October 2022
The Atari XL version of Return of Fury was recently released!
See the full Atari Age forum thread here for downloads
Gameplay video on YT by Saberman
There was some confusion on whether it was based on the C64 sourcecode or not. It is not. Ute, the author of the Atari port actually disassembled the original game, just like I did for the C64 version.
Then McClane sent the disassembly over to me, in the hope that I could help out. I didn't realise that the C64 version is almost 99% same code as the Atari. But it soon dawned on me, as I was able to label and comment much of the sourcecode.
So the fact is, the C64 version is based on the original C64 source, and the Atari version is based on the original Atari source. They're different projects, but still about 90% the same.
I later learned in an interview in Retro Gamer Issue 145 with Ron J. Fortier, the original author, that he actually made a, quote, "Atari emulator" for the C64 port!
So some of his decisions regarding the C64 code now makes much more sense. An interesting bit is that the "pixel perfect" collision detection was emulated on the C64 by generating collision masks from the tilesets.
My original contribution to the Atari version is the music. The rest of the game is owed to the hard, brilliant work of Ute and Fantomâs.
First time with the POKEY. I did a 4 track rendition of the title, game over and ending themes using RasterTracker
Had to use the normal square-ish mode as it's tough to get things sounding in tune in the other modes. I'll leave that to the pros.
I didn't consider that the NTSC version would be faster, so in hindsight I'd make it a bit slower. But overall I'm pretty satisfied with the results.