Dead Projects Society: MultiRunner

A Page Dedicated To A Project That Never Took Off

The MultiRunner Title Screen

Back in 1992, the Amiga was very much alive - at least for a motely crew of young hackers that foresaw a bright future for their system of choice. But even then we had bouts of nostalgia, and it was in one of those phases that the idea of a port of Brøderbund's classic "Loderunner" was born.

The basic design was built on two rules:

Stay as true to the original as you can.
Conform as much to the Amiga system programming rules as you can.

The first rule dictated that we had to come up with alorithmic descriptions for the behaviour of the Bungelings (the baddies in Loderunner) so that the game would play just like the original. In hindsight this proved to be a major pitfall :-)

The second rule was instituted because we wanted to create a program that would run fine in all system configurations and which would also be friendly to the system resources. My friends were pretty much radical in their outlook even back then - if it stopped the multitasking, took over all system resources and required a reboot after you were done with it, it was considered evil. Dan Barret (not Mark, dammit!) of comp.sys.amiga.reviews fame used to capitalize on this subject by posting a series of satires about the hypothetical "Blazemonger" game on Usenet news. Hence the project title "MultiRunner".

The MultiRunner Level Editor

In the true spirit of what we nowadays call "Open Source" I started by digging out my old C64 stuff, looking for the Loderunner disk. By judicious use of the disk drive's door I was soon able to figure out the data layout on the disk itself and the level data format after that. I mean, that was easy enough. Since ReadySoft's C64 emulator had come out a while before, I used that to transfer the level data to my Amiga.

Meanwhile, my good friend Minstrel had sent me a disk with a couple of images on it: his proof of concept how a modern Loderunner could look like. I was instantly in love with it, since the design retained the simplicity of the original without looking drab.

At that point, I pulled my Intuition Manual out of the bookshelf, loaded uo my editor (CygnusEd, what else?) and started to code. Thanks to the req.library at least writing the requesters was easy. I spend some time writing a compressor for the level data, and managed to shave off a whopping 20KB off the 46KB of the original file. But the inner workings of the IntuiMessage system should stay forever beyond me.

I had the level editor working at least so far that one could load a certain level and then paint in it. But a nasty bug had crept in that sometimes prevented the menus from working. On another front, the attempt to glean an insight into the workings of Loderunner by looking at both the C64 and Mac code had miserably failed: The 6502 code was so convoluted that it would boggle your mind, while the 68000 code was unrelocated and in Mac resource/data fork format to boot. That was the point when the depression started to set it.

Other projects became more important, and the longer the MultiRunner source sat unread on my disk, the lower was my inclination to touch it ever again. At one point it just silently died.

Rest in peace.

Thomas Bätzler, Februar 9, 2000