Commander X16

What would you like to see running on the CX16. I would like to see a 256 color simcity or Simcity 2000 on the machine. I know the SNES had a lot of games. And that sc2k was on it. Will anyone try porting snes games to the cx 16 like top gear?

New Games.

Totally doable and possibly interesting:

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  Corewars
  


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  4X games
  


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  Multi-player "business simulations" (supply and demand yields interesting interactions...)
  


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  City-simulations, colony simulations, etc.
  


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  Starflight-like variants
  


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  Fantasy RPG themed games (fighter, magic user, cleric, thief....)
  


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  Exploration games (Seven Cities of Gold, or even Space Hulk!)
  


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  Pirates!-like variants (combine it with Seven Cities and you may have something very interesting...)
  


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  Post Apocalyptic survival games (e.g. Fallout Shelter; Wasteland)
  

And also, arcade-style games.

 

Space Derelict for the Commander X16

I'm thinking of a 2D, top-down space derelict game, but based on Traveller instead of WH40K's "Space Hulk".

Your inspection cutter finds a derelict hull, matches course heading, links to it via cable.  Your battledressed marine squad deploys, attaches a portable airlock, cuts their way in.  You order their entry and march sequence, advancing them through the hull, cleaning out rebel scum, xenomorphs, and hostile aliens.

At a higher challenge level, your free trader finds the derelict, and your ragtag crew have to clean it out to claim salvage rights.

 

I liked Starflight's controls.  Stardock resembled the town center in MULE, and the docks in "Spain" for Seven Cities.  You had only a few places to go, but you actually "walked" there.  That is a nice way to anthropomorphize a menu.

 

SNES ports may need this? I think most snes or dos games were in some version in C or something like that. I guess if you had access to sd cards you could run C like programs or can Basic do all that. But which is more details Basic or C for a game. Or do you need some C compiler to run an SNES game or SNES emulator?

So, that video is about doing C coding on your modern machine, and cross-compiling to the X16.  cc65 is one of the tools that lets you write your own C code and compile it to run on the X16.

Porting a game would require having the source code and being able to compile it specifically to the X16 as a compile target.

 

 

So is there a file conversion for roms to be changed over or would that have to be made and done on a PC to be ported over the cx16? I only mentioned this when I saw the vlc player convert video to ASCII code movies. But I guess Roms are not original code. And what you mentioned would be editing the code line by line?

1 hour ago, rje said:

So, that video is about doing C coding on your modern machine, and cross-compiling to the X16.  cc65 is one of the tools that lets you write your own C code and compile it to run on the X16.



Porting a game would require having the source code and being able to compile it specifically to the X16 as a compile target.



 



 

 

1 hour ago, Travis Bryant moore said:

So is there a file conversion for roms to be changed over or would that have to be made and done on a PC to be ported over the cx16?

Video game ROMs contain machine code designed for a specific processor architecture. For example, an IBM PC (x86) program will not run on the Commander X16 (65C02). Furthermore, even if two systems have compatible processors, the code will often rely on specific hardware being addressable at specific locations. For example, a C64 game will expect the VIC-II registers to begin at $D000. Therefore, porting a game to the Commander X16 would likely involve rewriting the game from scratch.

SNES games were written in assembler, by and large. Certainly they were at Nintendo, which we all know after the Gigaleak happened. I've read the source of Zelda LttP - very cool stuff.

There is an impressive (but limited) version of SimCity for the Arduboy, which IMO is a terrible handheld that didn't have the planning and vision of the X16.  2.5KB RAM, and I think game files are limited to 22KB.    My point is that if it can be made for Arduboy, it can be made better than the original for X16.