Emerald Mine (Classic)

About

Emerald Mine is one of the most successful clones of Boulder Dash and has become a golden classic as well, together with a few other games, such as Supaplex. It was originally designed for the Amiga computers, but there seems to be a Commodore 64 version as well. The publisher of this well-known game is Kingsoft and it was programmed by Klaus Heinz and Volker Wertich.

Boulder Dash players must have been surprised when Emerald Mine was released (in 1987), as the game had many advantages with respect to Boulder Dash. The whole game had a merrier atmosphere because the levels were colourful and the hungry yam yams made many people laugh with their clapping teeth and the sound it produced.

Also, the teamwork mode was a new aspect, as Boulder Dash could only be played in single player mode. And Emerald Mine contained many more game elements (yam yams, beetles, aliens...) and possibilities. This all was extended by the coming of new or updated level editors, which introduced new characters and items (such as the android and the spectacles) and the players could set many more options with the new versions of these editors.

Besides these new features the game in general was better than Boulder Dash. It had smooth scrolling animations and the levels were larger (64 x 32 blocks, including the border).

Kingsoft released Emerald Mine II in 1988 and it offered some improvements. It was popular, as it looked much nicer and it gave the players a better overview of their current game status. Emerald Mine III was the last Emerald Mine game by Kingsoft and you could only play games that had been published by Kingsoft with it. But everyone kept playing Emerald Mine II, in which they could also play levels that had been created by others.

There was an Emerald Mine Club (E.M.C.) in Holland, England and Austria. These clubs collected level collections by Emerald Mine players and released them, the same kind of story as with Boulder Dash, for which there were clubs such as the Boulder Dash Forever Fan Club. The Emerald Mine Club Holland still exists. In the Levels section you can download these levelsets.

Apart should be mentioned the game Rocks 'n' Diamonds by Holger Schemel, in which all the Emerald Mine Club games (level sets) can be played with their original behaviour (the original Emerald Mine source code is integrated in it) and with their original graphics, sounds and title screens. It gives you the nice atmosphere of Emerald Mine back and you don't even need an Amiga computer for it!

History

For the complete history of Emerald Mine, have a look at the main page in the History section.

Emulators

If you want to play these old levels, you can try an emulator, a program which simulates an old Amiga computer. Some emulators might be added in this section in future.

Download

Emerald Mine is a commercial game but it seems that the publisher doesn't care really much about copying it anymore, because the game is very old. For that reason I provide them on this site. If someone can prove that the publisher disagrees with this, please report it to me and in that case I will remove the downloads.

In the download table below you will find the terms 'AGA' and 'ECS' (or 'OCS'). OCS stands for 'Original Chip Set' and was is the chipset that was used on the oldest Amiga computers, the Amiga 1000, 2000 and 500. This was followed up by ECS (Enhanced Chip Set), which is the slightly improved chipset of the Amiga 3000, 500+ and 600. For the third range of Amiga computers the AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) chipset was introduced, which is a great improvement of ECS. AGA is found in Amiga CD32, 1200 and 4000 computers.

The games appeared on Amiga disks and the files below have got the *.adf (Amiga Disk File) format. Bear in mind that this list only contains the original Emerald Mine games by Kingsoft. All the other released Emerald Mine games can be found in the Levels section.

Screenshots

Click on the screenshots below to enlarge them.

Levels

Emerald Mine II came with a level editor which enabled everyone to create their own standalone Emerald Mine games. But at the time of the release of Emerald Mine (I) there was already a level editor by Headcrash available. The Emerald Mine Clubs also created other editors, which were sometimes (or maybe always) improvements of existing level editors by Kingsoft. There were also editors available in which people could draw their own graphics and use these in their games. This is the reason why some of the downloadable games below contain different graphics from the original Emerald Mine. Find a more detailed history about level editors on the Main page in the history section.

In the 80s (and beginning of the 90s) Internet played a less important role than what it does nowadays. When people had created new levels, they often sent it to the Emerald Mine Clubs of Holland, England or Australia, which spread these new games around. At a certain moment the Emerald Mine Club founded two development groups: No One Incorporated and Ruppelware International Software, short for No One and Ruppelware respectively. Many Emerald Mine games that can be found below have officially been distributed by these two developers.

As already mentioned before in the Download section 'AGA' and 'ECS' refer to the Operating Systems on different Amiga computers. As games are specified as using both an OCS and an ECS chipset in game information sources, and apparently these games work on both chipsets, I will always refer to ECS in the table below.

Some games which you know by a particular name can be listed differently. For example, the game series called 'Emerald Mine Tutorial' are not listed by the letter 'T', but by the letter 'E'. Another example: 'The New Emerald Mines' is listed under 'T' and not under 'N'.

I don't provide levelsets with occult, pornographic or other offending titles or things inside them, because this site is meant for everyone. Those levelsets are marked as 'not family-friendly'.


Warning: the list below is not complete. Since it's been a lot of work sorting these level sets out, and I don't have enough time to do this, you can also download a ZIP file which contains all Amiga disks with Emerald Mine level collections here. It is an old collection from 2005 called "TOSEC" and I've added an extra collection called "Micromines 1" to it.

This website has been created by BoulderMart (Martijn). All content is free to download. Use it at your own risk.