Boulder Dash Forum

After discovering the latest Packer supports Diego-Effects I've decided to have a proper look at what they all do. I've also just noticed that they seem to toggle so you can combine them.

I've colour grouped them according to their toggle groups.



Fx A - Landing or pushed boulders convert to fireflies

Fx B - Landing or pushed boulders (or too big amoeba) convert to butterflies

Fx C - Landing or pushed boulders (or too big amoeba) convert to solid indestructible glued Rockfords (useless/glitchy?)

Fx D - Landing or pushed boulders (or too big amoeba) disappear in a puff of smoke!

Fx E - Landing or pushed boulders (or too big amoeba) convert to working Rockfords

Fx F - Landing diamonds convert to boulders (though sometimes their graphic doesn't change if they only fall one block)



Fx G - Falling diamonds disappear in a puff of smoke!

Fx H - Falling diamonds are glitchy and worthless when collected (will turn into dirt if they roll left)

Fx I - As above but they turn to walls when they roll left

Fx J - Fireflies (and Rockford) produce 9 boulders on exploding

Fx K - Dirt appears like brick wall (and will animate along with the magic wall when it's activated)

Fx L - Expanding wall appears like indestructible wall



Also, for those that don't know, you can also make the amoeba have a different maximum size limit. I could have sworn vertically expanding walls were possible in this engine, but that may be only possible with advanced hacking or something.

If I've missed something or misunderstood what an effect does, please correct me.

Sendy wrote:Fx C - Landing or pushed boulders convert to solid indestructible glued Rockfords (useless/glitchy?)

Indeed. They become glued Diamonds in the game, but look like Rockford (animated) in the Construction Kit.

Fx D - Landing or pushed boulders convert to single boulder birth, Landing diamonds are worthless when collected and can float in midair

Seems you tried multiple effects at once. It's just landing Boulders convert to an explosion puff.

Fx H - Falling diamonds are glitchy and worthless when collected (will turn into dirt if they roll left)

It will always turn and behave like dirt. Except like in effect F, the graphics are not always drawn.

Fx I - As above but they turn to walls when they roll left[/color]

Always will behave like a regular wall.

Fx J - Fireflies (and Rockford) produce 9 boulders on exploding

Be aware that this also effects the behavior of the effects D and G, since they produce explosion puffs.

Also, for those that don't know, you can also make the amoeba have a different maximum size limit.

Be aware that the 250 unit setting isn't reliable as overflow often occur within one scan interval before the engine checks the count, thus actual limit can be also 506 units, 762 units or the entire cave depending on sheer luck.

I could have sworn vertically expanding walls were possible in this engine, but that may be only possible with advanced hacking or something.

There are merely a few PLCK games which used this effect on a global setup. Setting this in a per cave basis was never supported in this engine.

This is very enlightening!
Fx J seems like one of the most useful ones in terms of making new puzzles and challenges.

Thanks for the clarifications!

Also the too big amoeba uses the boulder effects, ie. if you use effect a, you'll end up with 200 fireflies when the amoeba isn't suffocated.

And while this menu is rather restricted with only those few selections (and anything but self explanatory), you can actually create more effects with a monitor/hex editor.
For instance, you could turn explosions into butterflies, let growing walls look like slime, letting an amoeba die when growing as big as only 5 units and so on.
I did create some effects of my own this way, which can be found in my Deluxe Dash series and I also did some for Rolf's games.

Though nowadays, we would usually use CLCK, as it has an easy to use menu for those effects and offers much more features, comfort and bug fixes anyways. The engine has a few differences to PLCK, though, which makes it not 100% compatible.

Is there an easy hex edit to change effect C so that dropped boulders become titan walls?

Sendy wrote:Is there an easy hex edit to change effect C so that dropped boulders become titan walls?

All the offsets and element codes are in the Dash-FAQ.

However, you might find it more convenient to just use a monitor.
For your example, you would poke $07 (code for titan wall) into $3ec1 (delayed boulder in the effect table which starts at $3eb0) and into $bfea (the actual cave file).
It is important to do both and do it while editing the cave, since the effects in the cave file are created when starting a new cave rather than during saving. The effects won't be saved otherwise.
Also make sure you are editing the RAM bank, or you might end up copying bytes from the ROM, which will mess up the effect setup entirely.

If you use an Action Replay modul, you also can just freeze and poke those as decimal numbers like this:
poke 16065,7
poke 49130,7