The remake of Breathless was an old dream of when I was 14, along other titles like Gloom, Alien Breed 3D, Super Stardust, Mario 64 and so on. This work is part of another bigger project that is called TextureMind Framework, developed to facilitate the creation of these kind of projects, like games, demos, presentations and so on. The idea to make a remake of Breathless in this moment started when I saw that the 3D engine with Vulkan was stable enough to render any kind of map imported with AssImp library. So why don't import Breathless map and use the same 3D engine to render them?

I was amazed by the idea of rendering Amiga Breathless with Vulkan libraries. The biggest obstacle was to import the maps from the old format in GLD, that was more suitable for raycasting than polygonal rendering. I started downloading all the material from Aminet, with this link:

http://aminet.net/package/game/shoot/Breathless-1996-Source

Then I studied the format from the original source code in C, in particular the map editor. The first important obstacle was that the editor was programmed for loading the map only in uncompressed format and all the maps were compressed in an unknown format called SLZ. I got 0 results on Google. I didn't know the format and I was about to abandon the project.

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When i was a little kid I remember that i really wanted to create a Super Mario Bros game for the amstrad cpc 464. Now that I am 33 and I work as a software engineer I asked myself: why don't you make your old dream come true? :) Finally I found the time to create a demo with the famous first Level 1-1 of Super Mario Bro:

The horizontal hardware scrolling needs a double buffer in order to get an accuracy of 4 pixels. The demo runs on original Amstrad CPC 464 speed emulated by Caprice. It is pretty fast and can loop horizontally with a limit of 512 tiles meanwhile the level 1-1 takes only 212 tiles. I readjusted the original smb graphics to fit a 256x192 Mode 1 with 4 colors. I really like the effect of the gray scale map mixed with the blue sky, like in the original NES game. This demo has been programmed with SDCC in C and Z80 assembly.

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