What makes both of these releases so fascinating and exciting is they aren’t available for just the C64 or the Amiga, but virtually any retro platform you can think of. It’s really kind of astonishing. We saw another game last year offer this virtual cornucopia of platform choices, called Tristam Island as some of you might recall.
Well I'm glad to see this becoming a trend!
Earlier this month we saw the release of Silk Dust by Davide Bucci out of France.
This game is available on - hold onto your butts - 18 different platforms! Silk Dust can be played on Amiga, C64, VIC20+32K, C128, Plus/4, PET models with at least 32K of RAM, CPC 664 or CPC6128, MSX, ZX Spectrum 48K, MS-DOS, Macintosh 68k, CP/M, Olivetti M20, RC2014, Atari 800, Apple II and Atari ST.
Let all that sink in, my friends. The hard part isn't deciding if you should play it, but on which system!
In most of those listed above you can save your progress, too. Check Bucci’s site to see which can be loaded and saved off disks if that helps you decide which route to take.
Silk Dust is the third game Bucci has written featuring the main character Emilia Vittorini following Two Days to the Race (2019-2020) and The Queen's Footsteps (2019). Bucci put a play duration on these games of "a few hours" so it should be a pretty enjoyable excursion that won't take months of brain teasing to complete.
I fired it up quickly in a C64 emulator and it seems to be NTSC/PAL agnostic. So I believe we are good to go regardless of the original hardware we may want to use.
The other game that is on the horizon that follows this fantastic multi-platform approach is called Hibernated 1, Director's Cut, by Stefan Vogt.
This game can also accommodate a vast number of retro systems.
Hibernated 1 is available for Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and PCW, Spectrum +3, Spectrum Next, Commodore Amiga, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, MS-DOS, Apple 2, BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Commodore 128, Mega 65, TRS-80 Color Computer, Dragon64, MSX 1 and MSX 2, Oric, Commodore Plus/4, TI99/4a, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore PET, SAM Coupé, classic Macintosh and modern PC. In addition, there are z3 and z5 files provided, for playing the game in your Z-machine interpreter of choice.
You can download it now and play it. Or, you can buy a boxed Collector's Edition later this summer which is super cool.
Having a large collection of Amiga Infocom titles I was flip-flopping between the C128 and 680x0 Mac version as those two systems have pretty paltry game libraries and it's nice to spread the love around sometimes.
Unable to make up my mind, I asked Stefan Vogt his opinion as I wanted to make sure if I picked the Mac version it would run on System 7.
Vogt:
I ultimately went with the C128 version mainly because I wanted to play it in color, even though the graphical screens are few and far between. While the C128 can produce 80 columns of text (and the Mac... lord, who knows? It's a lot), the text on the mac would be crisper yet ultimately smaller. Since I didn't really want to play this game wearing reading glasses (yeah, we're there now) I went for the chunky C128 screen with scan-lines.The Mac 68x version actually requires System 7. On the other hand the C128 version makes use of the expanded memory of the machine AND can run in 80 columns.
And even though I pre-ordered the C128 version, I can always just go download many of them and hop from station to station until I'm ready to stop waffling over hardware and just get down to it. And that includes using a modern machine with an emulator!