The Three Faces of Bruce Lee on the IBM PC Platform
0Bruce Lee was a very popular non-scrolling platform game released by Datasoft in 1984. Bruce Lee progresses through 20 unique chambers by collecting lanterns, avoiding the attacks of the black ninja and the sumo wrestler Yamo and traps like spikes, electric fields, exploding shrubs and electrified floors. Collecting lanterns opens doors and eliminates obstacles preventing you from progressing. The goal of the game is to defeat an Evil Wizard and thereby earning riches and immortality. The original earned his with Enter the Dragon.
Originally developed on the colorful Atari 8-bit home computers, it was very widely ported to other home computers. The C64, the Apple II and the IBM PC all received ports of the game. It was also ported to British computers like the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro as well as Japanese computers like the PC-88, Sharp X1 and MSX.
The IBM PC version came on a self-booting diskette. Judging by the Atari version, the IBM PC version at first looks very downmarket. Most people are only familiar with the 4-color CGA graphics. These graphics are shown on an RGB display. But as the display screen suggests, there is another option.
The second 4:30 option shows Bruce Lee as the game could be displayed on a North American color TV set or NTSC composite color monitor. Now the color is much more varied, the stripes are gone. The tradeoff of course is that the graphics are not quite as sharp as they would be on an RGB display. I would suggest that most people would have preferred color over sharpness. I am using an old-style CGA card, so a new-style CGA card will show slightly different colors.
But what if you could combine the colors of the composite CGA graphics with the sharpness of the RGB graphics? Unfortunately Bruce Lee does not support EGA or better graphics adapters. But it does have a third 9:06 set of graphics contained on its disk, it does support the 16-color 160x200 graphics mode of the IBM PCjr. The PCjr's composite video output will show similar colors and will be sharper than the CGA composite video, but not quite as sharp as the RGB video output.
Bruce Lee, when run on the PCjr., also supports the PCjr.'s three voice PSG for music and sound effects, so not only does it look much more like the Atari and Commodore versions, it also sounds like them too. For the negatives, the enhanced graphics and sound will only appear on an IBM PCjr., not a Tandy 1000. Also, the game runs a little slower on the PCjr. compared to the PC. If you ran the game off a hard drive, which would require a DOS Conversion hack, the game may run just as fast on a PCjr. as it does on a PC.
I have taken the RGB CGA and Composite CGA video capture from an IBM PC/XT and the RGB PCjr. video capture from an IBM PCjr. I used the GV-USB2 for composite video capture and the Datapath VisionRGB E1s (via CGA2RGB converter) for capturing RGBI video. I captured at 720x240 and doubled the height 2x for a more appropriate aspect ratio, then resized everything 300% for Youtube using nearest neighbor scaling. The PC Speaker output was taken by tapping the leads of the speaker with alligator clips, but the PCjr. fortunately offers an RCA jack for audio output. I used the audio input on the GV-USB2 for all audio, it seems to be much kinder to the PCjr.'s audio output than my PC's line input.
For control I used a Gravis Gamepad. The IBM Game Control Adapter has no issue with the Gravis controller and its "digital pad" is very useful in many older 2-D PC games. The PCjr. uses proprietary port connectors for almost everything, but there is an adapter that will convert the standard DA-15 connector into something to which the PCjr. can connect. The joystick/gamepad interface is identical between the PC and PCjr., its only the connectors which are different. I used the adapter to allow me to use my Gravis Gamepad with the PCjr.
As you can tell, I am no master of Bruce Lee. I figured out finally after reviewing the footage I had recorded for this video that in the fifth room, where I died the most, you can only get the lanterns when they are white. Using a keyboard is possible with this version, but if I did I would have put on a truly pathetic show.
Other Videos By Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)
Other Statistics
Bruce Lee Statistics For Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)
Currently, Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant) has 495 views for Bruce Lee across 1 video. Less than an hour worth of Bruce Lee videos were uploaded to his channel, making up less than 0.47% of the total overall content on Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)'s YouTube channel.