First images of Jungle Quest for Atari revealed
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After being forgotten for a decade, the well-known programmer Peter J. Meyer decided to revive his Jungle Quest project, a platform game for Atari 8-bit computers.
Via the Atari.Io forumMeyer recounted that he had made great progress with the programming when he accidentally deleted his hard drive partition. Fortunately, he was able to recover a less complete copy from an old backup disk.
"Now I'm still figuring out what I did ten years ago and adapting more modern programming techniques into the game like multiplexing, compression, RMT music and sound, etc.," he said.
He noted that he made the game more colorful and pushed the Atari to its limits, in response to the "Commodore 64 vs. Atari 8-bit" discussion that generated more than 11,000 comments on the AtariAge forum between 2008 and 2009. "I wanted to put together something that shows what our great Atari can do on the C64," he said.
On the other hand, he revealed that Jungle Quest has gone through several evolutions at the code level: at the beginning, it was a game in TurboBasic XL with ML routines; then the Turbo Basic parts were translated to MAC/65 assembly language. Later, he ported it to Mad Assembler - so that he could continue developing it on his Windows PC and using emulators.
Meyer adds that he had initially planned for the game to be only for Atari 130XE computers or those with extended RAM. He then met Sal "Kjmann" Esquivel and Lance Ringquist of Video 61, who asked if he could make a "Battle Squadron" game for a cartridge.
At that time, I was still programming games on the MAC/65 and barely knew how to put together executable files and cartridges. Later, they gave up on "Battle Squadron" tofocus on the famous Tempest
Finally, Ringquist commented on his willingness to finalize Jungle Quest, which is tentatively scheduled for release in 2018. "We hope to make this an exciting game, and one that should have been made between 1986-1991," he added.
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