Tetris Pro
I had nearly given up on ever getting this game to run. But finally, on my new 486, after several attempts and at first with the help of a boot disk I managed. Meanwhile (after some careful editing of the AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, replacing MSCDEX.EXE with SHSUCDX.EXE and choosing the smallest driver I could find) I can even play it with the CD-ROM enabled. No, Tetris Pro is not really easy. Its demands are high:
But then Tetris Pro is also a very remarkable game. It is not only the first Tetris clone running in SVGA, it may well be the first DOS game ever to run exclusively in this mode, which became common only two or three years later. And the graphics are really superb, as is the music. Like ACiD Tetris, Tetris Pro is best served with the Gravis Ultrasound. Apart from the sound quality, it places the least stress on the CPU thanks to its hardware mixing.
As far as gameplay is concerned, Tetris Pro is absolutely classic. There are no fancy add-ons, not even those that were in the later official versions. A game for purists—like me.
In a way, Tetris Pro has remained unique. There were other spectacular Tetris games later, but, as far as I know, there was never again one that pushed the hardware of its time to its limits the way Tetris Pro did.
The graphics were really supposed to be seperate from the game, they
come in data disks (*.DD), and you can choose among these data
disks on the main menu screen, but there is only the one distributed
with the game, nature,
I never found another of them. Nor is the
data disk file format documented in the release so you could add new
ones.
I could find out a little bit about them: The graphics themselves are stored as ColoRIX bitmaps, since they are 640×480×256, the file extension would be SCF. ColoRIX bitmaps had different file extensions depending on bitmap size and color depth, if anyone's interested, here is the bunch:
320×200 16 SCD
640×200 16 SCE
640×350 16 SCR
640×480 16 SCP
800×600 16 SCG
1024×768 16 SCU
320×200 256 SCI
320×400 256 SCK
360×480 256 SCQ
640×400 256 SCL
640×480 256 SCF
800×600 256 SCN
1024×768 256 SCO
But how are the bitmaps stored in the DD file? Obviously compressed in some way. NATURE.DD has 1,895,249 bytes, the raw date for a 640×480×256 graphic alone have 307,200 bytes, and there are twelve graphics in NATURE.DD, plus two tracker modules. But what kind of compression is it?
