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LIMBO for Commodore 64 Preview available for download

Lord Error

Lord Error

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Oct 27, 2017
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Unbelievably, this is actually being made, and it's way better than it has any right to be. A Limbo port for C64 that follows the original quite closely in terms of gameplay, control and visuals. Perhaps the craziest of all is that the port is being developed semi-officially, by a single member of Playdead team - Søren Trautner Madsen - done as a hobby on his own time. Few days ago, a playable preview has been released, and it can be downloaded here, to be ran on a real C64, or an emulator:
https://csdb.dk/release/index.php?id=170889

Here's a short writeup about this release: https://www.vintageisthenewold.com/limbo-for-commodore-64-preview-available-for-download/

And here's a playthrough of the demo:


I'm always fascinated with what's possible on C64, and I've seen a lot of magic come out of the machine with demos released over the last few years, but this still left me in awe. The detailed animations, and the smoothness of it all - it's just hard to believe. As a reminder, this is a machine with a 1MHz CPU.
 
apocat

apocat

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Oct 27, 2017
10,097
As someone who had a C64 as his first gaming machine, that is insanely impressive. Just beautiful.
 
Perzeval

Perzeval

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Oct 25, 2017
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That's amazing. Would also have been hearing the reactions if it was actually released back in the day.
 
OP
OP
Lord Error

Lord Error

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Oct 27, 2017
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apocat said:
As someone who had a C64 as his first gaming machine, that is insanely impressive. Just beautiful.
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It's crazy, isn't it? I can't think of anything comparable to this that was released back in the day. Even the games that featured complex graphics and smooth scrolling like Creatures or Mayhem in Monsterland, never had anything close to this kind of interactivity with the scenery, running on slopes, swaying on ropes etc.
 
apocat

apocat

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Oct 27, 2017
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Lord Error said:
It's crazy, isn't it? I can't think of anything comparable to this that was released back in the day. Even the games that featured complex graphics and smooth scrolling like Creatures or Mayhem in Monsterland, never had anything close to this kind of interactivity with the scenery, running on slopes, swaying on ropes etc.
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It's pretty stunning. Graphically Mayhem is in the same league, but it seems he's managed to recreate that physicality that was so strong in the original Limbo. If you've tried it, Exile had some of that feel, with strong winds interacting with both characters and objects and a real feeling of inertia when using your jetpack, but it looked nothing like this.
 
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Deleted member 11018

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Good graces... I coded in machine language and "assembled" code by hand on the c64... This is quite something...
I m sure he worked with modern tools, but still...
 
Vinegar Joe

Vinegar Joe

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Oct 26, 2017
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That's crazy. There's a ton of stuff there we take for granted these days...but on the C64? Magic.

The art style might help some I guess. I bet there's a lot you can hide in all that blackness. Looks really good too.
 
King_Moc

King_Moc

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Oct 25, 2017
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pswii60 said:
Oh definitely.

But the impressive thing here isn't the graphics, it's the interactivity and things like the rope swing physics, and the size and movement of the spider legs. I can't think of anything like that back in the day.
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Yeah, it looks almost like sprite scaling. I'm impressed by what it can actually do tbh.

Though I was always a Spectrum kid.
 
HighFive

HighFive

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Oct 25, 2017
3,652
Wow. They need to give that playable for all, consoles included. Id play it! Its really amazing.
 
GrayFoxPL

GrayFoxPL

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Oct 26, 2017
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This is insane. Is this really made with 1 to 1 C64 specs?

I love my old C64 but to do this? I mean 2D rope physics? When he climbed the rope clearly divided into 2 simultaneously swinging pieces. Insane.
 

Deleted member 12790

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"Parallax scrolling" is a bit of an umbrella term that sort of loses its meaning when used to generalized. In the purest sense, no, the c64 could not do any sort of hardware parallax, it only defines one character field for backgrounds. Games like turrican or rtype are not doing real parallax, those are animated background characters. What you are seeing is the background tiles changing between sets of looping animations, one frame for every pixel of parallax scroll.

Now, games like choplifter could simulate parallax by changing the scroll register of the single character field during hblank. But for actual, dual playfield parallax, no, the c64 can never do that.
 

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King_Moc said:
Yeah, it looks almost like sprite scaling. I'm impressed by what it can actually do tbh.

Though I was always a Spectrum kid.
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Sprites on the c64 can be double tall and/or double wide with a flag. So in that sense, they are indeed scaling. Double wide mode lets you use 4 colors per sprite instead of two, but given the way limbo works, that limitations isnt really important and they can straight up use the flags for scaling.
 
ghibli99

ghibli99

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Oct 27, 2017
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Wow, that is nuts!

Krejlooc said:
"Parallax scrolling" is a bit of an umbrella term that sort of loses its meaning when used to generalized. In the purest sense, no, the c64 could not do any sort of hardware parallax, it only defines one character field for backgrounds. Games like turrican or rtype are not doing real parallax, those are animated background characters. What you are seeing is the background tiles changing between sets of looping animations, one frame for every pixel of parallax scroll.

Now, games like choplifter could simulate parallax by changing the scroll register of the single character field during hblank. But for actual, dual playfield parallax, no, the c64 can never do that.
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In general layman's terms though, anything that resembles parallax scrolling, which only really became a big feature in the 16-bit console era, is pretty impressive. I think it was Mega Man 5 on the NES that had similar effects going on in some of its stages that were very impressive to me when I played it for the first time about 5 or 6 years ago.
 

Deleted member 11018

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Krejlooc said:
"Parallax scrolling" is a bit of an umbrella term that sort of loses its meaning when used to generalized. In the purest sense, no, the c64 could not do any sort of hardware parallax, it only defines one character field for backgrounds. Games like turrican or rtype are not doing real parallax, those are animated background characters. What you are seeing is the background tiles changing between sets of looping animations, one frame for every pixel of parallax scroll.

Now, games like choplifter could simulate parallax by changing the scroll register of the single character field during hblank. But for actual, dual playfield parallax, no, the c64 can never do that.
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Sure :)
The effect being there by trickery is what makes these stand out. I like the synched characters alteration quite a lot, either for scrolling background or fixed one... if there's no apparent overlap there's no cake for me, but yeah, you were right to precise on the hardware side of things, but still i love the VIC-II.
 

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MikeNeko said:
Sure :)
The effect being there by trickery is what makes these stand out. I like the synched characters alteration quite a lot, either for scrolling background or fixed one... if there's no apparent overlap there's no cake for me, but yeah, you were right to precise on the hardware side of things, but still i love the VIC-II.
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This is using a much simpler trick, actually. The foreground objects are just sprites being multiplexed. The c64 has a limit of 8 hardware sprites per horizontal scanline. In areas where the faked parallax is happening, there is only a single player sprite on screen. By multiplexing the sprites, they can be reused infinitely in vertical strips down the screen.
 
GrayFoxPL

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Lord Error said:
Yeah! No SuperCPU add-on, no RAM expansion, just a stock machine. Just crazy.
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RU5cN43.jpg
 

Deleted member 2254

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The concept of applying complex designs to outdated or limited rulesets or hardware always fascinated me. Nowadays it's obviously less appliable to games: I mean, they still juggle around hardware limitations and such, but it becomes less absurd when you're juggling between, say, 80 or 100 players, or a model that has 600k or 700k polygons. Demaking games for older hardware while staying as faithful as possible, creating entire games out of other games' editors (like the full games in Trials, the crazy shit in Little Big Planet or Minecraft and so on), bending rules and expectations given a very limited set of options... it's just amazing to see, and it makes us wonder how games would like if hardware stopped evolving at the C64 or somewhere around there. There would no doubt be games looking even better than this, and this demake of Limbo looks absolutely amazing and faithful, and this is coming from someone who played the original Limbo (and its various versions) many times.
 
Timppis

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Now I know what I will do when eventually I will be thrown through a time vortex back into the eighties.

I will be a limbo-billionaire.
 
angel

angel

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I mean its a nice project, but it's not "amazing" in it's tech, just very interesting and cool. The c64 was a beast, look at the sprite pushing of something like Armalyte..and @50fps too.

 
apocat

apocat

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angel said:
I mean its a nice project, but it's not "amazing" in it's tech, just very interesting and cool. The c64 was a beast, look at the sprite pushing of something like Armalyte..and @50fps too.

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Armalyte! That brings back memories! Maybe I should dig out my old C64 and give it a whirl. It was a while ago since it saw any action.
 
AuthenticM

AuthenticM

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Can you imagine if this game had been made for the CM back in the day? Just fucking imagine. The praise it would have gotten. The influence on the rest of the industry. Holy shit.
 
jett

jett

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AuthenticM said:
Can you imagine if this game had been made for the CM back in the day? Just fucking imagine. The praise it would have gotten. The influence on the rest of the industry. Holy shit.
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Games like Limbo wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Karateka, probably the original artsy/cinematic sidescroller.

 
Cueil

Cueil

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Oct 27, 2017
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used to play the crap out of Ghost Busters on my cousin's C64... RIP Richard :-(
 
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