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C64 BD level format

Posted: Mon Jun 21, 2004 8:28 am
by Alan
The map format is very weird,

This is a shame, because I have 1000's of original BD caves.... mayby more than EM! But apparently BD,BD2,BD3 and BD-Construction Kit all use different map formats!
Unlike R&D maps where each tile is an element, BD's has things like box drawing functions...

Amazingly, somebody has decoded it:

BD level format

and..

more level format stuff

Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2004 2:48 am
by Yoshi348
That second link seems the more informative one... also, when I googled for Boulderdash, the original was the top link. ^_^ (After Martijn's MP3's and Alan's old graphics, I was looking for the sounds to wrap it up. I like the 5th link... a clone of Dig Dug?) I recognize Peter Broadribb as one of the 1995-2000 contributor sets. Heck, he's even got a C program for dumping the original BD file format as human readable text.

*is typing this as I'm reading*
The file format is almost like instructions for making it in an editor... it's even got a equivalent of RnD's dice button.

Hmm... there's an incompatability, "extra" diamonds (I assume over the limit you need) are worth different (usually more) points that regular ones.

Wow, there's a lot of stuff to dig through here. There's some much information I'm starting to get scared...

Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2004 8:12 am
by Alan
It is a lot of info!

Had a good look at some memory dumps of various BD games... And I'd say about 75% of them are BD-Construction kit format!
This format is not documented very well, but it looks like it doesn't use any shape drawing functions, just nibbles..... this is good!

I have about 520 Boulderdash games, each with about 16 caves (some have much more). It would be nice to have this part of History in R&D.

Fortunately I had made some caves using BDCK back in the old days... so If I converted these first, I'd know if it worked right.

As for tying everything up, yep that's what I was going to do.. original graphics,sounds,music and 8000+ caves :wink:

Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2004 4:03 pm
by Alan
OK, just wrote this little program that can display original BD maps from C64 memory dumps. I'll do the R&D export later.

You can scan through the memory looking for maps if they are not in the default location, some custom hacked BD games might do this.
The 3 games supplied all work out of the box :wink:
Load a c64 dump, and press "add" to see all the caves in a game...

Holger, have you written something like this or did you get the original BD levels from another source?

ConKit (Win)

*edit*

oops, dead link :?

Posted: Thu Jan 18, 2007 8:57 pm
by HerzAusGold
I'm about writing a loader for the C64 BD ConstKit Format.
If it's ready it's only a small step for a ATARI loader.
A test prog with converts the levels to a text file is still ready.

Special thanks to Guido who send me some assembler dump, which I can figure out the exact format very well.

Posted: Sat Nov 17, 2007 2:44 pm
by HerzAusGold
It's now ready. BD64 and ATARI (Nibble format) native loader.
Look here:

viewtopic.php?t=957

Have fun!