30 years later, Myst demake for Atari 2600 reminds us how far we’ve come

Nearly 30 years after its launch on the Mac in 1993, Cyan’s Myst remains to be as unstoppable as ever. As one of the vital profitable (but generally divisive) laptop video games of all time, it bought 6 million boxed copies within the Nineteen Nineties and later ended up on over a dozen platforms, with remakes counting for much more appearances, together with a VR model. Now, because of an unofficial interest challenge by Vince Weaver, Myst can add another platform to the checklist: Atari 2600.

Vince Weaver is an affiliate professor on the University of Maine in Computer Engineering. Since final 12 months, he has been engaged on a partial “demake” of the well-known point-and-click journey recreation that runs on Atari’s 8-bit recreation system, and he simply returned to the challenge to make updates last week.

For these not within the gaming neighborhood, the time period “demake” may want some unpacking. A demake is basically the other of a remake: as a substitute of upgrading a recreation to suit fashionable requirements, a demake takes a contemporary or basic recreation and adapts it for older, much less highly effective {hardware}.

“Making demakes is a interest of mine,” Weaver advised Ars in an e-mail interview. “In the previous, I’ve largely executed them for the Apple II platform, however a couple of 12 months in the past, I began making some for the Atari 2600. The demake type of began out as me making a type of small proof-of-concept model of issues as a joke, however then after I get constructive suggestions, I get a bit carried away.”

The 2600—a recreation console launched in 1977 with solely 128 bytes of RAM and a most decision of 160×192 pixels—could seem an unlikely house for the graphically-rich multimedia extravaganza that was Myst in 1993. It’s a recreation as soon as thought-about so giant that it turned a killer app for CD-ROM. But the disparity between platforms is precisely the purpose—as a result of the interpretation course of poses an attention-grabbing problem.

“The greatest problem on doing a demake for one thing like Myst is the graphics,” says Weaver. “Back within the ’90s, Myst was well-known for having stunningly good rendered graphics. Translating that to outdated 8-bit machines is difficult. It’s much more tough on the 2600 as you’re always racing the beam and have some excessive limitations. For instance, usually, you may solely have two colours per line, and something greater than that takes a number of tough coding.”

Due to console limitations, Weaver would not plan to port the complete recreation over to the primitive 8-bit console, however he desires to get sufficient puzzles working to make it “actual” recreation, as he writes on his web site: “The full recreation requires at the least 800 scenes, which might be roughly 200k, which might be each a reasonably hefty cartridge in addition to a number of graphics to attract.”