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Enduro (Amstrad CPC)

The legendary 24-hour endurance race of the Atari 2600, reborn on the Amstrad CPC 6128. Day breaks over the mountains. Two hundred cars stand between you and tomorrow. Hit the throttle, weave through the traffic and keep passing until the counter reaches zero... before night falls, the fog rolls in and the road turns to ice. Enduro CPC is a fan conversion of Activision's 1983 classic, rebuilt from scratch in Z80 assembly. It runs at a steady 25 frames per second in 16-colour mode 0 on a standard Amstrad CPC 6128. A whole day on the road Each in-game day lasts about four and a half minutes and changes as the hours go by, just like the original: Morning and clear day: blue skies, green fields, snow-capped mountains on the horizon. Snow: the road turns white and your car starts to slide, so steer gently. Dusk and sunset: the sky burns purple, red and orange. Night: everything goes black. All you can see are the tail lights of the other cars. Fog: you can only see a few metres ahead. Good luck. Dawn: if you made it this far, a new day begins. How to win Pass 200 cars on day 1, then 300 cars on every following day. Every car you pass counts down. Every car that overtakes you counts back up. Reach zero and the flags appear: you qualify for the next day. Run out of daylight before reaching zero and it's game over. Crash into a car and your speed drops to almost nothing. Then you have to watch the pack go by. Speed, acceleration, braking, the length of the day and the timing of every weather phase were measured on the original cartridge, so the race should feel familiar to any Enduro veteran. Controls Accelerate: Space, Cursor Up or joystick Fire Brake: Cursor Down or joystick Down Steer: Cursor Left / Right or joystick M: music on / off B: sound effects on / off As in the original, releasing the accelerator keeps your current speed. Press Space to start a race, and again after GAME OVER to try once more. Under the hood For the CPC fans who like to know how it works: Locked 25 fps, double-buffered, with an adaptive deadline so the frame rate never drops. Works on all CRTC types (0 to 4). No rasters or split-screen tricks that only work on some machines. The colour changes are done through the Gate Array only. Three palette zones per frame (sky, road and the fog layer), each changing colour throughout the day. Red and white kerbs that scroll by palette rotation: the stripes move without a single byte being redrawn. Smooth curves from 65 precomputed road shapes. Only the parts of the road that actually change are redrawn each frame. A scrolling 256-pixel panorama that only rewrites the edges of the mountains, never the whole sky. Scaled sprites in 8 sizes, AY music and engine sound. How to play Download enduro.dsk. Load it in your favourite emulator (Caprice32, WinAPE, ACE, Arnold...) set to a CPC 6128, or copy it to a real machine with a Gotek or HxC drive. Type RUN"ENDURO and press Return. Requirements: Amstrad CPC 6128, or any CPC with a disc drive and a 128 KB RAM expansion. The game uses the extra 64 KB of memory. Credits Code, graphics and music: Claude Opus 5.5 Original game: Enduro by Larry Miller, Activision, 1983 Enduro CPC is an unofficial, non-commercial fan tribute. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Activision. Enduro is a trademark of its respective owner.