Tile World is tile-based, puzzle free game software designed to emulate the game Chip's Challenge. Tile World was written by Brian Raiter, is licensed under the GPL, and runs on Windows, GNU/Linux, and BeOS.
One of Tile World's useful features is the ability to load user-created levelsets easily, without the renaming of files that is necessary in Microsoft's version of Chip's Challenge. Tile World also stores a replay of the player's fastest solution to each level, as well as showing time statistics for untimed levels (it treats them as though they had a time limit of 999 seconds).
Rulesets
Tile World has two rulesets intended to emulate two different implementations of Chip's Challenge: the MS ruleset emulates the Microsoft Windows implementation of the game, while the Lynx ruleset emulates the original game for the Atari Lynx. This is because the two versions have many differences.
Under the MS ruleset, the player and monsters move one tile at a time; that is, they do not scroll smoothly. Many bugs from the Microsoft implementation are also emulated, in order for score competition to be consistent with that implementation.
With the Lynx ruleset, all objects move smoothly. The Lynx and MS rulesets also has a variety of subtle differences in how monsters and other game elements work. For instance, in the original Lynx version, most monsters avoid fire; in the MS version, most monsters enter the fire and die. In addition, many levels made by fans use "invalid" tiles and tile combinations. These are not meaningful game elements and depend on how the Microsoft implementation happens to respond to their presense. These are not allowed when using the Lynx ruleset, because most of them cannot even be expressed in the original Lynx file format. (In Tile World, levels are stored in the format Microsoft's version uses.) The Lynx ruleset does allow some things the actual Lynx implementation of the game does not. Tile World's author Brian Raiter considered this a feature, but it became a liability when a way of modifying the Lynx game ROM and substituting in user-created levels was discovered.
Occasionally a discrepancy is discovered between one of the rulesets and the game it attempts to emulate. The MS ruleset, being more popular, tends to receives far more scrutiny. Some of the very unusual effects in that version are not emulated because they are not well understood and only occur in very specific and unlikely circumstances.
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