to the beginning)



The game loads and displays a screen with credits



With a joystick in port 2 pressing fire loads to see our hero in a dungeon of

some sorts



Moving backward gains us a sword; bit of a tip as our guy is pointing forward

you would assume you need to go this way, to collect the sword press down.

The torches on the walls flicker to give the illusion of some sort of realism

however they do not affect the lighting in the game in anyway. Our guy can

move behind some scenery. It looks like it's a nice game



HOWEVER

Movement is slow and very flickery, pressing fire causes our guy to jump but

with very heavy gravity I presume this is to point to the fact he is in a suit

of armour and so his weight is affected. The screen flick scrolls whichever

direction you move in left/right and then things get difficult



Gaps in the floor of the dungeon will need to be jumped, as you weigh some

considerable tonnage you soon find jumping is an art form in itself, you edge

up to the hole as much as possible and launch yourself with the aid of the

fire button hoping to clear the hole.



Now the two small holes themselves don't pose to much of a problem and you

continue deeper in the the dungeon looking around for more swords. The timer

ticks on and suddenly! You reach a hole to big to actually jump, although

there is a sword on the other side! This is where the games skill comes in,

collecting swords opens doors and going through theses doors is the key to

completing the game, as you will be moved to other areas and hence bypass

large holes in the ground.



At the end of the game the massages flashes on screen

"Congratulations!"

And a large pile of gold sits waiting for you to collect, and of curse Gold is

the Kings best friend.



GRAPHICS 4/10

SOUNDS

GAMEPLAY 4/10

LONGEVITY 4/10



OVERALL 4/10



Its frustrating to play, mainly because it's so very slow to move around.



***************************************

COMMODORE FREE INTERVIEW WITH

Tokra CREATOR OF VDC-IHFLI

***************************************



Q. Please introduce yourself to our readers.



Hi, I'm Torsten Kracke aka tokra from Germany. About 18 months ago, my

interest in Commodore machines was rekindled and I've since been active in the

usual forums. Together with lots of help from Mike (from the VIC-20 Denial

forum) I've released a VIC-20 demo called "Yes VIC can" at the Revision Easter

Party this year.



Q. Can you give some of your computing history and how you came across

Commodore machines?



About Christmas '78 or '79 our family got the first Pong-videogame, which in

the later years I upgraded to an Intellivision, and then to a VIC-20 and

finally a Commodore 128 before succumbing to the PC. I did a little

programming on the Commodores; but just in BASIC, later took my first steps in

Assembler and even released a C128-VDC disk to the Public Domain back in 1993

- which you can still find around the net, or on my page now

http://www.tokra.de/c128/64kvdcdisk.d64



Q. Can you explain how you came up with the VDC-IHFLI display format?



I was always interested in maxing out the graphic abilities of my Commodore

machines as you can see by the VIC-20 demo! There was a commercial piece of

software available for the C128 called "Graphic Booster" from a German company

way back then. Graphic booster promised resolutions of 720x700 and 65000

colours from the machine, However this was always way too expensive for me.

Grabbing all the information I had from magazines and books, I finally managed

to program my own BASIC-extension for the 720x700 resolution; and a few month

later; I wrote a program for GEOS128 which can display a full GeoPaint-file in

a resolution of 640x720. This was as far as I could get back then! Fast

forward to 2010 when I found the amazing "Risen from Oblivion" demo for the

VDC ; and discussions on the newsgroup comp.sys.cbm about high resolution

graphic-modes on the VDC in colour.



Q. What are the technical details for example the Screen resolution?



The resolution used in VDC-IHFLI is 640x480 - colour resolution is 2 colours

per 8x2 block and the vertical frequency is close to 60 Hz. 640x480 is a

standard VGA-resolution which in itself is close to NTSC. I'm not too sure of

the technical background here, but you will notice 640x480 in 60Hz is a pretty

common resolution. Also, the maximum colour resolution the VDC will display

without any tricks is 2 colours per 8x2 block. In 640x480 the bitmap uses

38400 bytes and the colour information uses 19200 bytes, for a total of 57600

bytes which still fits within the 64K of VDC-memory. This also shows why you

need an expanded VDC-memory. Older C128-models only have 16K VDC-memory. You

can see now that high resolutions cannot be achieved with that amount of

memory. Luckily VDC-memory-upgrade kits are still available on eBay - just

pull out the VDC from the socket, plug in the RAM-board, and re-seat the VDC.

No soldering required.



Commodore Free Editor notes on VDC upgrades

At the time of writing you could obtain a VDc Upgrade from here

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Commodore-128-64K-VDC-Video-Memory-Upgrade-/

310351185828?pt=UK_PC_Video_Games_Video_Games_JS&hash=item48425f47a4



You will need of course to open your machine and plug the device in, full

instructions are given the whole thing takes about 15 minutes to fit, I have

purchased 2 of these myself from the seller. The units are new and I presume

currently manufactured.





Q. And in laymans terms then how is the image displayed on screen?



The VDC-chip produces the full picture. The VDC Is a very flexible chip, if

you know how to set its 37 (or 38) registers. Basically you just need to set

the registers so that the VDC will display interlace-mode and the resolution

you want it to display. Then it depends on the capabilities of your display

device if you can see the results. Sadly, the VDC-chip hasn't been that well

documented, but the C128 Programmer's Reference Guide is a great first help,

as well as examining other peoples programs. Also very helpful was Richard42

of the commodore128.org-forum who with an oscilloscope was able to provide me

with frequency measurements.





Q. So you still have to interlace or swap two screen very quickly to give the

effect of a higher resolution, how then is the colour pallet created, and as

you say the 64k VDC is need to hold both images in memory at once is this the

case?



Contrary to the C64's VIC-chip where interlace is done by software the

interlace-effect on the C128's VDC is a hardware-capability of chip itself!

The colour palettes are just the usual 16 CGA colours the C128 has in this

mode. The illusion of more colours just comes through the interlace effect and

because the pixels are so close together. That is also how the aforementioned

Graphic Booster produces its "65000" colours - in reality its still just 16

colours, just the eyes are fooled by patterns of different colour pixels.





Q. Can you tell our readers how the demo images were they created, you took a


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