Classic strategy game Dune II ported to Pico-8

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Originally published at: Classic strategy game Dune II ported to Pico-8 | Boing Boing

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Is there a better image, that one is all pixelated.

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Jokes aside, what kind of irritates me about Pico-8 and its competitors like TIC-80 was that they feel the need to pixelate the text as well as the graphics. 8-bit computers had perfectly readable text – not these near unreadable monstrosities.

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The virtual machine has a 128x128 resolution, less than a Vic-20. Even with a 5x7 character set, that’s 21 characters on a line.

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But being worse than the computers it is supposed to be nostalgic for is absurd. It’s like how Millennials/GenZ like to apply filters to videos that supposedly make them look like VHS tapes – except if VHS looked as bad as the filters, home video would have never taken off.

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Dune II was my first RTS, and not only did it make me fall in love with the genre, but it also got me into the Dune universe! I had no idea what it was, other than a weird movie, before that point. After playing, I ended up reading everything and becoming a true fan.

XCom 2 (which is basically XCom) and Dune II are two games I routinely go and replay. So fun.

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Even the Atari 2600 ran at 160x192. The original Game Boy was 160x144.

Now I’m curious about the rationale for the 128x128 decision.

Okay, they explain the evolution in the first issue of the PICO-8 zine:

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