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Gunship on Atari 8-Bit?


dr. kwack

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Nice find!!

 

Beside the question if a prototype exists or not ... Has anybody ever asked if it was a good game after all? I have never played any Gunship game on any platform. But let's say the C64 version would have been the closest thing to the Atari version. Was the C64 version a good game?

 

Now that we have spotted Atari heros converting C64 games (SCR)... well hypothetical ... would it be fun to play a "Gunship A8" if it would be available just like e.g SCR?

 

grüße,

\twh

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I think Gunship would be a good idea, even better if they make it work well with the Rapidus accelerator, we could have the best version of all! (for those with the Rapidus) I'm still looking forward to getting a Rapidus and playing as many of the old vector graphic simulations as I can on it with a much improved frame-rate.

 

But all that article reveals is someone did some graphics for Gunship, but that doesn't mean a single line of code was ever done for the 8-bit version...what it does show is that there was preliminary work done on an 8-bit version.

Edited by Gunstar
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Nice find!!

 

Beside the question if a prototype exists or not ... Has anybody ever asked if it was a good game after all? I have never played any Gunship game on any platform. But let's say the C64 version would have been the closest thing to the Atari version. Was the C64 version a good game?

 

Now that we have spotted Atari heros converting C64 games (SCR)... well hypothetical ... would it be fun to play a "Gunship A8" if it would be available just like e.g SCR?

 

grüße,

\twh

If you had a C64 with a disk drive..It was worth getting Gunship..if like myself back then you only had a cassette drive...forget it.

 

The Zzap64 review is spot on.

 

http://www.zzap64.co.uk/cgi-bin/displaypage.pl?issue=024&page=016&magazine=zzap

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To be clear, Gunship existed for the Atari 8 bit and it was pirated before it could be mass produced and profited from. The plug was pulled and that was the end of it. This has happened many times and we've lost a lot because of it. My opinion is that had production copies beyond the initial mastering been released it still would have been sold just fine... that's not the way it works out though, who wants to chance that?

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Rockball was a myth too, until I released what I had of it, people didn't want to believe the very man who said he finished it... While what I cobbled back together was not the perfect finished product, he was at least vindicated, as I had the files and some sources from the original work on our drives, I recovered everything I could and put it out there. All you heard was it's a mis-remembered and it wasn't real. How many years till the old disks were looked at and brought out? Decades, if no one had mentioned it and insisted it was done, I would not have worked so hard to go through the old office and find it... We shared lots of stuff back in the day, Gunship crossed our way. I really don't know if I still have a copy or not... it was finicky and ran on one drive and not another... I don't know if it hated our archiver or not... I do remember it ran on some drives and not others... I'd suggest you take mach f at his word. Because he is correct

 

Say what you wish but again... Gunship was done, it doesn't mean it can't be done again if it can't be found..... these kind of things take on a life of their own....

 

You have credible people and artists claiming to have done the work, You have magazines, write ups, and memoirs saying it was done, you have persons who have seen the thing and told you why it wasn't run.... and still the doubts...

 

I don't know what I'll find but I'll start digging again.. I'd suggest everyone else do the same.. It's out there... clean the crap out of your drives and don't forget labels fall off so it could be that disk with nothing on the jacket that has everything we need... look for papers and disks labeled late '85, 1986,1987 give or take a year...maybe even 88

 

_The Road Warrior__

Edited by _The Doctor__
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  • 3 years later...

I wonder if I could still remember my password on this forum... I certainly don't have the e-mail account I had back then when I registered (14 years ago...!)

 

Never mind, I just managed to remember it and changed my e-mail address.

 

So, I guess there's been no luck yet, huh? Pity...

 

(sorry for the bump, but just recently I started to look again at my old Atari 8-bit stuff, and today I was looking through old printouts and stuff, somehow I ended up wondering "maybe Gunship finally resurfaced", I googled "atari gunship" and one of the results brought me back right here...)

 

Edited by machf
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I hate to sound like a stuck record, but…

 

In all my time at Microprose there was no evidence of A8 Gunship being an actual project in anything other than name. Whilst I cannot refute that art or mock-ups were made for the game, I could find no evidence of them nor any code…

 

sTeVE

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On 6/21/2018 at 3:43 AM, _The Doctor__ said:

To be clear, Gunship existed for the Atari 8 bit and it was pirated before it could be mass produced and profited from. The plug was pulled and that was the end of it.

Flaw in your comment: If this is true, then where is it? Because pirates never, ever shared... right?

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I did an article on Microprose for a trade mag with full contact with them, and they never made any mention of Gunship on the Atari, C64, yes, not Atari. I do remember asking if there were any projects coming up they would speak about and all I was told was the same titles everyone knew about with hints about new stuff.

 

As for it being pirated, well I was pretty deep in that scene and I never remember it being around. Big name companies like them were always top of the pirate pile because the game would normally be good. If the pirates got hold of that, I can promise it would have been everywhere.

 

I seem to remember a demo done in Poland possibly but it was just a fan thing and just had a version of the Gunship box art.

 

Edit: Just went through my stuff and found the demo, but it was produced 6 years after Gunship was out so 100% just a fan demo.

 

 

Edited by Mclaneinc
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Who actually handled the A8 versions of Microprose titles, coding wise? 

 

I remember there being Microprose USA, Microprose UK and Microprose France.

 

 

Stories in the UK Press in 1991 maybe? of Microprose setting up it's own UK coding studio, where as before the games had been coded in the USA, then published under Microprose UK arm. 

 

These were the UK people. 

 

 

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No idea re the coding, I spoke to the UK and US studio's,  what the UK side did I have no clue, for me, it was just about getting info and the odd free game (never got one), did get an offer to visit them and a bottle of plonk (from memory).

 

Oh, and when I mentioned the piracy side, I think it seemed to look like a brag, certainly wasn't meant to be like that, I was purely trying to say that I was getting access to pretty much everything 8 bit wise, and I'm sure I would have remembered Gunship, which I don't on the Atari.

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1 hour ago, Lostdragon said:

Who actually handled the A8 versions of Microprose titles, coding wise? 

 

I remember there being Microprose USA, Microprose UK and Microprose France.

 

 

Stories in the UK Press in 1991 maybe? of Microprose setting up it's own UK coding studio, where as before the games had been coded in the USA, then published under Microprose UK arm. 

 

These were the UK people. 

 

 

 

Microprose UK emerged when MPS bought Rainbird - I worked for them when they moved from Tetbury to Chipping Sodbury, just outside Bristol, from 1991-ish.

 

No 8bit development was ever undertaken in the UK - the only legacy home computer format we touched was the Amiga whilst I was there.

 

All 8bit development was done out of Hunt Valley, all long gone by the time I turned up - I visited that office several times and knew many of the staff well, but there was no cupboard of long lost gems ?

 

That video is awesome, I keep in touch with some of those people ? sadly Mike Brunton recently passed away... 

 

          sTeVE

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Thank you both gentlemen. 

 

The video i stumbled across by pure accident when looking into Jane Whittaker claims of being involved on various Amiga flight sims for Microprose (you wish Jane). 

 

That's very sad news about Mike, we are loosing so many from the industry these days ?

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1 hour ago, Jetboot Jack said:

 

Microprose UK emerged when MPS bought Rainbird - I worked for them when they moved from Tetbury to Chipping Sodbury, just outside Bristol, from 1991-ish.

 

No 8bit development was ever undertaken in the UK - the only legacy home computer format we touched was the Amiga whilst I was there.

 

All 8bit development was done out of Hunt Valley, all long gone by the time I turned up - I visited that office several times and knew many of the staff well, but there was no cupboard of long lost gems ?

 

That video is awesome, I keep in touch with some of those people ? sadly Mike Brunton recently passed away... 

 

          sTeVE

Where you there when Steve Cain was working for them?
I was called in at one point, what year I couldn't say as I struggle to remember what I had for breakfast these days.
I was working on Citizens. Although I vaguely remember it being called "Little People" at the time.
I was doing a shedload of sprite work for it, but it never came to fruition. Par for the course with a lot of projects both then and now.

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On 6/1/2022 at 6:20 AM, Mclaneinc said:

As for it being pirated, well I was pretty deep in that scene and I never remember it being around. Big name companies like them were always top of the pirate pile because the game would normally be good. If the pirates got hold of that, I can promise it would have been everywhere.

Well, as I said, I was told it was really hard to pirate, with two different drive mods needed to copy both sides of the disk (one of which this former schoolmate didn't have on his computer), and after it was copied, he'd have given me his disks and kept the copy sonce the copy would only run on a modded drive. And unfortunately, back then I was still stuck with a 410 program recorder, and my late cousin-in-law wasn't interested in the game.

 

What brought me back here was searching the Internet again for any news regarding this version of Gunship after finding out AtariMania listed the "Aventuras D'Onofrio" games with a rarity rating of "10", even though I *had* uploaded images of the disks to th UMich archives a long time ago, where they have been mostly unnoticed all this time... so I though, "well, maybe the same happened, who knows".

 

And I repeat: what I saw loading (and played for a couple of minutes) was NOT Super Huey or Tomahawk... find me another helicopter sim for the Atari 8-bit in which the cockpit looks pretty much like the Commodore 64's version of Gunship, and we may have found the answer to the mystery.

 

On 6/1/2022 at 3:54 AM, Jacques said:

With no existence of Gunship, it makes a nice candidate for Atari8 conversion :)

I've been thinking the same lately...

 

Also, this is what I recall seeing some years later at another friend's home in his manual for the ST version, here from the AtariMania page on Gunship for the ST at http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-gunship_9498.html

gunship_microprose_software_usa_i_9.jpg

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On 6/1/2022 at 5:49 PM, Landstalker said:

Where you there when Steve Cain was working for them?
I was called in at one point, what year I couldn't say as I struggle to remember what I had for breakfast these days.
I was working on Citizens. Although I vaguely remember it being called "Little People" at the time.
I was doing a shedload of sprite work for it, but it never came to fruition. Par for the course with a lot of projects both then and now.

Yes I was there when LP/Citizens was being developed and then canned.

 

Lovely looking game - the artist team particularly Paul Ayliffe, we quite obsessed with the style of the Bitmap Brothers!


sTeVE

 

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Those pesky directions for loading Gunship can't exist, just like folks who said the LH Football didn't exist. or Rockball wasn't completed (even after the main programmer said he did!), or any number of other titles people bickered about over time after being told it was real / existed in one form or another and in every case the software turned up... so the silliness will continue, and people still act snide and doubt.. each time without so much as a sorry from the chimpanzees that flung such poo...  as many worked hard to get the titles out there... even providing reconstructed material until the full software was found, recovered and provided to all. How soon they forget and wonder why not as much effort it put forth over the next title... it's not like the data isn't buried in the deep recesses of a barn, basement, workshop, old office that has been in mothballls for 40 or so years... or that a person might even remember where or what was on that disk... let's not forget all the Roklan stuff/on time stuff that was literally handed off to a fellow who dug through it and provided the goods. Such a thing can happen again, but this time I don't think I'll deal with the poo flinging silliness... it's been decades, whats a couple more... maybe a kid or relative will suddenly discover the disks during the culling of an estate and run them out for all to enjoy... heh more likely it'll end up in the trash... most have no idea what the old stuff is...  vented and done... time for someone else to see what they can/want to do.

Edited by _The Doctor__
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Yes it can seem to be a bit 'if I had not seen it then it can't exist' at times, in my defence I never went down that path. I purely pointed out that I had done a double page spread on Microprose with direct help from them, and they never mentioned it. On the piracy side I said that I'd never seen it and I had access to pretty much everything that was being 'spread', that's not to say it never existed. Someone I think said it had been pirated, again I say, such a title because of the named company would have been a big trophy for the hackers and spreaders.

 

The question is, is it out there or found it's way to the bin, the loading instructions tend to suggest that it must have been something they planned to work on. I can't remember if Microprose only used in house creations, or they farmed out to individuals. As for claims of stuff, we can't take all of them 100%, remember the dev that claimed he wrote Star Raiders?

 

Lost Dragon may have that answer regarding if it was always in house work.

 

As for putting off people hinting the stuff down, not in my case, the stuff that Kay does is just phenomenal and no one in their right mind would try and put him off. I do as I do to anyone doing stuff for these old machines, I thank them for their time and effort and I see that echo'ed left right and centre by folks on here.

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The only i'nvestigation'work I ever carried out regarding Microprose work was to triple check Andrew now Jane Whittaker claims about working on various Amiga Flight Sims was rubbish as was the claim Whittaker was headhunted by Wild  Bill and Sid Meier... 

 

This done to assist with a legal case between Whittaker and a third party.. 

 

 

Before that, Jaguar Gunship 2000,which one of the various folk i had been chatting with at the time, knew the Jaguar coder of the game and he'd said work was abandoned after early 3D modelling done. 

 

Over the years sadly an awful lot of industry folk have taken credit for titles they had no role on.. 

 

Kingsley from Rebellion claiming he'd done A8 Star Raiders, Whittaker has a list as long as your arm, Jr artist claiming credit for graphics Jim Sachs had actually done on Amiga Defender Of The Crown. 

 

Sad but that's the situation facing us. 

 

 

Others  simply get confused over which versions they'd worked on.. The Tiertex Desert Strike G. G coder thinking he'd done the M. S version, which had been done by The Kremlin is a good example, nothing malious in his claims, just a hazy memory. 

 

For years people claimed only certain games had been in development for the Atari Panther, then a new round of research turned those claims on their head. 

 

I don't think you can ever write anything off, you simply exhaust your sources, try and reach as many sources as you can. 

 

Game manuals/instructions were often written at a point a publisher had plans for multiple versions and would include references to versions never started, they are much like magazine adverts, designed and produced months in advance. 

 

A8 Jackal shown on early Konami UK magazine ads, cut from later editions. 

 

You  also never know what's still out there in private collections. 

 

So much source code has been lost as people didn't make back-ups, it was thrown out,as it wasn't seen as important at the time. 

 

I'm just grateful there are still people coming forward, sharing personal accounts in an effort to try and shed light on what might of been. 

Edited by Lostdragon
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Sorry, but a game of this calibre would be an AAA title back then and everyone would have it, as long as it was in a reasonably complete state. So it's extremely improbable it'd get lost and did not surface until now. A manual page is also not a proof of its existence, because these kinda things happened all the time, alongisde adverts and mag previews "from the future".

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Gunship didn't come out but I remember playing Tomahawk over at a friend's house. TBH, though, I never really thought that flight sims worked that well on 8-bit machines as they often had pretty shocking frame rates. The 16-bit era is where they really (ahaha) took off.

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