Emerald Mines

(Thanks to the Emerald Mines Club and also to Peter Elzner for some of the material for this web page.)

See also the Emerald Mines Club's web page.

Emerald Mines is a very popular BoulderDash-based game for Amiga. The original version was written by Klaus Heinz and Volker Wertich and released commercially by the German company Kingsoft in 1987. It included over 80 Levels and came with lots of new features over BoulderDash:

Smooth scroll animation as objects move from one position to another
Playfield size is 64x32 blocks (including border)
New extras included
- two types of emeralds (the new ones are called diamonds and are worth 3 emeralds)
- new enemies like a robot that follows the player or a thing called "Eater" (looks like Pacman) that leaves various things behind after beeing smashed and eats Diamonds
- new extras like dynamite and doors/keys
- nuts which reveal an emerald after hit by a boulder
- quicksand (only boulders can go through)
- extended magic-wall
  - Boulders change into Emeralds
  - Emeralds change into Diamonds
  - Diamonds change into Boulders
- bombs (like boulders but highly explosive!)
two-players at the same time (great fun!)
acid pools

Later, Kingsoft released version 2 with some improvements and a very slow level editor, and version 3 with minor changes. Unfortunately, Kingsoft's Emerald Mines refuses to run on high-end Amigas. Solutions are Peter Elzner's Diamond Caves (a direct copy of Emerald mines, with a few more extras and a very comfortable level editor), or the Emerald Mines Club's Emerald Mines demo (263K), ftpable from Aminet. The cost of the full version is only about US$2, to cover administrative costs of processing your order (why they don't just release the full version on the Net for free, since they don't get any profit from selling it to you anyway, is beyond me right now). The full version enables teamwork (multi-player) mode and the editor.

The Emerald Mines Club (EMC) in Holland creates, collects and distributes caves ("emerald mines"). You can become a member of the club and have the latest shipments of emerald mines sent to you monthly.

There doesn't appear to be an official Emerald Mines web page or ftp site.

Emerald Mines CDROM

There is an Emerald Mines CDROM for the Amiga. It features the original Emerald Mine (no new extras), about 10 different graphics/sound effects sets and over 10000 (ten thousand) Levels from all over the world! Unfortunately it is still the original Emerald Mine main-program which refuses to run on several expanded Amigas (grrr..) but Diamond Caves allows you to load the original EM-Levels as well as every Level from the Emerald-Mines-CD into Diamond Caves. The original Levels from EM1,2 and 3 are also present on the CD. The CDROM is made in the UK, but the only distributor I know of is one in Germany (also the publisher of the AmiNet CDROMs):
Stefan Ossowskis Schatztruhe
Veronikastr. 33
D-45131 Essen
Telephone: +49+201-788778
Email: stefano@tchest.e.eunet.de

Web page design by Peter Broadribb