Here is a screen shot of the arcade version of Rygar:

About Rygar

Rygar was created by Tecmo in 1986 and is is a scrolling ‘platform’ game where you play as Rygar, the “Legendary Warrior”. Moving through the levels, you will come across many different enemies, increasing in skill the further your progress.

Your main method of attack is via your Diskarmor, a large chain wielded disk (shield) weapon. landscape. During the game, you can acquire one of five special power icons to assist your attacks. These are:

Star Icon: Provides a longer chain to hit your enemy from a greater distance.

Crown Icon: Provides a stronger disk to hit more enemies with q single attack.

Tiger Icon: Gives ability to jump on enemies and kill them.

Cross Icon: Gives a temporary shield lasting from 10 to 45 seconds.

Sun Icon: Gives ability to shoot directly upwards, rather than the sweeping motion.

The other great attraction to Rygar is the number of hidden bonus items that can be found. There are hidden golden stars (which give you an extra life when you have collected 7 of them), hidden bomb icons that clear the screen of all enemies and time icons that extend your time in that round.

More information on Rygar, including level walkthroughs and hints, can be found at Rygar Info Site

Emulation and Rygar

The best version of Rygar available on emulation is the Sharp X68000 version. It is almost a perfect arcade machine port and is such a great version of this game. To play this game on your PC you will need to get a Sharp X68000 emulator and the Rygar disk image. You can download the emulator and the Rygar disk image from the Japanese Computer Emulation Centre. Have fun!

Most gamers will already know about emulators, but I recently discovered online C64 emulation. This is C64 emulation using Java or Flash online to run all of our favourite C64 games from the past. While it is still in its early stages, the progress so far is very impressive. Take a look at c64s.com and take a trip back to 80′s gaming at it’s best.

For those looking for details on more conventional emulation, I can recommend the CCS64 for Windows 98/2000/XP or VICE for OS X, Linux and for Windows users who don’t like CCS64. Most of the popular games and applications can be found at Lemon 64 or Arnold but for the hard to find ones, try a search at www.c64db.com – The Internet Database for C64 Games with over 30000 entries!

So now there even more ways to explore this wonderful machine and keep the Commodore 64 and its software alive, even when your 20+ year old hardware packs it in.

CCS64 Version 3