I recently reached out to fellow Aussie Badja, who was quite active in the community in the late 90's/early 2000's - notable for games such as Crates 3D and
Lotus Turbo Challenge on the TI-83, TI-83/84 Plus and TI-86 calculators. For a little while I'd been considering porting Crates 3D over to the CE, and he has given his approval, along with kindly handing over the source code for Lotus in case I get around to porting that as well.

I don't have a lot of free time these days, so I imagine they'll be quite simple ports with the monochrome graphics scaled up for now, but we'll see how I go.

After a little tinkering, I've gotten Crates 3D to compile, render the title screen (which is a pre-build level) along with copied over some other text/vram routines from my other games.



Next step will be to detect the world/levelset files, and then move into testing and resolving any issues with the gameplay on the CE.

I'm excited for this! I remember playing this game for the TI-84 Plus and I'm excited to see where this goes!

Loved Crates 3D back in the day, great to see it living on!

Glad you managed to get some free time with the new addition and such 😊

This looks great! Will you be adding the level editor?

That was quite the fun game back in the day, and badja had a number of hits - Uncle Worm was my favorite of his, and Piano83 inspired my TI calculator audio adventures, including FloppyTunes and mobileTunes. I have fond memories of hand-entering the hex for Piano83 on my TI-83 in sophomore in year in high school, then showing it off to my Latin class with headphones attached to my TI-83's link port.

I look forward to seeing how the project progresses in your limited free time.

It sure was a cool game - a great example of a very simple puzzle idea that can get a lot of mileage!

I made some more progress today, getting the levels detected and playable.




I'll focus on the CE version of the game first, and then most likely yes will write a new level editor (the existing one is an older Visual Basic 3.0 program that won't run on modern machines).

Well that was quicker than I thought - there really wasn't too much 16-bit register -> 24-bit register stuff to deal with, so the straight port is basically done



I'm going to have a bit of a play with colour/sharper graphics next

Here is a mockup showing:
Left = current 83/83+ sprites (magnified x3)
Center = dimetric sharper sprites
Right = trimetric sharper sprites - same layout from two angles



Any thoughts or preferences?

The dimetric view looks almost standard iso and quite clean - but the downside is that it's less intuitive as to which direction you'll move when you press the Up arrow. The trimetric view is closer to the original game, and so I'm currently leaning towards that one.

I like the one on the right; I think it is the easiest to see. Also, if the block the player is controlling was a different color it would make the game much easier then the original.
Keep up the great work! 🙂

Agreed, the more angled view gives better visibility

I've added some texture to the crates now.. The orange/brown crates are the platforms (white crates in the original), and the black/gray crates serve as the player and the target crate (black crates in the original)

Here's a working copy with the enhanced graphics, and you can also toggle between enhanced/classic mode



Currently enhanced only works from the one view angle, so that's next up, along with trying to optimise for speed

Wow this looks amazing in color

This looks very cool and well executed. I've never seen the Crates game before, but watching this clip gives me a pretty good idea of how it plays.

I'm looking forward to it being available for download!

A little more progress tonight - I got the other view angles in the enhanced graphics working, and also put a wipe transition between the graphics modes.



Interestingly, the wipe transition uses a "halt" as a small delay, and the speed difference between CEmu and actual hardware is quite a lot, not sure if this is by design or something with interrupt timing that I've forgotten about?

I'm fairly sure just halting as a delay with no other configuration will vary depending on factors such as USB being plugged in. Personally, I would recommend additionally checking some other factor such as an LCD interrupt bit to determine whether a desired unit of time has passed.

Ah yes that does sound familiar. Anyway, I removed the halt and went with a small BC counter.

The port is now completed and should be available here once the file is approved:
https://www.cemetech.net/downloads/files/2865/x3808