Stunt Car Racer
Image: MicroProse

Geoff Crammond's classic racing title Stunt Car Racer has just received an impressive new port for the Commodore Plus/4 (as spotted by the folks over at CommodoreBlog).

The acclaimed racer was originally released on various platforms such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, Commodore Amiga, Amstrad CPC, and DOS back in 1989. However, now thanks to a homebrew developer named Cobbpg, players will be able to experience a brand-new port, for the Commodore Plus/4 computer.

This version is based on the Commodore 64 release of the game and was announced earlier this month along with a demo on the Plus/4 World forums. Since then, the finished version has now been released, with Cobbpg describing it as somewhere halfway "between the Amiga and the C64 visually".

Cobbpg said the following about the port in his original announcement:

"After reverse engineering SCR to modify its physics so it can run at 50 FPS I started looking around and quickly realised that this game hadn't been ported to the Plus/4 yet. Since the TED is in many ways similar to the VIC-II, especially in the absence of sprites, I figured this might be an interesting challenge. And so it was!

"The biggest limitation was RAM space. The original game doesn't leave much of the C64's memory untouched, and the Plus/4 has less accessible RAM while needing an extra 1K for colour information. For the time being, my solution was to remove load/save functionality and the ability to change key bindings, so I'd be able to get a working game and have some breathing room to shuffle things around. At the moment I have a bit over 2K memory left, so I should be able to restore some of the missing bits.

"I really like the way the game looks with the rich TED palette, even if the multicolour mode limitations (i.e. only two unique colours per block available) were sometimes difficult to deal with."

You can download the port now from Plus/4 World, or check out a video of it in action below:

[source plus4world.powweb.com, via commodoreblog.uk]