Introduction
Welcome to my site! This site is meant to provide you freeware and commercial Boulderdash clones and everything that has to do with these games, such as extra levels, music, etc. The game concept of Boulder Dash is very old and that's why you can't play those old games (Boulder Dash itself, Emerald Mine, Repton, Supaplex etc.) anymore. Fortunately, many clones have been made by fans. Some of them are very good (and may be even better than the original!). All PC clones, including good as well as bad games, can be found on this website. If you are looking for freeware Windows clones, just click on 'Freeware Clones' in the menu to the left and click on 'Windows' on the next page. Simple, isn't it?
Although some clones are much better than the original, it might be that you want that good old Boulder Dash back. With its poor graphics and sounds. Just for that nostalgic feeling! In that case, download Boulder Dash v1.0. Or download Miksoft's Boulder Rush, a good working Boulder Dash clone for Windows with the original levels, graphics, sounds and music. Just have a look among all those games on this website and you'll find one!
I greatly support all new contributions, such as new levels, bug reports, level solutions, music and everything concerning the games listed on this website. If you have contributions, but also if you have comments or questions about this site, or about Boulderdash games in general, feel free to contact me! You can find my e-mailaddress in the menu to the left of the page.
Thanks to Alan Bond for giving me the permission to use his graphics as background for this page. The background comes from the levelset 'BD2K3', which was designed for Rocks 'n' Diamonds, one of the clones you can find on this website. Also, many thanks to Francesco and Tomi Belan (they are both members of the Rocks 'n' Diamonds forum)! Especially Francesco has helped me a lot to redesign this whole website. Now it uses a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file which contains the layout rules for the site. Visit Francesco's own site here. Thank you, Francesco!
Be sure you visit this site regularly, because there can always be updates with new levels to beat (or even new games!), new graphics sets, new music for a game or whatever!
News
About
Boulderdash games are based on the game Boulder Dash, which was published in 1984 by First Star Software. Many sequels and clones followed and the game became very popular.
But what is Boulderdash? Well, it's a game that combines action with logic. You guide a player ('Rockford' in the classic Boulder Dash) by digging through caves to collect a number of gems (diamonds). After finishing this job, you end the level through the exit, which is opened after you have collected enough gems. But collecting gems is not always that simple! Often there are many stones (boulders) that you can drop on enemies, such as butterflies and fireflies in the original Boulder Dash, or such as bugs in Emerald Mine to eliminate them, but the stones can also smash you if they fall on your head! There are enemies in the game, such as fireflies, who can kill you when you touch them by crossing their path. But are also enemies who change into gems when you kill them! Magic walls can change stones into gems when they fall through them. Or you can surround growing amoebas with rocks so they change into gems! Boulderdash games combine logic with action and are fun for the whole family!
History
History of Boulder Dash
The initially published game (1984) could be played on the Atari 400/800, IBM PC, and PC Junior. Boulder Dash was licensed for the first time to Micro Fun, which published the game on the Commodore 64, Apple II and Colecovision and Boulder Dash II on the Amiga. MicroFun first published Boulderdash but did not pay its payments, so the game fell into the hands of First Star Software, that published the Apple II version and took over the licence for the Commodore version. Mirrorsoft (Amstrad CPC), Beyond (BBC Micro, Electron and Spectrum), Data East (arcade) and Comptique (Fujitsu, MSX, and NEC) also got a licence in 1984.
First Star Software started to publish sequels to the original Boulder Dash. They developed Boulder Dash II: Rockford's Revenge for Commodore 64/128, IBM PC, Apple 8-bit and Atari 8-bit platforms. Electronic Arts published these versions and released Boulder Dash I and II as Super Boulder Dash in 1986. The game was licensed by Beyond (Amstrad CPC) and Zoomsoft (MSX and Spectrum, with the subtitle Rockford's Riot).
After that, a Swedish company called American Action AB developed and
published
Professional Boulder Dash III for Commodore 64,
Atari 8-bit,
Spectrum, and Amstrad CPC in 1996. This game was very similar to
Boulder Dash II
and had a new set of levels and different graphics (e.g. Rockford in a
spacesuit!).
Then came the Boulder Dash Contruction Kit™
which was
the first game in the Boulder Dash serie which came with a level
editor. First
Star Software developed versions of this game for the Amiga, Apple
8-bit, Atari
8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64/128 and IBM PC (MS-DOS). The Boulder Dash
Contruction Kit was published by Epyx in 1986 (UK) and 1987 (USA) and
to
Zoomsoft. Between 1986 and 1987, Zoomsoft released European versions
for the
Spectrum and Amstrad CPC.
Rockford™, a new sequel in the Boulder
Dash serie, was developed by
First Star Software and released in 1988 by Mastertronic. This version
could be
played on the Amiga, Amstrad, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64/128,
IBM PC
(MS-DOS), and Spectrum and was published worldwide. It was set in
various
different worlds with themed graphics.
In 1990, there came new versions of
Boulder Dash, which could be played on the NES (in North America) and
Game Boy
(in North America and Japan). Nintendo distributed them in Europe. Data
East
published the NES version in Japan. Also in 1990, Data East developed
and
distributed the fourth arcade version of Boulder Dash.
Then there came
ten quiet years with only some budget re-releases. Finally, in 2000,
First Star
Software licensed Boulder Dash to Kemco (Kotobuki Systems Co.) for
consoles,
cell phones, PDAs, and hand-held systems. At the end of 2001, a version
for
java-enabled cell phones was released in Japan. After that, there came
Boulder
Dash EX for Game Boy Advance in 2001 and Boulder
Dash-M.E. for Mophun in 2002.
The first tool producer was First Star Software, which released the famous Boulder Dash Construction Kit in 1986. For the first time it was now possible to make your own caves and partially because of this level creator became more and more popular in the following years. The players could design new caves in the way they wanted and that was a great thing for many of them. This tool was soon superseded by Lord Diego's Effect Construction Kit (1987-1988). With this extended Boulder Dash Construction Kit it was possible to add some special effects to your caves (like fireflies exploding into nine boulders). And in contrast with the Boulder Dash Construction Kit, this tool enabled you to use slime and amoebas in the same cave and to put as many Rockfords and exits in the caves as you wanted!
Another sort of Boulder Dash tool was the Enemie Designer by No One in 1987. ('Enemie' is wrongly spelled. It should be 'Enemy'.) With this great program the fans could express all their creativity in designing alternative graphics sets for their cave collections. And the Charset Editor - also created by No One in 1987 - made it possible to design other fonts for Boulder Dash.
In the 90's (mainly) Marek Roth (LogicDeLuxe) created his famous Deluxe Packer. No One and Prof. Knibble had already started making the so-called cave packers and Marek continued this. Cave packers are used to bundle loose caves to one self-running game, as you could only create loose levels with the Boulder Dash Construction Kit. However, the Deluxe Packer offered more besides packing your levels together to one game: including graphics sets, music, a title screen and an intro message in your own Boulderdash game!
The newest tool was created after the Boulder Dash period. It appeared when many people had forgotten Boulder Dash and played games with better graphics. But there were still a number of fans active! It was in November 2002 when Marek Roth (LogicDeLuxe) released a beta version of the Crazy Light Construction Kit (version 3.0). This very comprehensive program did not bundle caves, but tools together! It included all the things you needed to create a splendid new Boulderdash game. Besides the possibilities to create cave packs instead of loose levels and to make title and intro screens, it had many extra features, such as: the possibility to replace the titanium border wall of a cave with any other element (e.g. 'empty space' which makes all the moving items appear at the other side when they run out of the cave), many special effects to add (in the spirit of the 'Enemie Designer' by No One), new elements (clocks, keys, bombs, Mrs. Rockfords, chasing boulders, biters, acid, bubbles, doors and some more), more cave properties to adjust (setting the time limit for a cave higher than 255 seconds, setting the maximum amoeba size (it was always only possible to set this to 200 units) and a better editor to create a very cool title screen, with many more possibilities than before, in the Deluxe Packer.
The development of the Crazy Light Construction Kit has stopped for a while since 2002, but Marek Roth took up the work again! In the meantime it is possible to create self-running games with it!
For those who are a bit more interested in the technical history around Boulder Dash, here follows some information which could be of use for you.
The first edition of Boulder Dash (1984) worked with the so-called BD1 Engine, featuring the elements Empty, Dirt, Brick Wall, Magic Wall, Titan Wall, Boulder, Diamond, Amoeba, Firefly, Butterfly and Exit. The size of the complete game was about 16 KB when unpacked.
Boulder Dash II (1985) appeared with the BD2 Engine. Known errors were corrected and two new elements were added: slime and slippery walls. In contrast with the BD1 Engine, the Amoeba does not stop when a Boulder is thrown into the Magic Wall and this is also coherent with the fact that the peculiar Magic Wall timing is dispensed with.
The third part of the series was published in 1986. It remains obscure why this had the BD1 Engine again. Besides the uglier graphics, there were also many errors in it, which made it impossible to solve the levels four and five. Many objects have wrongly made graphics and the Monoliths (the name for 'Amoebas' in this game) are not animated in most levels.
First Star Software still exists! That's rather unique, because most companies who started in the very past have already stopped. There are still new boulderdash games being developed! You should visit the site of First Star Software.
History of Emerald Mine
Before starting the story, I would like to mention that most of this information comes from the Emerald Mine Club Holland homepage. Since this was almost the only source to offer such an extensive overview of the Emerald Mine history, nearly all information below comes from this website. I would like to thank them, and Ruppelware in particular, who have been working on Emerald Mine stuff behind the scenes for years in part. By mentioning this, I would also like to apologise for not mentioning clearly enough all their efforts and the source of this information.
Emerald Mine is one of the most succesful clones of Boulder Dash. It was developed by Kingsoft and version 1 was published for the Amiga in 1987. It featured a level numbering like aa0, aa1, ..., ab0, ab1, ..., ak1 and while playing, the time, score and emerald values were displayed in a tiny window in the top-lefthand corner.
Emerald Mine offered many more features than the original Boulder Dash did. Two obvious new elements were:
- The YamYam, which had a programmable content of items which come out of him when you kill him by dropping a stone on his head or by exploding him.
- The Alien, which is always coming towards you (and is deadly of course!).
Another new feature was the team mode instead of single player mode.
The team mode function worked only in every fourth level in a level
collection. So you could play level 0, 4, 8, 12, 16 and so on in team
mode.
With the release of Emerald Mine v1.0, a level editor was released by
Headcrash. You could create your own caves with it and change the
graphics of the elements. For example, you could change the beetle into
a butterfly.
Graphics editing was done with a shareware program called SIMPLEBOB
and was (just like the editor) very time consuming since you had to
draw every image pixel-for-pixel and you had to do every animation as
well. So you sometimes drew one character 20 times or more in different
animation
cycles.
Then, around 1989, KingSoft released V2.0 which only differed in layout from V1.0. The score was now displayed on the bottom of the screen and the levels were numbered 0-101. This version became very popular since it looked much nicer and gave a better overview of your current game status.
However, for version 2.0 was no editor available. So people created levels with version 1.0 and then renamed the levels to V2.0 standards. This had one major drawback: the available time in V2.0 was different from V1.0! So when you had tested the cave in V1.0 and then renamed it, you would only have 50 percent of the time you thought you had.
Release V3.0 was just another 'simple' improvement (from the perspective of KingSoft), since the levels were encrypted and crunched, meaning you could only play KingSoft released games with it. But KingSoft failed to bring out any successive games, so everybody kept on playing with the V2.0 version for which there were already over 50 games released by private builders (through the E.M.C. (Emerald Mine Club) of course). No other features were added to the game. The V3.0 editor that was released by KingSoft offered only one feature the Headcrash editor didn't offer: play testing directly from the editor!
A negative side of this new release was that all own designed graphics were no longer supported. Furthermore, at about the same time the E.M.C. released a much better V2.0 editor which made cave creation much easier.
The E.M.C. found two development groups (No One Incorporated and Ruppelware International Software) which were developing an all new V2.0 level editor and other tools. One of the features of that first release was a fill function, which was soon followed by several other special drawing functions.
Version 1.0 of the NOI-RIS editor was released in 1990 and immediately found an eager user group within the E.M.C. Both groups, now working as a team, released quite a few versions of that editor, drastically improving it's quality all the time.
By the release of V4.0 they moved away from the C-language and gained a huge speed increase of up to 700% by rewriting all programs in Assembler.
In 1993 they wrote some bug-fixes for the KingSoft V2.0 game and with a tool called EMEFIX created a 'better' game. The E.M.C., which liked the changes very much, persuaded them to develop an all new version of the Emerald Mine game. It should basically support all functions of the V2.0 KingSoft release, but should take care of all the bugs in the KingSoft game and allow for future enhancements.
After almost a full year of intensive programming, there it was: Emerald Mine Player V5.0 by NOI and RIS. Why V5.0? Simple, by that time the Emerald Mine editor was passed release V4.0 and they wanted to align the Player and Editor versions to keep things simple for the users.
Suddenly, builders could put everything into the YamYams
(before that only 21 characters were possible), while the playing
abilities stayed the same. So it had the same feel to it as the
previous versions had.
This was very important because by that time a lot of mines
existed and the E.M.C. had insisted on
compatibility with older mines.
Two of the best features were:
- Play testing from the editor, now you could immediately test a cave from the editor!
- The Quit function in the player, before this time to stop the game you had to reset your Amiga. So during the development of a mine you could easily reset your Amiga 400-500 times for testing and adjustments.
Several new characters were introduced:
- Balloon: This hung in the cave, but started moving as soon as the player pushed a switch in any of the 4 directions.
- Sliding Wall: These were items from the old Boulder Dash game, which could magically shut behind you.
- New decor pieces to brighten up the game.
Emerald Mine player V5.0 was released together with an all new V5.0 of the Emerald Mine editor as well, which gave the builders optimum use of all the features of the new player.
After this 'tour de force' the programmers took some time off to play some Emerald Mines and build new mines to show the possibilities of the new game.
But, as is always the case, fate came by and double-crossed them. Commodore announced the AGA machine and like any programmer they couldn't wait to get their hands on it to use the new possibilities. They started with an Amiga version of Dr. Creep (another story altogether) in a 256 color full animation game. One of them then said: "Tssk, I could create an AGA version of Emerald Mine in one evening."
This was very unwise of him, since the others took the challenge and dared him to prove it (which he did). And all of a sudden Dr. Creep was forgotten, new graphics were created (the old game had only 16 colours). To create the new graphics they had to draw all of them anew, so they made some new tools to allow builders to use any paint program of their choice to draw and create IFF pictures, which would then be converted to the graphics needed by Emerald Mine. To release just an AGA version of V5.0 seemed a bit meager, and would leave out the E.M.C. members not wealthy enough to buy an AGA machine.
So starting from Emerald Mine V6.0 there are two versions! AGA & ECS. A lot of new ideas had surfaced by then to enhance the game even further.
This silly notion of KingSoft to just allow special Teamwork
caves every
4th time was removed. The naming standard for caves and highscores was
adapted
to:
- CAVE/00S till 80S for Single mode playing
(HIGH/00S - 80S)
- CAVE/00T till 80T for Teamwork mode (HIGH/00T -
80T)
New characters were thought out (this took longer than programming them):
- Android: This little bugger can clone selectable items within a cave as indicated by the builder. Furthermore he can move along diagonal lines. Until then everything moved at right angles, much like a castle in Chess. This fellow moves like a queen.
- Magic Ball: Operated by a handle (start/stop) and it releases builder selected characters into the playfield.
- 8 doors and 8 keys (instead of 4).
- Spectacles and Magnifying Glass to make invisible things visible.
- Initial wind directions. (Now the Balloon can be in motion when you start a cave.
- Scoring above the up to then limit of 999.
- NTSC support.
By that time, the E.M.C. asked about the old Boulder Dash version of the game. The E.M.C. members were by this time so used to the look and feeling of Emerald Mine that they wanted to play the Boulder Dash levels with the new V6.0 player.
So, the programmers went back to the drawing board and developed Emerald Dash. (However, be aware that there are multiple versions of this player available, since the original Boulder Dash changed over the years to enable and disable certain game features. So only play Emerald Dash with the player designed for it (if you have got an old computer!).
Emerald Dash offers the fun and recognition of 'old' Boulder Dash levels, with the all new enhanced Emerald Mine look and feeling. Currently, there have over 30 disks of Emerald Dash caves been released.
History of Supaplex
Supaplex is one of the best and most original Boulderdash clones ever made. The game was originally designed for the Amiga, but later there appeared versions for PC, Atari ST and Apple Macintosh (which was called 'Infotron' and which was an unofficial version). For the Apple Macintosh version, go to Dave Pecks website or download it from the Classic Supaplex page (which will appear within a short time on this website).
Somewhere in, or before 1991 a small group of students (the authors) were in need of a project to program. They adored Boulder Dash on the Commodore 64 but they could not play it anymore. They decided to create a Boulderdash clone. After a lot of hard work, their game (then called 'Think') was completed. The name 'Think' was apparently already in use in another game somewhere, so to avoid legal problems they changed the name to 'Supaplex'.
This first Supaplex version had been designed for the Amiga by Philip Jespersen (download a backup (which is not totally complete) of his old website here) (and Michael Stopp) and they decided to give it a try to ask whether the game could be puslished by an official company - with success. They sold it to Digital Integration Ltd. (of which the URL was http://www.digint.co.uk), which charged Robin Heydon with the task to make a PC version of Supaplex. After this, Dave Peck programmed an own version for Apple Macintosh at high school, but he was not connected with Digital Integration.
When Supaplex was released, it was accompanied by a special contest (and a demo with only a few levels was sent to a lot of magazines). At that time the game was still a commercial game and it was sold in the shops. Nowadays, there is newer and improved version, called the 'SpeedFix' version, which is free, even though Supaplex is still licensed. For that reason, it is better to refer to the game as 'abandonware' instead of 'freeware' or 'commercial'. There is some history concerning the free release and the development of the actual SpeedFix version and of Supaplex. Maarten Egmond has done his best to get a more active Supaplex community, which finally resulted in his Supaplex Homepage. Herman Perk got into contact with him and created the SpeedFix version. On his website, Maarten Egmond tells his story concerning his Supaplex activities. You can also read it below. (Please note that it has been modified a little here and there.) I have put some historial facts between.
"I discovered Supaplex in a small game review in a magazine in November 1992. It said Supaplex was an 'oldie', re-released in the low-budget market. It was recommended if you liked thinking games (as I did). They gave it good ratings (on a scale from 1 (awful) to 10 (best)):
I decided that the screen and sound are not the most important aspects of a thinking game, and the documentation is something nobody cares about. However, the important two ratings (playability/price) were very high. It was priced at only ƒ 29,95 (Dutch Guilders) (EURO 13.60) - affordable for little me, so I decided to buy it. I still have the original box at home!
I played the game, and it was a very good game. I just wasn't very patient at that time, and after trying a level three times I would give up if I hadn't finished the level yet. I tried to find a way to cheat (which was quite easy) after I got completely stuck around level twenty somewhere, and I looked at the levels I couldn't reach yet. Unfortunately, the higher levels were even harder, so the game ended up in the cupboard soon.
At that time I was also programming as a hobby. I didn't have any idea of what to program. After thinking about it for a while, I tried to find out how Supaplex stored its levels. If it was easy, I could make a level editor (called 'SPEdit'). Indeed, the levels were encoded pretty easily (at least the basic information) and I started working on the level editor.
After a while, the level editor seemed 'finished'. (It didn't even support gravity, since my limited playing of Supaplex never got me in a situtation where gravity was present!) I made some new levels, and that was about it for then. I put the editor in the cupboard, and got on to new adventures.
When I got on the Internet a few years later (around 1994), I decided to put the level editor up there. I didn't know anyone who knew Supaplex, but it didn't cost me anything to put up the editor for download, so why not?
I also found out about the famous Hilde's Supaplex page (which has disappeared from the web, but can still be accessed here) - really the first web page ever about Supaplex! It was my first encounter with a human being outside my own house that knew Supaplex. While I worked some more on my level editor, I got to know more people enjoying Supaplex, and I decided it would be a good idea to share my home-made levels with other people, and maybe they would also share their levels. For this purpose, I created a page where all new Supaplex levels that were sent to me would be available for download.
By the time my Supaplex pages were online for the first time, people started asking me questions about the LEGAL status of Supaplex. I was under the impression that the company was broke. Since the game was property of Digital Integration, there was a problem for people who wanted to get the game LEGALLY, since it could no longer be purchased anywhere (except a few second hand copies maybe), and copying would be illegal."
At about this time, Herman Perk joined and about then his first SpeedFix version was ready and sent to Maarten Egmond plus a few levels which are now included in the Supaplex 01 level collection (see Classic Supaplex page, which will appear soon). He had contacted Philip Jespersen and Robin Heydon, two of the authors of Supaplex, to ask for help with the SpeedFix and to send them the result. (Maarten Egmond might also have contacted Philip Jespersen.) Philip totally agreed with giving the game away to the public for free. Robin told Herman Perk that the original PC code had gone lost and he had nothing anymore. From Philip he got the original Amiga code, which was useless for him, however.
About this Maarten Egmond writes at a further place (which is chronologically wrong and for that reason quoted below):
"I got to know Herman Perk, who told me that Supaplex was actually running too fast! It seemed that on a slow computer, Supaplex would run fine, but on a fast computer (anything faster than about 16 MHz 386) it would run at twice the speed. After a lot of debugging, and disassembing Supaplex completely for which he had to read through hardly readable assembler code, he found the problem, and created the first SpeedFix. As with any program, there were improvements, and soon version four was to be released, the first SpeedFix to be "officially distributed as 'SUPAPLEX.EXE substitute'."
The improved extensions of the SpeedFix were partially made because Maarten Egmond wanted to see them, but they had only to do with having everything a bit more organised and nothing with the game itself.
Maarten Egmond continues:
"To find a good answer to the important question, I went to look for the authors of Supaplex, and asked them about it. They said that it would be ok if I just gave away the game for free, and that they enjoyed seeing the game still "alive". So that's what I did. I put up the game on my webpage, free for downloading."
Herman Perk found on the Internet (or eventually at CompuServe, which was a computer time-sharing company at the time, by which users were enabled to dial in to make use of interactive services, such as e-mail) a Dutch-language level editor, which he sent to Maarten. This was at the same time as when he and Maarten heard about each other for the first time.
Among the first levels on Maarten's site (the set 'Supaplex 01') there were some levels that were included with the Dutch editor. Two of these levels took a long time to record demo solutions for: the levels 'Romancing the Stones' and 'Electron Inside'. Maarten wanted to throw them away, as he thought that they were unsolvable. Herman Perk prohibited this by solving 'Electron Inside' and by making a mini level of the problematic detail in 'Romancing the Stones', which was later solved by Alexey Boreisho from Russia.
This lead to the following, with which Maarten Egmond continues:
"After some time, I found out that there was another level editor (at present I know of lots of level editors.) To my astonishment, the level editor was also made by a Dutch guy, who even lived in the same village as I do (with less than 30,000 people!) This was an unbelievable coincidence, considering my belief that there were only a few dozen Supaplex fans in the world."
Maarten and Herman had talked about releasing Supaplex freely and Herman had suggested that Maarten should especially contact Digital Integration Ltd. (the company which released Supaplex, which does not have a homepage anymore) if he wanted to publish Supaplex online on his website.
Maarten Egmond continues:
"In the mean time, I found out that Digital Integration was, in fact, still alive and kicking, so I immediately asked them about the distribution of Supaplex. Luckily (for all Supaplex fans) they agreed to let me continue to give away the game for free."
Now Supaplex could be downloaded for free from Maarten Egmond's site.
He concludes with:
"Since those old days, my pages have been growing steadily over the years. New levels have been sent to me regularly, and there are now already over six hundred new levels (compared to the 111 original ones)! I have added related software, background information, explanations, frequently asked questions, and more. There are more Supaplex fans than I would have ever imagined when I first started on the level editor."
Herman Perk has contributed a few Supaplex level collections. He has decoded the levels from the (unofficial) Apple Macintosh version of Supaplex (called 'Infotron') into the levelset 'Supaplex 99' (which can be downloaded from the Classic Supaplex page). However, it was impossible to play all these levels, as they the had different sizes. Some levels were too big, as Supaplex could not load levels that were bigger than a certain size. For that reason, Herman has included the playable levels of the 'Supaplex 99' levelset in the level collection 'Supaplex 01' and he put the levels with a different size in the set 'The Infotron Levels', which can only be played in MegaPlex (see below). By the way, Paulo Matoso has modified MegaPlex, which has caused a few problems, however. The biggest level from "The Infotron Levels' cannot be loaded anymore now, but you can play it in the older version of MegaPlex, which can be downloaded from the Classic Supaplex page.
Nowadays you can play them with MegaPlex (see below for more information). Another level collection by Herman is 'Supaplex 98', which consists of the original Boulder Dash levels. They were converted from the game 'Boulderoid v1.5'. The set 'Supaplex 97' are levels converted from the game 'Mr. Matt'. The 'Boulderoid v1.5' and 'Mr. Matt' files were protected with a password, but Herman managed to hack them. The files from 'Infotron' for the Apple Macintosh (which are included in 'Supaplex 99' as described above) were compressed in Apple Macintosh style and they were also RLL (Run Length Limited) compressed. For the right identification of different objects (Murphy, zonk, wall, etc.) he got some help from Dave Peck. Dave also gave him some information about the most important differences between 'Infotron' and 'Supaplex', which can be read in the text file that is included in the ZIP file of SupaShow (which can be downloaded from the Classic Supaplex page).
Some of those sets from other games were protected with a password, but Herman managed to hack them. He also had some problems with a file for Apple Macintosh, which contained an RLL compression. Herman had no access to an Apple Macintosh and for that reason he did not know how things were coded. The only thing he had was a screendump of a level, from which he knew most of things. For the last details and extra information about the differences between Supaplex and Infotron he got help of Dave Peck.
In modern times the Supaplex concept has been continued by MegaPlex. Some see it as a Supaplex clone, others as a Supaplex conversion. It is a windowed variant on Supaplex with exactly the same behaviour, in-game graphics and sounds. MegaPlex was written in Visual Basic and consists of the playing-part of Supaplex (so the main menu and the other screens are left out). Frank Schindler, its author, has literally copied Herman Perk's disassembly code from the SpeedFix to MegaPlex by copying each code line (line by line!) and he expanded the game to be able to play bigger-sized levels (which made it possible to play the levels from the 'Supaplex 99' collection) and he included a level editor. Unfortunately, MegaPlex does not have built in the highscore system of Supaplex.
The unofficial sequel to Supaplex is Igor - The Time Machine by Elmer Productions (or rather: Maarten Egmond). Its official name was 'Supaplex 2' but for legal reasons (Digital Integration Ltd. did not give permission to use this name) this name was dismissed. Igor differs quite a lot from Supaplex and can better be regarded as a separate Supaplex clone. You can find it on the Commercial Windows Clones page.
Unfortunately, Maarten Egmond's Supaplex Homepage is not updated anymore since 29 June 2004. The complete content of it plus more recent updates can be found on the Classic Supaplex page of this site. Maarten predicts on his website that there will always come new fans, as long as the game is playable on one or more computers. I hope so and I would like to continue this with my special Supaplex page!
Further in the future, there might appear three-dimensional Supaplex games, which already seems to be speculated. The disadvantage of this is that you will not get a good overview by this and most fans will probably stick to the good, old, simple Supaplex. However, Maarten Egmond himself is already dreaming of Virtual Reality Supaplex games, in which you can run yourself through the playfield, being haunted by angry Snik Snaks. I doubt whether this will ever become reality, but it would be fun anyway!
At the present, we must cut our coat according to our cloth. At this moment, there is still a dedicated community of Supaplexers around. If you want to know more about Supaplex, go the the special Supaplex page of my site (which will appear soon). Or you could go and visit Maarten Egmond's Supaplex Homepage (which is unfortunately not being updated anymore, but it is really worth a look).
If the game
is too old for your
computer and if you do not manage to get it work with other methods,
play
it in Rocks 'n' Diamonds, a
great Boulderdash clone with also Supaplex
in it. Or have a look among the other clones on this website. There are
some other Supaplex clones around.