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Dear friends

 

When I bought my first Atari 800XL, in 1984, I immediately realized to have in my hands not only a good “game machine” but also a powerful ‘didactic’ instrument to learn.

I enjoyed myself with several good games published in the first half of the 80’s and then, I started to program with the excellent Basic available on the Atari 8 bit trying to explore and exploit the graphic and the sound of my machine.

Italian books or magazines were almost not existing and, obviously, Internet was far to be a solution… I didn’t stop in my passion and, with many difficulties, I was able to get some documents in English from the USA.

With these info and billions of hours awake in the night, I made the jump from Basic to the ‘mystic’ Machine Language...

In those years it was very popular “Winter Games” by Epyx but, unfortunately, it didn’t exist an Atari version. For this reason I decided to try to convert the Ski Jump event and to show my creation to Lindasoft, a mythical Italian software house supporting the 8-bit world.

 

The meeting was very positive and they asked me to complete an ‘Atarian’ version of winter games. I finished the game and it was published (obviously without the Ski Jump event, too similar to the original from Epyx) but, due to the Italian Atari market, based mainly on systems connected with cassette recorders, Lindasoft decided to sell it only on tape... a multi-event game is conceptually made to be run by diskette and the cassette version was not a good idea.

 

 

Now, after a lot of years, and thanks to the support of Filippo Santellocco ( http://www.santelloc...atari/index.htm ) and other friends, It's possible for me to recover this old program and to share it with all you in this complete and never released disk version. I've prepared also an English version of the instruction manual and I recommend you to read it before to play ;)

 

White Circus is a multi-event sport game, it runs on all Atari 8-bit systems and it gives you the opportunity to compete with your friends in 5 different winter disciplines.

 

Please remember:

currently my English is very far to be perfect, but it was absolutely terrible when I was a boy, so I beg your pardon for any text error in the game.

Also, White Circus has been my very first game... I programmed the code in Machine Language, I created the graphics, the music and the sounds effects. I assembled it in about 10 months in 1987, using BBK Monitor, not a real and comfortable Assembler tool…

It’s normal that White Circus is not perfect and that the playability is not always at the top. I know that it is not a masterpiece but it’s a my creature and I will always love it :)

It’s a great joy for me to have finally the opportunity to share it with all you, Atari fans :)

 

Ciao

 

P.S.

You can find this game and other news also in the nice website of Filippo : http://www.santelloc...i/programmi.htm

 

White Circus.zip

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Welcome to the forum Andrea!

 

What a wonderful way to introduce yourself: a nice story and a lost game!

 

Thanks for the kind words regarding my website, the first and only Italian language one dedicated to A8.

I am proud of it in particular for the page where I am saving Italian language manuals, books, magazines, ads.

 

'nuff said, here some White Circus screenshots:

post-12528-0-02401900-1367441867_thumb.png post-12528-0-81747300-1367441810_thumb.png post-12528-0-24136300-1367441812_thumb.png

post-12528-0-88946700-1367441813_thumb.png post-12528-0-24791300-1367441815_thumb.png post-12528-0-87161400-1367441816_thumb.png

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  • 3 weeks later...

time to try a "new" A8 game ! :)

 

You're right, my friend !

Maybe I would need some more practice in order to be good again in assembly but, nowadays we have a lot of wonderful tools compared to the late 80s...

Anyway, I'm currently working on an A8 version of an old C64 game. It should be not so difficult to 'convert' so I can consider it a sort of exercise before to try with a completely new one :)

 

Please stay tuned, because I'll give you more info about the conversion in the next days ;)

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  • 4 years later...

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