Stunt Car Racer preview for Commodore Plus/4

Available for download at https://plus4world.powweb.com/softwar...

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. The result is somewhere halfway between the Amiga and the C64 visually, which makes it distinct in its own way.