defender Starblitz Rainbow PRGE Edition on C64

[Mr SQL]

Starblitz Rainbow is a Starpath SuperCharger game for the Atari 2600 with super smooth graphics and rainbows.

 

Gameplay

You defend the colorful Rainbow Cities of Mars from Comets and Meteors while fighting off Invaders that shoot homing pods at you.

Your Defender style ship is equipped with drone missiles you can control and loop around your ship.

 

The Rainbow Cities don't realize you're protecting them so launch surface to air missiles at you increasing the difficulty.

 

PRGE Edition

The PRGE 2016 Special Edition has extra sound effects and a playable PRGE cut scene ending with background music.

 

This version for the Commodore 64 includes an embedded Atari 2600 Emulator that runs the SuperCharger game.

Note this game is running unchanged in the emulator so much of the color transitions are currently lost for two reasons -

The C64 only gets the least significant Nyble (4 bits) for the 8 bit Atari color registers, often this is a zero resulting in black.  

The C64 only has 16 colors instead of 128 making it more like a SECAM Atari 2600.

 

SECAM color tuning

I'm planning to make some minor changes to tweak the colors but I wanted to share this version before making any changes as there are some interesting and unexpected effects from the emulator:

 

Your Ship sometimes turns invisible but you can still see the black outline over the City buildings and cutscene structures. 

Your Drone missiles are always in stealth mode making it difficult to use them in space.

 

Interesting optical illusion:

If you look at your ship the PETSCII graphics on the City appear.

If you look at the City the PETSCII changes to show an illusion of parallel lines and artifact colors too if you have NTSC and a real classic Television.

 

SID Sound Effects and music are interesting, turn up the volume to hear all of it.

 

Impossible City Mode

Set the BW/Color switch to BW (shift lock or holding left-shift on the C64) and Cities become crooked. 

 

What's missing:

Crystal clear video mode - I may add this to the emulator.

Besides all the color and Rainbow effects there is a small amount of judder that creates the optical illusions.

On the Atari 2600 the judder is only present in Impossible City Mode.

 

starblitzrainbow.prg  (C64 program) 

 

STARBLITZ_Rainbow_PRGE_V2.bin (Atari 2600 binary)

 

  Starpath SuperCharger audio WAV file