Back in my elementary school days (in the early 90s), one of the most popular computer games at our school was Supaplex, a Boulder Dash clone for MS-DOS.
Being a big fan myself, I decided to create a level editor for the game using QBasic. The Supaedit project was born.
This was my first real programming project, and pretty daunting task (for someone my age back then) as it also involved reverse engineering the file format used for Supaplex levels. In addition, early on during the project I didn’t even have a powerful enough PC to run Supaplex, so I had to visit my friends to test the levels.
I eventually figured out the format (for the most part, I never delved deeper into some advanced features such as maps with partial gravity), and the resulting program was used by myself and several of my friends to create new Supaplex levels, often based on versions first drawn on paper. With no Internet access and very limited BBS access, the program was never distributed beyond a small group of friends.
Current State of the Project
The Supaedit project was finished in 1995. While certain advanced features were not supported by the editor, it was a perfectly capable program by then and even included documentation. Nowadays, there are far superior alternative editors. The original Supaplex is also freely available and there are few remakes that should work better with modern computers (they may not reproduce some of the quirks of the original game perfectly though, this might affect certain advanced tricks). For information about remakes and various tools, check out the Supaplex page at Martijn’s Boulder Dash site. The page also has hundreds of user-made levels.
Download and Installation
SupaEdit 3.5 (MS-DOS/QBasic, RAR archive, Finnish)
This is the final version of Supaedit. The release also includes many levels made by myself and my friends. To run the editor, you need QBasic (available from Microsoft). You may also need an emulator such as DOSBox to run QBasic and SupaEdit. The levels themselves can be easily used with original Supaplex, just replace levels.dat, level.lst and player.lst with one of the versions from archive (levels0.dat, level0.lst and player0.lst are the original files).
Screenshots (taken using DosBox)
