Shamus+, new labyrinths for the Atari classic
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Following a successful reverse engineering process, Siegfried "slx" Lenz (Austria) yesterday presented Shamus+, a version of the classic arcade game by Synapse Software (1982) that incorporates five new mazes.
At the beginning of last July,Lenz began to investigate the Commodore 64 version-whose maps are believed to have been developed by Jack L. Thornton. He discovered that it had differences from the Atari version; including four levels named after famous fictional detectives: (Sherlock) Holmes, (Jacques) Cluseau, (Philip) Marlowe and (James) Bond.
Despite not being a programmer by profession, "slx" was able to develop a converter into the Action! language. Then, he added the maze selection menu. And in mid-September, he solved a problem with the speed - which decreases as the player advances from one level to another, to make the game more difficult.
Additionally, "slx" incorporated a Tournament mode where the challenge is to play all the mazes in succession. As for the C64 version, the difference in speeds stands out (the gameplay on the Atari is faster); the correction of Shamus's "floating hat" - which allowed enemy bullets to pass through the protagonist's head; as well as the possibility of killing enemies that touch the other side of walls.
"With 128 rooms per maze, that's 512 completely new rooms, plus a few that are different from the original C64 maze. Given the limited number of shapes, there are far fewer rooms."completely new"with designs that are not used in the Atari version," Lenz admits.
Finally, "slx" left open the possibility of porting the VIC-20, CoCo, and TI-99 mazes in the future. "The VIC mazes would require more changes to the game engine, as they are smaller and have different room layouts. For the PC version, I would need to learn 8080 assembler or hand code the existing maps," he added.
Shamus+ for Atari 8-bit computers
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