Boulder Dash Forum

Well, i believe i played Boulder Dash for the first time at a friends house. I don't remember the year, it must have been in 1985. Soon afterward I got my own C64 and a tape copy of Boulder Dash I and II

I became an instant fan, my favorite cave in BD 1 was Cave I.



In BD 2 it was Cave L.



I didn't see myself as a very good player and over the years I haven't really improved my skills. But fortunately several of my friends back then (omg, it's almost 25 years ago!) were quite good players. We gathered every now and then after school and played until the joystick glowed.

My C64 assembler skill became better and with the help of some cartridge (forgot the name) I was able to freeze the game and have a look under the “hood”. Soon I found out where and how the caves were stored and starting building my own construction kit in Basic with a lot of peeks and pokes.

I made a couple of caves on a squared paper, but soon found out that I needed a lot more caves to make my own game. So I invited my friends and family to design the caves – we all then became the Zombie Crackers – although only a couple of guys had computer skills and none of us had ever cracked a game. We had a lot of fun and honestly never thought about giving the games to others, I mean they were not that much better than BD 1. But another guy I meet convinced me that he could trade these “homemade” Boulder Dash with new great games for the C64. In our BD 4 I changed the Boulder Dash start screen, added "Zombie Crackers" and gave him a copy on tape. The third guy in the chain phoned me some weeks later and was told me he was thrilled and asked for more, and that was how it all started.

Ten years later, when the Internet arrived, we found our games out there available for download. I was very surprised - I never thought that our home brewed stuff would make it beyond this third guy in the chain. I started asking some of my colleagues and new friends if they ever tried the Boulder Dash 4, 5, 6 or 7. Some of them answered yes, but when I told them that I was Don Pedro, not all believed me.

We actually started with Boulder Dash 4 – The one called “Masters Boulder Dash” by Zombie Crackers. BD 5 was the first with the intro screen which stamped it “Don Pedro” and from there we went on until BD 13.

EDIT: After Sleeping on it: I can't remember ever calling it "Masters Boulder Dash", maybe someone out there changed the name, because of Dr. Watsons BD 4.

Yeah, 13 is not a typo - back then we actually made BD 12 and 13, but somehow the C64 was already doomed and I was starting on Business College, so they never made it to the Internet. Some years later we found the tapes, but we had no C64 to load them anymore.

So how did we test them? Well, I must admit we just tested level one, which means that caves with random things could become unsolvable at higher levels. The unwritten rule was: If just one of us could get through level one it was finished.

What about the Construction Kit (CK), how did you do it? As I wrote above it was a Basic program. The levels were typed in as String Characters into variables. At run-time those were converted into the right values and poked into memory, quite simple. After finishing it on squared paper, each member looked it over and we all agreed in consensus if the cave should be in the game or not. Everyone took turns at the keyboard typing them in.

One thing which always disturbed me with my CK, was that I was only able to change the setup of the caves slightly, I was unable to add more objects than there already were. I don't know why I didn't spend more time trying to find out how to, but that explains why most cave setups across all our versions are almost the same.

I was happy enough to stumble across Arno's Great Fan-site Forum, so now you know the story about the Zombie Crackers and Don Pedro.

Cheers
Don

Welcome aboard, Don Pedro!

Don Pedro wrote:In our BD 4 I changed the Boulder Dash start screen, added “Masters” and Zombie Crackers and gave him a copy on tape.

That's interesting. I didn't though, that this was your first selfmade game. You weren't aware of Dr. Watson's BD4 then, which is believed to be the first fanmade game ever.

Yeah, 13 is not a typo - back then we actually made BD 12 and 13, but somehow the C64 was already doomed and I was starting on Business College, so they never made it to the Internet.

A pity. Any chance that the tape might still work?

LogicDeLuxe wrote:That's interesting. I didn't though, that this was your first selfmade game. You weren't aware of Dr. Watson's BD4 then, which is believed to be the first fanmade game ever.

No, about 6 month later somebody gave it to me.

LogicDeLuxe wrote:A pity. Any chance that the tape might still work?

Im sorry, the tape is long gone - this is over 20 years ago.

Don

CWS wrote:How did you become a Boulder Dash fan?....

Wow, I'm not sure if the Brain Cells that were around back then are still alive in my head, a lot of alcohol has passed under the bridge so to speak

Let me see what I can remember....

I grew up in a time far removed from the one we find ourselves in now, Man had not yet landed on the Moon, John F Kennedy was still alive and the Cold War Threat was part of everyday life. You had to turn a wheel on Telephones, B&W TV was the newest thing out, Records were Vinyl and gigantic, Calculators and Mobile Phones are what you saw on Sc-Fi TV shows. I watched the first run of Lost in Space, Star Trek, Dr Who, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch etc... on TV.

I think you get the idea, I'm old

Computers were the size of Houses and deemed by my elders to be a New Fangled invention that would never take off. My first experience with a Computer was on a School Trip, we had to go to another school which had the only Computer in the State. I remember seeing all the Reels with Tapes spinning around in boxes that were the size of refrigerators.

If I remember correctly we were going to make our own Programmes that would print out a Calendar, nothing fancy just a Plain Text calendar where the only exciting thing was using *'s to make pretty borders and patterns and it was on those long perforated print out sheets that were the norm back then.

This is where my memory dims a little bit, we had to Colour in or Punch holes in Cards (I forget which), the cards were about 20cm long and 8cm wide and to the best of my recollection you had to do like 1,000 of them to get your Plain Text Calendar. You had a wooden box to store them in and they had to be in the exact right order or your calendar would only be good for toilet paper.

What I do remember VIVIDLY to this day is walking along after finishing all my cards, tripping, dropping the box and all my cards spilling out over the ground. In hindsight maybe we should have been told to number them

Hence my Love Affair with Computers came to a sudden end

Fast forward a few years (maybe a decade or so), I was working for a Swedish Company doing Service Work and Maintenance Contracts, I was re-introduced to Computers through the Allen Bradley PLC and the 1 IBM Laptop we had in the State, the Boss usually had it under armed guard and you had to give him one of your Kids or a Kidney as a Security Deposit to borrow it. Back then IBM was the Bee's Knee's in computing, I still remember that Green Tinted Monochrome Screen with fondness.

Anyway as all good employees do, someone got their hands on a copy of "Lesiure Suit Larry" and we use to play that a lot and I mean a real lot!!! That's probably why I like Strategy Games, because lets face it the graphics did nothing to enhance the scantily clad characters

Did I mention there was no Click or Double Click back then, you did everything in DOS, thank god I have forgotten more DOS than I care to remember.

So...One Sunday in the mid 80's I'm working with the Boss and he brings in this thing called a Commodore 64 with .5MB of RAM for us to pass the time with, he bought it as a Game machine for his disabled daughter and was trying to figure it out. Well he boots it up and I'm like a COLOUR SCREEN and NO sign of DOS!!! To this day I still think Commodore missed a great opportunity, they could of been the MS of today if their marketing people had seen the potential in a Desktop and the Home Computing Market.

I don't remember what he had on the C-64 back then, but I do know I rushed out and bought one

EDIT:
Removed some mis-information that LogicDeLuxe jogged my memory about and put it in the right place.

There was no Internet back then to get Games, instead there was .... ummmm .... lets call them Swap Clubs, the biggest in our State being the employee's of a well know Soft Drink firm and it's not Pepsi so don't think of them

Suffice to say, when they had a gathering the theme was Pirates of the Carribean, way before Johnny Depp got involved

That's when I first encountered Boulder Dash, maybe I bought it, maybe I swapped it, I can't clearly recollect, but I remember it enthralled me. I have never been a good gamer and wasn't too good at Boulder Dash to begin with, there was something addictive about that little Rockford bugger running around though. I saw that Sendy said that the Fireflies scared her, well everything scared me, I had Rockford running around at Super-Sonic speeds and was probably my own worst enemy. I don't think I even got to the end of Level 01 in BD01, 02 or 03 and not sure if I had the Construction Kit, I know I never used it.

Next I upgraded to a Amiga 500, never did get my hands on Emerald Mine, but every now and then I would boot up the old C-64 and play Boulder Dash to relax and have some fun.

EDIT: (information in the right place now)
I got the .5MB expansion card too, after straightening the Pin I bent trying to get that little sucker into the tight compartment in the bottom I had a 1MB Amiga 500

It's amazing looking back now and remembering how 1MB of RAM could be so exciting when you compare it to whats available now

Then for the next decade or so life changed (as it does), work commitments, travelling, you know Life stuff that stops you from having fun.

It wasn't till the 90's that a company I was working for gave us all a Laptop, I didn't get back into games at that point as there was still no Internet available to me and I had lost my "Swap Club" contacts years earlier. To tell the truth I never even thought of Gaming, the C-64 was sitting in a box somewhere and I would just use the Word Processor on the Amiga 500 now and then.

Around the late 90's the company decided we all needed the Internet, back then they trusted employee's to do the right thing and I don't think they realised the potential for lost work

One thing I do remember is what the IT guy said to me when he was taking me through the process of getting online, doing emails, websites and all the basic stuff.

As we finished he said: "Welcome to the last day of your life"

In many respects he was right, the Internet was fascinating! There was so much information available, so many things to do and people from around the world to chat to. I have to admit I got hooked for quite awhile, maybe a few years and he was right in some respects, my life did end that day, but to be more exact it morphed into something else.

Anyway, shortly after that I left that company (my choice) and because I was hooked on the Internet I bought my next Computer a Compaq 5BW474 with Windows Millenium on it, don't groan I liked WinME and it never gave me any trouble after I got use to it, actually I'm still using the Compaq now, I have upgraded to Windows XP Pro, replaced the CD Drive to a newer Pioneer one (few years old now) and rewired the Fan when the Power Circuit for it packed up, other than that it's a good reliable machine that does everything I need it to do. Did I mention I still use Dialup as well??? Yeah, I'm a Dinosaur

The wife keeps telling me to buy a new Computer, but I tell her if I start replacing Old with New she better watch out

So now we find ourselves at Star Date a few months back, I was in a Chat Room and we were reliving our past, Games, Computers and all that when one of the people asked if I had seen the C-64 sites, I said I had heard of them but not bothered because I didn't have a C-64 anymore.

Then they said the Magic Word .... "Emulator!!!"

I downloaded CCS64 (because that's what they used) and the very first game that sprang to mind was .... you guessed it .... Boulder Dash. Oh boy, just playing for the first time after so many years was such a pleasure, the sounds just as I remembered them, the frantic running around, getting clobbered on the head, all of it

Being a few years older now I managed to clam down and get through the Levels and Games reasonably well I thought, then I hit some of the Caves with Bugs (unsolvable) and went looking for Solutions. That's when I found Arno's Site and Forum.

As if that wasn't enough I then discovered there were BD Fans out there making their own games with Classic and Modern Themes, very nice ones too, although I still think Logic DeLuxe created Crazy Dream Dash just to make me balder than I already am

...And that's it, I'm Old, I've rediscovered Boulder Dash and I can write really long posts when I'm in the mood

Regards
John

P.S.
I'm married with 2 Dobermann's (Max and Kara), the wife is for Sale, she bites the dog's don't

johnomg wrote:It's amazing looking back now and remembering how 1MB of RAM could be so exciting when you compare it to whats available now

I even more wonder what you used it for? There is not much software even aware of RAM extensions on the C64.

LogicDeLuxe wrote:I even more wonder what you used it for? There is not much software even aware of RAM extensions on the C64.

Your right Logic, I had a look at Wikipedia and after seeing the picture of a C-64 and a Amiga 500 it jogged my memory.

The .5MB RAM extension was for the Amiga 500 not the C-64, like I said a lot of Brain Cells have passed away since those days

Why I expanded the Amiga 500??? Well to be honest it's probably because the Salesperson recommended it and no-one I knew had a computer with 1MB of RAM, whether it made any difference I don't know, but it did give me Bragging Rights for awhile

My comment still stands though, it was exciting to have a whole 1MB back then and amazing when you consider the sizes available now.

Thanks for jogging my memory

johnomg wrote:The .5MB RAM extension was for the Amiga 500 not the C-64

Now, that makes a difference. 1MB really is the minimum you should have there. Otherwise, most software won't work satisfactory if at all.

I was born in the late 70's. I didn't grew up with computers because my parents were not friends of this modern stuff. I could only play computer games when I visited my friends. When I was about 10 years old, I can't really remember the exact age, my brother and I were in vacation at my uncle's house. They had two pc games on these thin floppy discs. One was Leisure Suite Larry the other was Rockford by Mastertronic. My brother always played Larry. As I couldn't speak English yet, I started to study French at school, I could only play Rockford. I liked the game because of the possibility to play five different worlds with different graphics, cook, cowboy etc. In one world you had to collect coins, in the other world you had to collect apples... The gameplay was very fast and I was not very good in playing.

A few years later, I don't remember when it was exactly, I had got I very popular handheld with a liquid crystal display including one game. The first game I bought was Boulder Dash. I didn't even know, what Bd was, I only bought the game because I liked the cover of the game box and thougt it was something like a Jump'n run. I remarked that it was similiar to Rockford and even thought it was based on it. I didn't like the game very much. The gfx was terrible and the sound was annoying. Since then I didn't play bd for years.

The last two years at school I learned the programing language turbo pascal, but not very good. With the help of a friend a could expand my knowledge in pascal. We didn't have internet, so it was not as easy as it is today with internet. A few years later I started to learn Delphi.

About five years ago, by a fluke, I had a friend that gave me the game Rockford by Mastertronics. I started programing a game engine based on this game about 4 years ago. Later I remarked that Rockford includes all classic elements from bd1+2, so I decided to support bdengine based games too. I'm still working on the game but progress is very slow because I have other things to do besides.

Now I play the fanmade games on a c64 emulator, with bremake, my favourite clone, and of course with my own game engine. That's how I came to this nice webpage

subotai wrote:Now I play the fanmade games on a c64 emulator

You did play the originals too, didn't you? Play the original 8 bit Atari version. Or the C64 version for better sound, but slightly inferior colors. Or have the best of both in GDash. Forget the official ports and remakes other than the C64 version. Fanmade clones are far supperior in some cases, like GDash or Boulder Remake.

Btw, Rockford was originally released as an Amiga based arcade, so get the Amiga version to play it as intended (68000 at 7 Mhz).

LogicDeLuxe wrote:You did play the originals too, didn't you?

Of course I did, but only a few caves. I also played the Amiga and Arcade versions of Rockford many years ago.

In my opinion, it's always better to play the original games than the clones because you can be sure that it works as it was intended. I appreciate Boulder Remake so much because it is very accurate. It's kind of hard to create a clone that works exactly as the original engine. And in my opinion, that's not really necessary as long as you can use an emulator.
Of course, the advantage of the clones is, that you can directly select every cave.

I only started coding my "remake" because I wanted to play all the 40 caves and I couldn't find a clone that supports the additional elements of the game Rockford, for example snakes and taps . It seems that in Rockford you can only play 20 of 40 caves.

subotai wrote:I only started coding my "remake" because I wanted to play all the 40 caves and I couldn't find a clone that supports the additional elements of the game Rockford, for example snakes and taps

A Rockford remake was done in Rocks'n'Diamonds: http://www.artsoft.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1901

I know this remake and it's very nice I forgot to mention it.
But I started coding my engine about four years ago, and the R 'n D adaptation was released in december last year. Sadly, due some limitations of the R 'n D engine, some elements as the snake (or worms) for example cannot be accurate. I also wanted to create a remake with the R'n D years ago.

200 years ago, I enjoyed watching Dearly Beloved No.1 Son playing on his C64. I L O V E D hearing all the diamonds fall !!
Recently I found BD for my N. DS. Lite - It is NOT the same - or maybe I just haven't 'passed' enuf sheets !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Any Info ? or shd I just download BD from this site to my PC. ?

I must confess that having browsed many msgs on this Forum that everyone seems SO very 'Techy '

Simplistically, I just wanna Play The Game !

Sorry if this msg is too puerile !! I just wanna hear the diamonds fall !

Then go to http://www.gratissaugen.de/erbsen/c64dash.html and download the C64 Boulder Dashes. You can play them with a C64 emulator for your PC.

Yes, or download Gdash, the latest BD clone, from this forum (Index- Games: Remakes- Gdash)