Congratulations Colin :) Well done on sticking it out,
oo-err *_+
Great news on the new software, the Gremlin games
especially being amazing to hear, I remember seeing
pictures of Harliquin back in the day and thinking it
looked brilliant, and whilst not being able to picture
Thing on a Spring, I can at least remember the name.
Haven`t been able to get issue 11 of SAM Revival yet,
but dying to hear all that music :), and the Invasion
II game on issue 10 blew me away, such nice animation
and sprites, brilliant game, Warren did a great job, I
enjoy it faar more than flashback which I could never
get anywhere with (a bold statement I realise)
Good luck with finding the time with these projects,
and I`m dying to know more about the Mahem accelerator
(serves me right for not keeping up with SAM stuff).
-
Just also like to say well done to Steve, Dan and
everyone else who`s been busy doing stuff for the new
SAM archive
--
--- 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 the 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 carefully 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
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
