2020-12-08
After many years of work, a major update of the Emerald Mine Club level
collection is finally available!
The updated level collection contains 28 new level sets for the following
Emerald Mine Club disks that were still missing before:
- Bond Mine 19 - Xmas Mine III
- Classic DenMine 1
- Classic Green Stuff
- Crazy Mine 2
- DazelDash
- Eat Mine Update
- Emerald Mine Beetle
- Emerald Nep 1
- Freak Mine Super Pro
- Haunted Mine 5
- Head Mine
- Kevin Mine 4 - 6
- Kids Fun Mine And Beyond
- Laser Mine 1 + 2
- Pawn Mine
- Revenge of the Yams 1
- Rock’n’Roll Mine 1
- Through The Chaos Caves 8 - 10, 17 - 20, 21
The new version of the Emerald Mine Club level collection therefore contains
53523 levels in 604 level sets now.
The new level collection also comes with completely updated artwork that
tries to be as close as possible to the original Amiga game, especially
regarding the in-game playfield dimensions which are now closer to the
original game.
Another feature of this update are the newly converted sound effects,
which not only have highly improved audio quality, but that come in two
variants that can be selected from the game engines setup menu: You can
either use the classic Amiga 500 style, low-pass filtered sounds, or enjoy
the new Amiga 1200 style sounds with higher quality.
The original title screens and title messages of the original EMC disks
are still part of this level collection.
Using the new native Emerald Mine engine (based on the game engine of David
Tritscher’s “Emerald Mine for X11”, which was further improved for higher
compatibility), even more levels are solvable now. This is proven by
solution tapes for as many as 258 level sets that were recorded by
Bela Lubkin and Ryan Pineda.
The updated Emerald Mine Club level collection package is available at the
Levels & Artwork page!
2020-12-05
Here’s another bugfix release that fixes and adds the following:
- fixed handling of player at fake acid for EM engine
- fixed wrap-around with entering EM style doors for EM engine
- fixed activating robot wheel at wrap-around position for EM engine
- fixed some elements and properties when reading native DC2 levels
- added Emscripten support for running R’n’D in a web browser
- fixed compiling on OS/2 (ArcaOS, in fact)
- fixed some compiler warnings for newer versions of GCC
Now available on the download page!
I wish you all a happy St Nicholas’ Day! :-)
2020-11-11
This is yet another bugfix release that fixes and adds the following:
- re-added accidentally removed program icon
- fixed bug with text input / text area gadgets when pressing “Escape” key
- fixed bug with clicked text area gadgets marking level as changed
- improved inserting level sketch from clipboard to level editor
- fixed some game elements when inserting level sketch from clipboard
- added setting game engine when inserting level sketch from clipboard
- fixed workaround for color key bug in SDL 2.0.12 that breaks transparency
- improved handling “CONF” and “PROPERTIES” buttons in level editor
- fixed bug with virtual buttons that may be broken after rotating device
- increased maximum tape length for playing extreme levels like “Zelda II”
- fixed graphical bugs if digging or collecting causes player relocation
Now available on the download page!
2020-10-23
25 years ago to the day, the very first version 0.9 of Rocks’n’Diamonds
was released!
Here’s the historic LSM (“Linux Software Map”) file used for the first release:
Begin3
Title: Rocks'n'Diamonds
Version: 0.9 (Pre-Release)
Entered-date: 23OCT95
Description: Arcade style game for color X11 with stereo sounds.
A game like "Boulderdash" (C=64) or "Emerald Mine" (Amiga).
Sound server takes advantage of some features of VoxWare(tm),
but works on plain /dev/audio, too.
Comes with full source code.
Keywords: game x11 boulderdash emeraldmine color stereo sound
Author: aeglos@valinor.owl.de (Holger Schemel)
Maintained-by: aeglos@valinor.owl.de (Holger Schemel)
Primary-site: sunsite.unc.edu /pub/Linux/games/x11/video
941953 rocks_n_diamonds-0.9.tgz
Alternate-site: ftp.x.org /contrib/games
941953 rocks_n_diamonds-0.9.tar.gz
Platforms: Should run on any UN*X system with color X11 (8bit or better).
Expected to work on Linux, HP-UX, SUN, Net-BSD, AIX and IRIX.
Linux binary included.
Copying-policy: Freely distributable copyrighted software
End
Interestingly, mirrors of the original FTP sites used for the initial release
are still available
(here and
here),
although they do not have the package file for the first version anymore,
but only for the second version 0.9b (released a few days later).
Of course, the initial version 0.9 package is still available as a direct
download
from this web site, and the Git repository of Rocks’n’Diamonds has a
special branch
to compile the historic version with modern compilers and systems.
For nostalgic impressions, here are some screenshots of Rocks’n’Diamonds 0.9:
I wish you all a lot of fun playing Rocks’n’Diamonds also for the next 25 years! :-)
2020-10-05
This is another bugfix release which fixes and adds the following:
- fixed some problems with wrap-around levels in Emerald Mine engine
- added full compatibility for wrap-around levels in Emerald Mine engine
- fixed single-step mode for wrap-around levels in Emerald Mine engine
- fixed playing tapes recorded with old Emerald Mine game engine
- added command “autofix” to fix tapes recorded with old EM game engine
- fixed key shortcut to start/end game (which was broken since 4.2.0.0)
- fixed some other key shortcuts that require entering upper case letters
- added menu command “:undo-tape” to undo/restore last recorded tape
- fixed potential crash bug that may occur when loading custom artwork
- fixed single-step mode when using custom elements with mouse click events
- added creating undo/redo snapshots when using mouse click events
- fixed problems with virtual buttons and showing envelopes on Android
- improved startup speed by optimizing parsing of parameter values
- improved handling output of warnings, errors and debug messages
- fixed showing source date on version page of info screen menu
- added showing commit hash on version page of info screen menu
Now available on the download page!
