nother great game ! It took me half an hour each time I needed to take a screenshot from the arcade version or the C64 version because I just couldn't help playing for a while.  :o)  Both are equally addictive, but on the C64 it looks quite old. I thought it deserved a lifting.

Have a look at the arcade original. I really wanted to get closer to that look. Adding the score bar and the Press fire to play really enhances the arcade feeling, doesn't it?

As for the logo, I really wanted to make it look bigger and more impressive, with lots of details. I'm pretty pleased with the results.

The small planet is a real let-down, don't you think ? The goal of the game is to reach the Earth. So you have played through the game, it took you at least half an hour, and all you get is this tiny squashed blue and white ball ? Come on ! We can do better than that, can't we ?

n the left the original C64 screen, and on the right my own version.

irst, let's analyze the original picture. I think many parts of the game use sprites. On this title screen, logo letters are made of vertically expanded sprites (they are 24 pixels wide), and the Earth is probably also made of two sprites (as it is 21 pixels high). I don't know what stars are made of, but if I had to do it, I would simply use high resolution mode or full multicolor mode and plot them where they need to appear. Let's take that for granted. I have noticed that stars never appear on the same horizontal row as the copyright text. There must be a split there that falls back to character mode (even standard character mode, probably). During the game, the top part of the screen that displays scores is also probably in character mode.

Now let's have a look at the changes I have made. I decided that it would not be easy to get a bigger logo just by using sprites, so I designed it to use color character mode instead. It uses up 60 characters (less than the original R-Type logo). The other text parts also use a custom character set. The program needs several splits to display the logo and the other text lines. Of course, there won't be any stars to the left and to the right of the logo.

As for the Earth, it is 2 sprite large and 2 sprite tall (thus using twice as much sprites as the original one) but as it never appears at the same time as enemies, it shouldn't matter. To prevent stars from appearing in the dark part of the planet, black should be used as a third color to fill the left part of the planet.