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Rick Dangerous 2 CRT conversion

Another legendary game converted to MagicDesk cartridge format 🙂 As it is typical for an 8-bit game, it’s frustratingly hard as a hell. But Rick Dangerous games always delivered critical dose of charm and fun experience to stay forever fond to hearts of 8/16 bit fans. In modern days I am playing mostly Amiga WHDL release because of 16-bit graphics, but Commodore 64 version of game is 100% excellent also. Gameplay is same and 8-bit graphics (for this type of game) is top notch. After all, C64 version was my first contact with Rick Dangerous and where most of the memories were made 🙂

Although fully aware of excellent EasyFlash “Duology” release with both games in one package, I really wanted to have the same modern feeling, but with fully clean RD2 gameplay experience version of the game, runnable from emulators but also from widely accessible/cheap cartridge on real hardware. In this conversion I used data files from Dominators crack release. All game/level data was analyzed and unpacked, disk transfer routines dumped and game’s level loading logic converted to cartridge memory transfer functions.

At the end of work, I wanted to also add some title picture on startup, but after searching online, I realized there was never Rick Dangerous title picture on C64. Probably over the time I got used to the one from Amiga version of game. So as the simplest solution I took Amiga version screenshot, opened it in Pixcen, corrected few outlines and shadings/dithering’s and got, personally, satisfactory result. If somebody wants to improve it, here is editable Pixcen file. Let me know in comments if somebody gets/updates better version 🙂

In this uncompressed version game takes about 140Kb of space, just shy over 128Kb ROM chips, so 256KB ROM chips are minimum for EPROM programming. I have no plans for creating packed version, but remaining space could be used for adding Rick Dangerous 1 (which is single filer) and with addition of nice game selector, MagicDesk recreation of EF duology release is easily possible. In provided ZIP arhive, use BIN files for EPROM programming, CRT files for Vice/EF/KungFu/SideKick64/etc. Cartridge hardware can be created using this project but burned chips should work in Marina64 and similar projects also.

If nothing of that is available, you can play the game in browser also 🙂

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