With some music cover by Kamil ‘Jammer’ Wolknikowski captured from the real thing here as well:
The C64 binary release is here: http://csdb.dk/release/?id=155115
For technical aspects:
it uses two character sets split midscreen and sprites for the items (after a rastersplit) as well as three sprites for Delores. I merely wrote the code for this (and took the shot from my C64
Yes, I am amazed myself quite often, even though I deal with C64 pixel art as a programmer a lot.
Those 16 colors are not just restricting but also super-restricted.
Per square block of 8x8 pixels (or the classical 4x8 double wide pixels|) you have only four of them available.
And those four are not free either. A whopping three of them are the same for the whole picture! Only a single color can be selected per 8x8 tile. And this is not even one out of 16 but only one out of the first eight.
Maniac Mansion, Zak McKracken and in fact most C64 games use that mode. Mastering it is quite a skill.
Quite many C64 games simplified their game gfx by selecting a set of four colors for the whole image and just use those four in total (there are also technical reasons, not just color-scheme-madness).
There is one additional feat for this mode that usually has double wide pixels (hence 2 bits per pixel so 2^2=4 colors).
You can toggle a tile to contain hires pixels, so it is truely 8x8 pixels but then only in two colors. One being the first global color, the other again one of the lowest 8 (of the 16 color palette). Oliver used that quite effectively i.e. for the ornaments here to allow for some details.
@enthusi : a few years ago I searched for a description of C64 “unofficial” graphic modes, those that exploit some hardware features to provide more colors or better resolution or less restrictions. I found the following page, that explains some of them:
It is my understanding that these modes are mostly used in demoscene productions, but would it be possible to use them in a game as well? Are there C64 games that use them?
Yes, those special modes usually either occupy alot of CPU time or memory - or both.
Aside of the tiled character set gfx that we used here and for our own game (as almost all C64 do) the C64 has a native bitmap mode that has fewer restrictions on the colors but only 4x8 squares and a considerably larger memory footprint. Few games used it, more often puzzle games or such. That genre sometimes even utilized some more fancy demo modes such as FLI (if you want to read up on it).
The demo scene did btw not end where that website stopped (eg., NUFLI).
Yes, while it is technically possible to use a converter for NUFLI we wanted something that is a) pixel art (as in manually set pixels) and b) at least in principle somewhat feasible. You could write an engine based on the split character mode and in fact we pretty much did (while TWP itself is totally out of the question).
NUFLI on the other end occupies almost all the CPU time available. There is just enough to play a tune and maybe do one or two things but never running a game engine. Any sort of background animation is a total no-go with NUFLI as well.
That ‘mode’ uses up all sprites as well for example (and half of the memory, too).
