When I was 17 or so (year 11, 1987), I had spurned my Commodore 64 in favour of a BBC B micro. At the end of year 11, some of the departing year 12s gave me the code to a little project they’d been working on: a clone of Ultima for the Beeb. It was really just the core of such a game: the display routine for moving about the map, obscuring objects out of view (such as behind walls), and showing monsters.

At a time when I should have been out pursuing girls, this caught my imagination (I’d played a LOT of Ultima in my time), so I took the code and expanded it. A friend who was into role playing games wrote a basic story for it. Another friend supplied some music for the title screen.

I re-wrote the main display routine in 6502 assembly language for speed, and added maps, extra characters to talk to, weapons and fighting. “Quest I: The Wrath of Mægenmund” (egads, it sounds like something out of Spinal Tap) wasn’t anything special, and was never finished, but it was pretty cool.

It ran in the Beeb’s graphics mode 4, so it was monochrome, 320×256 pixels, I think. It used a lot of loading in and out from the disk, with a main (outdoor) map, and lots of separate maps for dungeons, towns and villages. There was no sound to speak of, but there was a lot to explore. You could buy drinks from bartenders (to gain strength), talk to the villagers, buy weapons and supplies, then go out and fight monsters to get more treasure. The money was measured in pounds, shillings and pence, and the language and fonts of the characters and the interface was a wacky mix of olde English, gothic script and runes.

I kept working on it for a couple of years after high school (the Beeb saw me through part of university, until an IBM PC arrived in our house), but it fizzled out in 1990, when other interests overtook it.

Why has nobody made the perfect Jumpman remake?

Caveat: it has to run on my secondary 1.7 GHz Windows 2000 PC, which though it has a 3D graphics card, the 3D doesn’t work because of some weird-arse issue with DirectX (Short version: It’s a Diamond Viper V550. I’m sure DX 7 and 8 worked okay with it, but DX 9 doesn’t… and it’s pretty much impossible to downgrade without re-installing Windows.)

Given this computer is over a thousand times as fast as a Commodore 64, that shouldn’t be too hard.

Of the Jumpmans (Jumpmen?) listed at remakes.org there are:

• Classic Jumpman — runs in DOS, using the PC’s on-board speaker for sound. Bleuch, no volume control, etc
• Jumpman Deluxe — for the Amiga, it looks like. I don’t have an Amiga. I used to, but I only used it for playing Aladdin.
• Jumpman Lives! — also in DOS. Looks terrific, and graphically is about as close to the original as it gets. Some sound works, but a lot (eg the music) is missing, and I can’t get the arrow keys to work.
• Jumpman Project — this is the original IBM version, tweaked to run okay on fast machines. So it’ll be DOS again, so no volume control, and horrible CGA colours, until it’s enhanced at some stage in the future.
• Jumpman Under Construction — has a terrific screen editor, but has been written in such a way that on a PC without 3D graphics, it is as slow as molasses. WTF? This game dates from 1983 and ran on a 1Mhz Commodore 64!
• Jumpman Zero — only runs on 3D, because it’s been super-jazzed up in a way the author probably thought looked really cool. I disagree — I care nought for making the blocky graphics have a 3D perspective, and I really hate the way it’s been turned into a scrolling playing field. How can you possibly plan your ideal path through the level?

Okay, so maybe it’s time to look at a C64 emulator instead.