[NEW GAME RELEASE] - Sokoban LE for Taito L System

[cmonkey]

Welcome to Sokoban LE!

This is the Taito L System port of the Spectrum version of Sokoban done by Spanish coding outfit Compiler Software in 2006. The original coding team open sourced the game so I had a look at the source to understand the basic game mechanic and then ported it to L System, adding a few bells and whistles along the way. Hence I named it Sokoban L Edition (or Sokoban LE for short).

What this game contains :-

All 99 levels of the original Spectrum game

Full end game sequence upon beating level 99 (which is pimped up from the original end game sequence)

9 graphical styles to choose from (8 from the original game and 1 new one designed by me)

10 awesome AY-3-8910 chip tunes to choose from (or silence if you prefer that!)

An attract mode which demos the first 45 moves of the first 8 levels of the game

A 200 move UNDO feature for when you totally mess a level up ;-)

A funky in-game menu which allows you to change music/tile set/exit to menu/restart level

Two secret hidden warps which, if found, will mean that you only need to actually beat 24 levels of the game to complete it

Password for completing each level (passwords are compatible with the Spectrum version of the game) so that you don't need to start from level 1 each time you play the game

What this game DOES NOT (nor ever will) contain :-

DLC of any kind

in-app-purchases of any kind

multiplayer capture-the-flag or deathmatch modes

There's an extensive readme in the each archive, explaining all the features of the game. I've made a version for Plotting boards, a version for Puzznic boards and a version for Play Girls boards. That should cover most L System boards out there. All versions have been tested extensively on both real hardware and in MAME.

Many thanks to ben76, Hurray Banana and Sokurah for being my beta testers during the development of this game.

Now go and play it and give me some feedback as to how it plays and start posting those level passwords up here. Oh, and see if you can find the 2 secret hidden warps.....

Running on a Plotting board

Running on a Play Girls board

https://www.ukvac.com/forum/data/uploads/1497/sokoban_le_plotting.zip

https://www.ukvac.com/forum/data/uploads/1497/sokoban_le_puzznic.zip

https://www.ukvac.com/forum/data/uploads/1497/sokoban_le_playgirls.zip

 

[Hurray Banana]

Glad I don't have to keep quiet anymore about this awesome effort Ade.

I urge everyone to download the roms and fire it up in a cabinet with mame or if you're lucky enough to own one of the boards Ade mentions burn some roms and play it the way it's meant to be played.

Well done to Ade for producing a fantastic port for a great little arcade board.

I applaud you efforts mate, this is a great piece of coding work, well polished.

 

[ben76]

Glad I don't have to keep quiet anymore about this awesome effort Ade.

I urge everyone to download the roms and fire it up in a cabinet with mame or if you're lucky enough to own one of the boards Ade mentions burn some roms and play it the way it's meant to be played.

Well done to Ade for producing a fantastic port for a great little arcade board.

I applaud you efforts mate, this is a great piece of coding work, well polished.

Can't add anything else except to add to the fact it's an amazing piece of work and download it now!!!!

If people have the pcb but can't burn the chips themselves then I maybe able to help a couple of people out but not got loads of chips.

Again I will say it's an amazing piece of work if I had any idea on how to manage it it wouldn't be as good as this

and play testing it has been great fun but as above tough to keep quiet lol

- Ben

 

[silverfox0786]

awesome both my taito L pcbs will be happy

 

[Alpha1]

Absolutely fantastic work!!!

 

[Robert]

2 excellent works in one day.

 

[smarty]

Really great work Ade, it's very impressive what you've done. Credit is due for your skills... a complete spectrum game running on an Arcade PCB, that's mental!

Seeing this really make me want to dabble in the software side of things, but I don't think I've got a fast enough brain to compute it all...

 

[minwah]

This is great!

I especially like the music and ability to select tunes and graphic sets.

Not got very far but thought I'd get started with a few level codes:

Level 2 = CAGFBC
Level 3 = DAGFCC
Level 4 = EABFGC

Playing this in Mame (v0.99) by the way.

Awesome stuff, well done

 

[cmonkey]

Glad you like it sir!

I'm also really happy to see people posting level passwords.

Which is your favourite tune and graphical style?

 

[Hurray Banana]

This is great!

I especially like the music and ability to select tunes and graphic sets.

Not got very far but thought I'd get started with a few level codes:

Level 2 = CAGFBC
Level 3 = DAGFCC
Level 4 = EABFGC

Playing this in Mame (v0.99) by the way.

Awesome stuff, well done

That level took me ages to work out I am so impatient at these types of games

 

[minwah]

Which is your favourite tune and graphical style?

I have mainly been playing with Alone Coder, Karboflex so far. Gotta love Popcorn also

. I will give the other tunes a go as I play more though...

I've been using 'The Tower' graphics set. I found that one or two of the graphics sets are initially slightly harder to identify the items that you need to slide around when there is a lot of stuff on the screen.

 

[cmonkey]

I think Alone Coder's track is absolutely awesome, really shows what you can do with the humble AY-3-8910 if you're a chip tune coding God like he is.

Don't forget that you can also easily insert your own music track into the binary to overwrite the ORIGINAL tune. All the details are in the readme.

I agree that some of the graphical styles are a little bit harder than others to see what should be pushed to where.

 

[minwah]

I think Alone Coder's track is absolutely awesome, really shows what you can do with the humble AY-3-8910 if you're a chip tune coding God like he is.

Don't forget that you can also easily insert your own music track into the binary to overwrite the ORIGINAL tune. All the details are in the readme.

That's a nice touch. There are some great tunes in Vectrex homebrews but I'm not sure they can be easily extracted into a usable format.

 

[cmonkey]

That really depends on whether the Vectrex homebrew coders wrote their own audio engine(s) which use proprietary tune format(s) or whether they re-used an existing audio engine (and one which used a well established tune format) and tweaked it a little for Vectrex, as I did with the audio engine for this game on L System.

If it's the latter then there's a good chance that Vortex Tracker II may be able to import the tune(s) and if it can then you can export them as PT3 format, for inserting into the Sokoban binary.

Have a look in the Vectrex homebrews with a hex editor, tune data is usually quite easy to find.

 

[phillv85]

Will any of the versions run on a Champion Wrestler board? Looking at the specs Playgirls, Puzznic and Plotter all use 1 Z80 @ 3.3mhz, whereas Champion Wrestler uses 2 Z80's @ 3.3mhz.

 

[cmonkey]

Will any of the versions run on a Champion Wrestler board? Looking at the specs Playgirls, Puzznic and Plotter all use 1 Z80 @ 3.3mhz, whereas Champion Wrestler uses 2 Z80's @ 3.3mhz.

'fraid not. I do own a Champion Wrestler board so I could have used that board as a potential target board but I figured I was already maintaining two versions of the code (Plotting & Puzznic uses same code, Play Girls differs slightly) and two was enough. Time to stump up for a Plotting/Puzznic/Play Girls board....

 

[guddler]

Sooo....

I just realised this is a horizontal game. Don't shout at me, but would it be completely out of the question to have a menu option that switches between horizontal and vertical?

Or are you done with the game now anyway and already working away on the next great thing

 

[cmonkey]

I'm all done with it and on to the next great thing.

The game wouldn't work in vertical configuration as it's a port of a Spectrum game and Spectrum's were generally used with the TV in a horizontal configuration! The resolution of L System is 320x224 which would make it 224 pix wide in vertical config, but some of the levels for the game need the full 256 pix width of the original Spectrum, so those levels will only work in horizontal config.

 

[guddler]

Oh well, never mind - will just have to not be lazy and rotate me monitor

Generally speaking my cab is always vertical. Dunno why but very few of the games I play seem to be horizontal.

 

[cmonkey]

Just turn your head 90 degrees, it'll be quicker and easier than rotating your monitor