What’s more fun than porting an old game released for an old system such as the Apple IIgs to its 10-year-older predecessor, the Apple II from 1977? Cue [Deater]’s port of the classic video game ‘Another World‘ to the original Apple II. As was fairly obvious from the onset, the main challenges were with the amount of RAM, as well as with the offered graphics resolutions.
Whereas the Apple II could address up to 48 kB of RAM, the 16-bit Apple IIgs with 65C816 processor could be upgraded to a maximum of 8 MB. The graphics modes offered by the latter also allowed ‘Another World’ to run at a highly playable 320×200, whereas the ported version is currently limited to the ‘low resolution’ mode at 40×48 pixels.
The game itself still needs a lot of work to add missing parts and fix bugs, but considering that it has been implemented in 6502 assembler from scratch, using just the gameplay of the IIgs version as reference, it’s most definitely an achievement which would have earned [Deater] a lot of respect back in the late ’80s as well.
Feel free to check out the Github page for this project, grab a floppy disk image from the project page and get playing. Don’t forget to check out the gameplay video linked after the break as well.
this is very nice, looks very playable too. Indeed a great achievement!
I played this wonderful (and truly ahead of its time) game as a teenager. I can’t imagine the herculean effort and countless hours that went in to get this conversion done only using the ‘visuals’ from the original as reference. Congratulations Cue!
“Whereas the Apple II could address up to 48 kB of RAM”.
Actually, the 6502 (and thus the Apple II) could address 64kB of RAM. Or more, when using bank switching techniques. Only the early models came with 48kB.
“my tuba”
I can certainly appreciate the hard work and skill it took to pull this off, but as someone who has only seen a bit of “Another World” before I can’t really tell what I’m looking at in much of the video. But hey, if it makes him happy and fans get a kick out of it then I say bravo!
Demo for 8 bit atari:
youtube.com/watch?v=PCa_0nXvfDg
he should make a terminal/vt220 version
This will be useful when the quantum apocalypse limits all technology to a primitive level.
Impressive seeing something originally made for an OSC Amiga simplified enough to run on an Apple II+.
The original/8 but apple ][ line could address up to 64kb, not 48, and with bankswitching tricks could posess up to 8mb of bankswitched memory. The 16bit IIGS could address 8mb continuous.
to those saying the Apple II could easily have more than 48k of RAM, yes, that is true. I simplified things a bit in the video as a full discussion of the Apple II hardware across its 16 years of production would take longer than the full gameplay.
I targeted a 48K Apple II+ system as I have one and I wanted to be able to play on it. The game should work fine on an original Apple II from 1977, though you’d have to have it fully topped off with RAM, and you’d have to load and run the loader manually as the original systems didn’t autoboot and my HELLO program is in Applesoft rather than Integer basic.
To get 64k prior to the release of the Apple IIe in 1983 you had to install a language card, which was somewhat intrusive (you actually had to install a card, pop out a RAM chip and connect the card via ribbon cable to the empty RAM socket). Also suddenly you have to bank switch the RAM which got increasingly more complicated the more RAM you had.