Tile World's Emulation of the Lynx Ruleset

Tile World's emulation of the Lynx ruleset intentionally diverges from the original Atari implementation in a few minor aspects. These differences are allowed to stand because:

Of course, these criteria are partly subjective, and while the author listens to the opinions of the general community, in the end he follows his own judgement.

(These criteria also reflect the different statuses of the MS and Lynx games. The MS game is widely played, and its odd ruleset is carefully examined for any advantage it can give in increasing scores. In contrast, the Lynx game was hardly played at all at the time Tile World was first conceived, and few people knew much about its internals or the inconsistencies in its ruleset. Because of this discrepancy, Tile World's emulation of the Lynx game was pursued mainly to revive a game that was on the verge of becoming moribund. Emulation of the MS game, on the other hand, was of little interest to the community unless it was as accurate as possible.)

The specific differences that exist between the original Atari Lynx implementation and Tile World's Lynx ruleset are as follows.

Note that, with the exception of the blobs' random movement, all of the differences listed here can be suppressed by running Tile World in "pedantic mode". This is done by supply the -P option on the command line. When Tile World is running in pedantic mode, it will e.g. ignore the wiring information in the data file and connect buttons in reading order.

Note that solution files created under Lynx pedantic mode may very well not work in normal Lynx mode, and vice versa. Tile World does not keep track of which mode was used when a solution was created. (The main purpose of supplying pedantic mode is for those who wish to use Tile World to test levels that are ultimately meant to be played with the original game, either on actual Lynx hardware or on one of its emulators.)


Tile World
Software
Brian Raiter