Well done Colin - congratulations on the 10 year anniversary.
 
Sounds like a great idea to convert the Gremlin games. I seem to recall someone on the list saying something about Auf Wiedersehen Monty a while ago. Do you know what happened to that?
Here's to ten more years!
 
==Matt.

Colin Piggot <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Well yesterday was a special day.... the 10th Anniversary of Quazar!

For it was on the 29th April 1995 when I had a stand at the third Gloucester
show, where I unveiled the (2nd) prototype of the Quazar Surround soundcard,
marking the start of Quazar!

And that was just the beginning of what has really taken up a heck of a lot
of my time since then! As you may be aware a few new products are in the
pipeline such as the Mayhem Accelerator, and issue 12 of Sam Revival is
nearing completion and will be being sent out shortly.

And here's some juicy tidbits of news taken from the next issue of Sam
Revival to wet your appetites about a few other things I am working on when
ever I get a few free minutes...

Hydrasoft Games
---------------
I have recently bought the rights to several old Sam games, and a pile of
unreleased stuff from Pete King, formerly going by the name Hydrasoft. Pete
had two games released back in 1996 and 1997 - Conquest and Mage Fire, which
were published to a limited extent by Zedd-Soft (run by Michael Stocks /
Zodiac Magazine). I was also involved with the two titles way back then by
adding support for the Quazar Surround soundcard to both of the games.

I had previously secured permission from Pete to use Conquest and Mage Fire
on the Sam Revival coverdisks (and you'll find Mage Fire on the coverdisk
with Sam Revival 12) but now with owning the titles I can go further with
them and I am already planning a revamp of Conquest to update all the
graphics and sounds. What I have to do now is go through a massive pile of
disks to look at all the unreleased games. Expect more news soon!


Gremlin Graphics Games
----------------------
I have received permission from Andy Davis of Alchemist Research to use old
Gremlin Graphics games on th e Sam. Now instead of just adapting the ZX
Spectrum versions to run on the Sam under emulation (as was done on the old
Blitz diskzine back in the late 1990's) it is my aim to create full Sam
versions of some of the classic games for inclusion on the Sam Revival
coverdisks.

The first game I am looking at is 'Thing on a Spring', originally released
back in 1984 for the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC only. Thing on a Spring is
a bouncy and fast platformer and with some carefully planned scroll routines
it should make the transition to the Sam with few problems.

Now the music for any game is very important for me, and I am planning to
feature the original SID based music (for use with the SID interface) as
well as a new rendition of the tune for the normal Sam SAA1099 soundchip. I'
m pleased to say that initial work on the game remake is underway, and the
SAA1099 version of the music is already complete! The SAA1099 music track
was carefu lly composed by David Suzuki-Sanders (who also composed the 'About
as SID as its going to get' SAA1099 track on the audio CD with the last
issue of Sam Revival.)

The second game I am looking at converting is 'Harlequin', one of the first
games I ever played on an Amiga, and one that immediately impressed me with
its graphics, music and playability. Harlequin is another scrolling platform
game, based in a fantasy dreamworld with very colourful graphics and a
thumping soundtrack, and was released only for the 16 bit machines in 1992 -
the Atari ST and the Amiga.

So why should the Sam be left out of such a great game? No reason I think!
So far I have converted over the graphics for the first level from the Atari
ST (easier to capture via an emulator than the Amiga version), and for the
main scenery and characters only 12 colours were used so this conversion was
quite straight forward. My aim is to convert across the whole of the first< BR>level as a test, to see how well I can get the game engine to work. However
as this game does involve full screen scrolling and some quite large sprites
I will be writing it to run with the Mayhem Accelerator to give the Sam the
speed it needs to move everything around.

(Of course the magazine will have all the screenshots of work so far, and
they will also appear on the new site at www.samcoupe.com at the end of the
week!)

And hopefully all going well, there'll be a few surprises of more new stuff
throughout 2005 too....!

Here's to many more years to come....!

All the best,

Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and Repairs for the Sam Coupe
April 1995-2005 - Celebrating 10 Years of developing for the Sam Coupe
Website: http://www.quazar.clara.net/sam/ and http://www.samcoupe.com/

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