The 1984 game of Tetris has been mentioned many times on Indie Retro News, with new versions of the game being re-released on the Amstrad CPC, C16, Plus/4 and ZX Spectrum. Well here’s another version of the game that is sure to be enjoyed by many that still love this game even today, as JOTD is developing Tetris for the Commodore 1200 as a port from the 1988 Arcade game by Atari Games. To coincide with this news, not only can you play a very early Alpha demo that’s missing sound, but Saberman has provided a video of this early development.
Here’s the latest from JOTD. “I consider Tetris Arcade version by Atari the best Tetris version around. It’s colored and the music is great. The game used a 6502 CPU and not a Z80. I wrote a converting source tool for 6502 to 68000 as well. Not a lot of reverse-engineering has been done on that one by anyone (including me) but with so little RE I could make the game start & display the first screens. Thanks to MAME I could workaround the nasty protection (constant bank switching caused by “slapstic” chip) and unlike my other ports, the project is more a fast emulator than a re-coding. It requires AGA because the original game has 16 banks of 16 colors and a 256 color palette which is – added – dynamic. So ECS port would be quite tricky without rewriting the whole game. ATM it produces a 1:1 graphical arcade port. Sound will be added later”.
