Myst gets a demake on the Atari 2600

Myst, famous for being the “killer-app” that convinced everyone they needed a CD-ROM drive, wouldn’t be the first choice of game you’d think of as an ideal candidate to port to the Atari 2600, but that didn’t stop Vince Weaver from giving it a go.

Weaver asked himself “How much of MYST can you run on a 4k 16k Atari 2600 cartridge?”

Although a proof-of-concept, and not intended to be a finished game, Weaver keeps adding new locations – just today he announced 15 more. He says “Everyone wants to see more levels, so I’m learning how to use an E7-style bank switch cartridge (16k ROM / 2k RAM). I’m hoping I can put a decent amount of Myst island on it. The kernel/engine I have takes 448 bytes for each screen, but I am using ZX02 compression to fit a lot more in (though it’s tricky decompressing to the RAM). The compressed data has to fit in 256 bytes per level, which can be tricky for complex levels.”

Weaver has previously made demakes of various games for the Apple II including Myst, Monkey Island and Another World.

You can download the game from here.