio apartment--something has to go. Opportunities to do the same thing faster just by rearranging code are rare and difficult to find.

I've fixed that sticky boundary for the next version. There's also some bugs in the password system, so unfortunately passwords from this release may not work in the future.

Edit: I should say, the passwords from the currently posted version may not work at all, even within the same version. I'll try to post the fixed version tomorrow.

[Dr. Kylstein]

Double-post to let people know that I've updated the download link in the first post. This should fix the passwords, so games can be continued--even into future versions. It also fixes the map bug Roobar found.

[Dr. Kylstein]

There was a bug that made it impossible to beat levels beyond level 8, this has been fixed in Beta 3.

[entropicdecay]

Very interesting, impressive. When I first played it seemed the graphics were glitched out, but it turned out to be the emulator I was using as I switched to a different one and in that one they're fine

Edit: and yeah, flickering and/or slowdown when there are many sprites onscreen are due to the NES itself and limitations on the number of sprites. There must be ways to mitigate them to a point since some games have them less than others (although in some cases it may be due to being careful with how many sprites are used), but the same issues can be seen at times in a lot of official NES games as well

[KeenRush]

Haven't tried it myself yet but from the video (on youtube) it seems pretty damn impressive. An interesting project.