MINI-SKI for the Commander X16

This is a skiing game for the Commander X16 written in C by Mark Wiedmann. All music and sfx were created by Mark with the Furnance tracker.

What is the Commander X16

In a nutshell, the CX16 is a new 8-bit system based on the 65c02 processor (popular in many 80s/90s systems like the C64 and NES). It is a spiritual successor to the C64/C128 and even boots into a very similar BASIC prompt. It is NOT compatible with those systems though as the CX16 includes a more advanced graphics/sound chip. The goal is to have a better supported 8-bit system for folks to hack on. There is an emulator for developing on, and actual hardware will be available in the near future.

See Their FAQ for more info

Requirements

• The cc65 cross development package for 65(C)02 systems.
• The Commander X16 emulator. On the community Github

Building

The build folder should already contain the latest .prg and all supporting files ready to run.

Building the and running .prg file

make

will build the ski.prg file which can then be run in the emulator with

make run

This command executes: [path-to-emulator]/x16emu -prg ski.prg -run

x16emu is the emulator so use the appropriate path to that executable if it exists elsewhere.

Level Design

The levels are built using the amazing level editor LDtk. The .ldtk file and tileset images are included with this repo. To use the levels in Mini-Ski, I wrote a NodeJS (JavaScript) program to convert the level data into binary files that can be loaded at runtime into the C level structs. You need to regenerate the .bin files after any updates made in LDtk.

To generate the level .bin files:

make ldtk

This will create a series of .bin files in the build folder.

Tilesets and Sprite Images

I'm using GIMP to make the images for my tilesets and sprites. Mini-Ski runs in 256 color/8bpp mode and I don't read in .png files, so to use images from GIMP they need to be converted to something Mini-Ski can read. The conversion util maps each color to a CX16 palette index and bin image. There are a few steps:

In GIMP:

1. Combine all layers into 1 layer
2. Remove any transparency/alpha from the layer (Layer -> Transparency -> Remove Alpha Channel)
3. "Export" the image and Select "Raw image data" as the file type
4. Save the .data file in the tools folder

Now convert the .data file into a .bin file useable in Mini-Ski.

In the makefile there is a command make gimp to do this.

Additional Credits

For sound/music I use the awesome ZSMKit by MooingLemur which licensed under an MIT license (https://github.com/mooinglemur/zsmkit).

ZSMKit is mainly designed to be used in Assembly, so to use ZSMKit in C, I borrowed some code and the cx16.cfg from Toboter's amazing game Vault of the Vindicator.

The "Tiny Ski (1.0)" graphics are created/distributed by Kenney (www.kenney.nl).

License

See the license file