Great game, had alot fun to play it today. One strange thing i had while playing today, not sure if there is a little bug or whether if I really was mistaken in the course of the game (could also be possible).
The following happened. I played and had only one ship left, then i made it to the 20.000 and there the player gets the first extra-ship, right. Then i thought - okay, now i have two ships left again and i can have one of my ships captured by the enemies and then retrieve it and have double the shooting power. But in the moment, when i was captured, the Game Over message occurred, as if the game hadn't properly registered, that i had just been given an extra life some seconds before.
Have you ever had a situation like this in the course of a game?
I had the opposite - twice in one game I was showing 0 ships in reserve, got killed, and actually still had another life. (The number of ships was correct, it was the display that was wrong.) Haven't been able to reproduce it, though - I thought it might be if your Challenging Stage bonus took you through the extra-life threshold, but it isn't that.
Great port of Galaga, the best one, but the scoring for killing enemies in initial entry waves is not fixed. If you kill enemies in initial entry waves, you get 50,80,150 pts. instead of 100, 160, 400 pts.
Wow, just wow! This plays super smooth. Back in the day the C64 magazines would have renamed you as "conversion god". =D First playtest yielded a score of 56920. I will always be bad at this game. XD But I love it. Thanks for doing this!
Haha, to be fair there's been some amazing ports for the CPC lately and it's certainly a machine I was always attracted to with those coloured keys and built-in tape deck.
A two-player simultan mode (like the melody-board supported Atari VCS-2600 version has for example) would also be fantastic by the way. But i can imagine, that this could cause some technical problems in the programming. Fantastic it would be definately, if the C64 version would have such a game-mode. Just a suggestion.
I think I found a bug: In the first round, I got my fighter captured, and then the boss, in formation with one other fighter and my captured ship, swooped back down for another run. As it came down, I shot and missed the boss, but hit the fighter that was coming down with it (the alien, not my captured ship), and...I got my captured ship back, despite the fact that the boss was still alive! In fact, I was so thrown by this that the boss hit and killed my original ship, but I was able to continue play with the released ship.
Weird stuff, but a great achievement otherwise. Thanks for all the hard work.
Awesome work! I did notice that on one occasion my captured fighter was immediately returned to me as soon as the alien finished capturing it and taking it to the top of the screen. I didn't have to shoot him! Probably has something to do with the iffy collision detection. Hopefully you can nail the issue!
Just almost perfect, everything have a real feal from the arcade version, wish the Galaga player spacecraft looked a little more like the real deal, but hey it's just a 64 right?
I never thought I would see the day this come true
Thanks again for making such a great game, come to life on one of my favorite puters of all time
Yeah I've had a lot of attempts at that player sprite, the chunky pixels don't lend themselves to that particular shape. If there wasn't such a thing as dual fighters I could use a hi-res white sprite with a colour overlay, but two ships at the bottom would take up four sprites, leaving just four for bombs and diving enemies leaving the screen, massively increasing the flicker.
This now runs at out-of-control speed on the Retroarch port of VICE. Version 2 was fine. The only other game I've ever had this problem with was the recent Lady Pac.
Hmm, sounds like something's up with their port, it works on VICE 3.5, whatever version they have in TheC64 and presumably, as I've had no reports to the contrary, real hardware and Ultimate 64. I'll ask the dev of Lady Pac if he's had any issues.
Great port. I recognized two issues more in V3.1, which are not in the issue-list above.
First one is, that the game correctly saved my highscore, when i scored more than 30.000 points, but after a restart of the game, my higher score was not correctly displayed at the top of the screen, where the highscore can be seen. There still is the 30.000 score listed as the highscore, although the highscore-list shows my much larger score correctly at the top. So it works in the list, but not in the highscore-display on the screen.
Second thing i recognized is, that sometimes the game has it's little problems with sprite-collisions. I noticed a few times, that i actually hit an enemy with a shot, but maybe because i didn't hit the opponent exactly in the middle, he just kept on flying and ddidn't die. That cost me a few lives and that's not the case in the Arcade original or in the NES and Atari-7800 ports. The shot hit-query sometimes is not precise enough so far and this should be improved.
Then i also noticed some of the other issues mentioned in the list above. So there is still work to do, but from a gameplay point of view, it already looks and plays good. Looking forward to the finalised game.
Thanks for the bug reports. High score thing looks like an easy fix, and I am going to look at the collision detection, I'll strip it down to one enemy and one bullet and track it frame by frame.
A big YES !!! You did what i thought would never happen on c64. We now have a true, not only decent, but just EPIC conversion of the best Arcade Game ever made, and you are the one who succeeded in this incredible challenge. Many thanks !!!!
Really Classy, Love the feel of the Controls, perhaps saulc12 off Lemon 64 could do a Tiny Update of the Graphics for you but other than that, this is heading in the right direction - We are Long Overdue a PROPER conversion of Galaga on the C64 - Wonderful Stuff ! :->
Very good indeed so far. I've encountered a bug where the Boss Galaga and my captured fighter were the only enemies left onscreen and the boss refused to attack for over a minute, so eventually I had to shoot them both in formation to progress.
I saw in the comments that you are using software sprites and a sprite multiplexer for hardware sprites. Coder LFT made two sprite routines that I think could be usable in the game of this type:
At last, 1rst phoenix and now Galaga. I wonder why not released this title at its time past years with another name.This preview is rellay great. Congrats in advance.
OMG, that's just brilliant !!!! Please make it a definitive game, you can still make history on this beloved platform ! Just wondering from a tech side : Are you using soft sprites or sprite multiplexing ? Keep up doing this great work !!!!
At last, a great port of Galaga! Thanks for doing this! About the aspect ratio, the recent port of Phoenix (Phoenix Recovered, June 2021) solves this using a vertical orientation, forcing the player to rotate the monitor, but for me, it´s worth it. Great work! Looking forward to try the final version!
I spent a large part of my youth waiting for good arcade ports of games like Crazy Kong and Galaga. And I was often disappointed about the Galaga ports I found! Galencia was nice, but it wasn't Galaga. THIS is more like Galaga than any other port I've ever seen on the C64. Thank you for making this. I'll be very keen to see the complete project!!
Great! The first preview is already better than Galencia (which IS a GREAT game, but its not the real Galaga^^). It already feels, looks and sounds like the real thing! I`m glad that I`m following you by some coincidence! Otherwise I would have missed this.^^ I`m admin of a small retro gaming group on Facebook. I will post this preview there. Hopefully more people will notice, download, play and comment and motivate you to continue the work on this gem! Noticed two bugs: I was destroyed, I respawned and was hit by another missile that was already on screen when I died.^^ Highscore (I scored 58.000 points first try^^): The game remembers the highscore, displays it when you start a new game. But in the main menue highscore is always 30.000. Please implement the Highscore table from the original. And if you`re hardcore, make the scores saveable. I`m no coder, but there are already some routines as an addon for an expanded SEUCK version that enables highscore saving to disc. Maybe that could be of some use. Thank you for your hard work on this one! Please continue!
This is awesome! Finally someone is on to make a decent Galaga port, after all these decades! Thank you for your effort and please don't give up!
From what I can tell from the first play, it looks quite fine. I'm Impressed about the smoothness of the attack waves and the Sprites are quite colourful. The player could become a little more similar to the original.
Gameplay seems good. I wasn't able to hit all the targets in the Bonus round, but that could be just because of my non-present skills ;)
Thanks! Yeah I'm not 100% happy with the player sprite either but the double-wide pixels don't make it easy to replicate the arcade or even the NES version. Feel free to download SpritePad and see if you can improve it! :)
Nice port! Feels pretty authentic and the enemy animations look very good, just the explosion-animation of enemies could be improved, I think. Sound effects are a bit annoying, but old school ;-) I had a bug: one of the big green enemies on the top was drawn only half (left or right half was missing). I didn't think about taking a screenshot, sorry.
Thanks! No problem, I'm aware of that one, and there should be code in there to stop it happening but obviously that's not working! Explosions are smaller than the arcade, I didn't want them to take up more space than the enemy that was destroyed as it would lead to more problems with the enemies next to it, like the one you saw.
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Great game, had alot fun to play it today. One strange thing i had while playing today, not sure if there is a little bug or whether if I really was mistaken in the course of the game (could also be possible).
The following happened. I played and had only one ship left, then i made it to the 20.000 and there the player gets the first extra-ship, right. Then i thought - okay, now i have two ships left again and i can have one of my ships captured by the enemies and then retrieve it and have double the shooting power. But in the moment, when i was captured, the Game Over message occurred, as if the game hadn't properly registered, that i had just been given an extra life some seconds before.
Have you ever had a situation like this in the course of a game?
I can confirm that you are right.
Christ. This is what happens when you do a bug fix at midnight while you're on hold with 111. Version 6,421 incoming.
I had the opposite - twice in one game I was showing 0 ships in reserve, got killed, and actually still had another life. (The number of ships was correct, it was the display that was wrong.) Haven't been able to reproduce it, though - I thought it might be if your Challenging Stage bonus took you through the extra-life threshold, but it isn't that.
Great port of Galaga, the best one, but the scoring for killing enemies in initial entry waves is not fixed.
If you kill enemies in initial entry waves, you get 50,80,150 pts. instead of 100, 160, 400 pts.
Which is correct? I played the arcade and thought I'd matched it.
Damn, just checked the arcade...I had it right all along then and then changed it for some reason....
in 3.1 version preview, the score was correct.
Yeah, don't know why I got the idea in my head it needed to be changed. New version about to go up.
Excellent work in the result and open source spirit. The game goes straight to my C64 favs folder!
excellent - i love it - Thanks a lot !
No problem!
this is phenomenal!!!!! Fantastic job!!! Playing on Ultimate 64 works great!! With Tac-2 joystick of course!!
Good to hear it works well on the Ultimate!
Wow, just wow! This plays super smooth. Back in the day the C64 magazines would have renamed you as "conversion god". =D
First playtest yielded a score of 56920. I will always be bad at this game. XD But I love it. Thanks for doing this!
Haha yeah I'm not as good at this game as I remember. Struggled to get over 100K on a giant arcade Galaga a few weeks ago.
Duuuude! Fantastic port. I a at a loss for words.
Cheers!
I was an Amstrad CPC player myself but I also really enjoy other system's good games such as this one. Well done!
Haha, to be fair there's been some amazing ports for the CPC lately and it's certainly a machine I was always attracted to with those coloured keys and built-in tape deck.
very good
Thanks for your continued support
Bravo for this magnificent adaptation! This is quite simply the best Galaga on our beloved Commodore 64! You did a really good job
Thanks, much appreciated!
Awesome conversion so far.
A two-player simultan mode (like the melody-board supported Atari VCS-2600 version has for example) would also be fantastic by the way. But i can imagine, that this could cause some technical problems in the programming. Fantastic it would be definately, if the C64 version would have such a game-mode. Just a suggestion.
Yep - 2-player co-op mode will be in the release version!
Wow, sounds fantastic. Now i'm looking forward to the final version of the game even more.
Here is what I call a great Galaga version!
Great game! I really wait for the final release! :)
Great game so far!
I think I found a bug: In the first round, I got my fighter captured, and then the boss, in formation with one other fighter and my captured ship, swooped back down for another run. As it came down, I shot and missed the boss, but hit the fighter that was coming down with it (the alien, not my captured ship), and...I got my captured ship back, despite the fact that the boss was still alive! In fact, I was so thrown by this that the boss hit and killed my original ship, but I was able to continue play with the released ship.
Weird stuff, but a great achievement otherwise. Thanks for all the hard work.
Thanks - fixed this bug yesterday!
Awesome work! I did notice that on one occasion my captured fighter was immediately returned to me as soon as the alien finished capturing it and taking it to the top of the screen. I didn't have to shoot him! Probably has something to do with the iffy collision detection. Hopefully you can nail the issue!
Just almost perfect, everything have a real feal from the arcade version, wish the Galaga player spacecraft looked a little more like the real deal, but hey it's just a 64 right?
I never thought I would see the day this come true
Thanks again for making such a great game, come to life on one of my favorite puters of all time
Yeah I've had a lot of attempts at that player sprite, the chunky pixels don't lend themselves to that particular shape. If there wasn't such a thing as dual fighters I could use a hi-res white sprite with a colour overlay, but two ships at the bottom would take up four sprites, leaving just four for bombs and diving enemies leaving the screen, massively increasing the flicker.
There's a new ship sprite in the final version, hopefully you'll find it more like the arcade sprite!
Just perfect so love it, thank you very much!
This now runs at out-of-control speed on the Retroarch port of VICE. Version 2 was fine. The only other game I've ever had this problem with was the recent Lady Pac.
Hmm, sounds like something's up with their port, it works on VICE 3.5, whatever version they have in TheC64 and presumably, as I've had no reports to the contrary, real hardware and Ultimate 64. I'll ask the dev of Lady Pac if he's had any issues.
Great port. I recognized two issues more in V3.1, which are not in the issue-list above.
First one is, that the game correctly saved my highscore, when i scored more than 30.000 points, but after a restart of the game, my higher score was not correctly displayed at the top of the screen, where the highscore can be seen. There still is the 30.000 score listed as the highscore, although the highscore-list shows my much larger score correctly at the top. So it works in the list, but not in the highscore-display on the screen.
Second thing i recognized is, that sometimes the game has it's little problems with sprite-collisions. I noticed a few times, that i actually hit an enemy with a shot, but maybe because i didn't hit the opponent exactly in the middle, he just kept on flying and ddidn't die. That cost me a few lives and that's not the case in the Arcade original or in the NES and Atari-7800 ports. The shot hit-query sometimes is not precise enough so far and this should be improved.
Then i also noticed some of the other issues mentioned in the list above. So there is still work to do, but from a gameplay point of view, it already looks and plays good. Looking forward to the finalised game.
Thanks for the bug reports. High score thing looks like an easy fix, and I am going to look at the collision detection, I'll strip it down to one enemy and one bullet and track it frame by frame.
Looks and plays freaking great!!!
Thanks, glad you're enjoying it!
A big YES !!! You did what i thought would never happen on c64. We now have a true, not only decent, but just EPIC conversion of the best Arcade Game ever made, and you are the one who succeeded in this incredible challenge. Many thanks !!!!
Thanks, hope it continues to impress when the fringe bugs reveal themselves ;
Really Classy, Love the feel of the Controls, perhaps saulc12 off Lemon 64 could do a Tiny Update of the Graphics for you but other than that, this is heading in the right direction - We are Long Overdue a PROPER conversion of Galaga on the C64 - Wonderful Stuff ! :->
Awesome work! Thanks for bringing one of my favourite games (Next to Megamania) to my fav machine. Can't wait for the full game!
Looks really good. Looking forward to a final version of this game.
Very good indeed so far. I've encountered a bug where the Boss Galaga and my captured fighter were the only enemies left onscreen and the boss refused to attack for over a minute, so eventually I had to shoot them both in formation to progress.
Thanks for the report, I've hopefully fixed that bug for the next release.
Please let there be saving for the high scores... :) I always enjoy games when the high scores get saved to a disk for next time.
Impressive work!!!
I saw in the comments that you are using software sprites and a sprite multiplexer for hardware sprites. Coder LFT made two sprite routines that I think could be usable in the game of this type:
https://www.linusakesson.net/programming/fieldsort/index.php
https://www.linusakesson.net/scene/lunatico/misc.php
If you have the time, take a look, it may be something that could be useful to you. I really hope that this game will be finished.
Cheers!
saw this on youtube earlier. excellent work!
At last, 1rst phoenix and now Galaga. I wonder why not released this title at its time past years with another name.This preview is rellay great. Congrats in advance.
OMG, that's just brilliant !!!! Please make it a definitive game, you can still make history on this beloved platform ! Just wondering from a tech side : Are you using soft sprites or sprite multiplexing ? Keep up doing this great work !!!!
Both! The enemies in formation and your bullets are soft sprites, everything else is sprites using Shallan's multiplexor.
At last, a great port of Galaga! Thanks for doing this! About the aspect ratio, the recent port of Phoenix (Phoenix Recovered, June 2021) solves this using a vertical orientation, forcing the player to rotate the monitor, but for me, it´s worth it. Great work! Looking forward to try the final version!
I spent a large part of my youth waiting for good arcade ports of games like Crazy Kong and Galaga. And I was often disappointed about the Galaga ports I found! Galencia was nice, but it wasn't Galaga. THIS is more like Galaga than any other port I've ever seen on the C64. Thank you for making this. I'll be very keen to see the complete project!!
Great! The first preview is already better than Galencia (which IS a GREAT game, but its not the real Galaga^^). It already feels, looks and sounds like the real thing!
I`m glad that I`m following you by some coincidence! Otherwise I would have missed this.^^
I`m admin of a small retro gaming group on Facebook. I will post this preview there. Hopefully more people will notice, download, play and comment and motivate you to continue the work on this gem!
Noticed two bugs: I was destroyed, I respawned and was hit by another missile that was already on screen when I died.^^
Highscore (I scored 58.000 points first try^^): The game remembers the highscore, displays it when you start a new game. But in the main menue highscore is always 30.000.
Please implement the Highscore table from the original. And if you`re hardcore, make the scores saveable. I`m no coder, but there are already some routines as an addon for an expanded SEUCK version that enables highscore saving to disc. Maybe that could be of some use.
Thank you for your hard work on this one! Please continue!
Congratulations! After some playing I can say easily this will be another great game for the Commodore 64 Community! :)
This is awesome! Finally someone is on to make a decent Galaga port, after all these decades! Thank you for your effort and please don't give up!
From what I can tell from the first play, it looks quite fine. I'm Impressed about the smoothness of the attack waves and the Sprites are quite colourful. The player could become a little more similar to the original.
Gameplay seems good. I wasn't able to hit all the targets in the Bonus round, but that could be just because of my non-present skills ;)
Looking forward to see the full game.
PS: I WOULD BUY THIS!
Thanks! Yeah I'm not 100% happy with the player sprite either but the double-wide pixels don't make it easy to replicate the arcade or even the NES version. Feel free to download SpritePad and see if you can improve it! :)
Nice port! Feels pretty authentic and the enemy animations look very good, just the explosion-animation of enemies could be improved, I think. Sound effects are a bit annoying, but old school ;-)
I had a bug: one of the big green enemies on the top was drawn only half (left or right half was missing). I didn't think about taking a screenshot, sorry.
Thanks! No problem, I'm aware of that one, and there should be code in there to stop it happening but obviously that's not working! Explosions are smaller than the arcade, I didn't want them to take up more space than the enemy that was destroyed as it would lead to more problems with the enemies next to it, like the one you saw.