«Cosmic Ark» port in development for Atari 8-bit
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We start the year 2022 with the port in development of «Cosmic Ark» (Imagic, 1982) for the Atari XL/XE series computers.
The game, designed by Rob Fulop for the Atari 2600 console, puts us in charge of an alien mothership that must avoid meteorites and send a small UFO to recover species on the planet.
The idea for this version belongs to "Glurk", a user of the AtariAge forum who in just one month converted the classicsBarnstormingandFrostbite-both Activision titles.
In recent days, "Glurk"opened a thread in the AtariAge forumto ask the community for their ideas on how to achieve the star-studded background that characterizes “Cosmic Ark.”
Avery “Phaeron” Lee, author of the Altirra emulator, joined the debate. However, yesterday he surprised everyone by sharing this functional, though not 100% complete, version.
"For the most part, (the game) is a bit buggy (...) it's not finished yet, the starfield could be optimized a lot to better match the original. Cosmic Ark involves a fairly easy disassembly; code and data are separated, and (there's) none of the nasty tricks like offset indexing. I figured most of it out by hand; but a 2600-targeted tracing disassembler like DiStella should make quick work of it," he said.
For his part, "Glurk" humbly admitted that he is not as fast a programmer as Lee. "Phaeron solved most of the game while I was still mulling over the best way to make the stars. There is no need for us to duplicate our efforts," he added.
Cosmic Ark for Atari 8-bit computers (WIP)
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