The game of Boulderdash - retro gaming for Topfield and Win32

One of my favorite games for the Commodore 64 was Bouldedash. Simple to understand and play, difficult to master beyond the first few levels. I've recently discovered a site dedicated to the original game, located here :BoulderDash home page

This site provides tonnes of information about the internals of the game, and they even provide pseudo-code to the inner workings. I have not used this code as basis for my game, but I have "borrowed" the cavedata, predictable random number generator and some graphics

I've never coded a game before, just commerical apps during work-time, and I was a bit disappointed with the enclosed games for my Topfield 5000. Enough to get challenged by a friend to do better.
I wanted to start out with making a version of Boulderdash for the Toppy. This proved difficult, as programming with the API is a bit of working in the blind. Writing, compiling, copy to Toppy, run & crash, try again.

Not before long I wanted to give up, but there was a bet involved; so one late saturday night I game up with the attempt to mimick the API calls of the Toppy under Windows. This seemed possible, and indeed; now I could run & debug my game on Windows before deploying it to the Toppy.

The game can be downloaded from the links below. The Topfield TAP development environment you must seek out here !

Instructions of play

You must collect jewels in order for the door to the next level top open. On the top of the screen, above the playfield you can find information about how many diamonds needed to complete the level and how many you have collected so far, the current levelnumber and difficulty, seconds left to complete the game in, your score and number of lives left. Best illustrated with a picture:

You must complete the game before the timer runs out, otherwise you loose a life. Boulders can be pushed if there is empty space around, but beware of gravity. There are also enemies to be found beyond the first levels.

Use Enter (or OK on the Toppy remote) to start the game. Use the arrow keys (Channel/Volume +- on remote) to move around. Pressing Home (or Mute on the remote) pauses the game, and Esc (or Exit) ends the game.

This is a first release, and as such it has a few missing. In particular there is no sound (probably coming soon), and the intermission levels do not give you an extra life, as they should. Enjoy !

July 2005,
Kjetil Nęss

Downloads

The game of Boulderdash for Windows
The game of Boulderdash for Topfields