Hey anybody see on that new “King Kong” DVD, Peter Jackson recreates the long missing “Spider Pit” sequence from the original film? Since the original footage could never be found they used the old script and storyboards and emulated the “next best thing”
Now in videogame land one of the most sought-after “lost prototypes” is surely Color Dreams’ “Hellraiser” for the NES. The big gimmick was it would have used a coprocessor (likely a Z80) and extra RAM (about 64k) to do effects a normal NES couldn’t dream of. This including having bitmap graphics as opposed to the NES’s tile-based system. It also had some sort of color switching scheme to increase the palette, although that part sounds a little flakey.
Every so often I get an urge and go looking around the internet for info on this thing, like Indiana Jones trying to dig up lost artifacts, but without the cool hat. Anyways, last night I came across an article where the Color Dreams guy states “the hardware was done, but no code was ever written” He then elaborates on the hardware a bit.
From this I think I can guess how it might of worked. So, like Peter Jackson and old giant monkey movies, maybe us videogame fans can fill in a missing part of history! If you’re familiar with the Z80 and might consider taking a whack at it, please see my “Hellraiser Proposal” page. The old-school Nintendo community would really get a kick out of something like this, maybe a homebrew could even be made. Call it “Hellraiser” even if it has nothing to do with the movie. I know cost was a factor in killing the game back in 1991, but now a person can get a Z80 and some RAM fairly cheap. Or perhaps this “Super Cartridge” could take memory cards (like the Cuttlecart 2) and allow a variety of homebrews to be programmed and run. Whadda think?
