Planet Bob

Interesting, that looks identical to the 7800 game Tower Toppler. I wonder what the relationship is.

Have you played any other versions of this? Which is best?

Interesting, that looks identical to the 7800 game Tower Toppler. I wonder what the relationship is.

 

Just a difference in name. For reasons unknown to me did Epyx (and later Atari) change it to "Tower Toppler" when importing it to the states. The original C64 version was written by John Phillips and released from Hewson.

 

Have you played any other versions of this? Which is best?

 

Thanks for this question. I'll have a look at the 7800 version and will report my findings tonight

The playability of the 7800 version is there, albeit the tower effect looks slightly less impressive: The background is monochrome there, while the C64 uses 4 colors per line. Also all enemies look ugly, since they are drawn with a weird vertical venetian blinds technique. (Maria must have interesting technical limits here )

 

To my surprise I also found a NES version going by the name "Castelian". It's looking as good as the C64 version, but it's s...l...o...w...

=> The whole game feels as if it's running with half the speed or even less than the C64 version!

Weren't there also ST/Amiga versions? Or am I misremembering?

 

EDIT: According to mobygames.com, there were, plus lots of others...

Weren't there also ST/Amiga versions? Or am I misremembering?

 

All in all there's probably a dozen versions, as I recall it was also ported to the Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum and MS-DOS in addition to the 68000 versions you mentioned. I'll have a look at the Miggy version tomorrow

And there was also an unreleased A8 version, albeit using Gr.8 (hires) artifacting only for color (urg). Plays slower than the 7800 version also, probably because of trying to run a soft-sprite system in high-resolution.

 

It does look like the 7800 version was, maybe, ported from the A8 version; that could explain the vertical lines. Though I'm pretty sure that artifacting doesn't quite work the same on the 7800 as the A8.

Okay, regarding the Amiga version...

 

It sure looks best overall. It also plays roughly the same as the C64 version. I just thought it was missing the awesome from the C64 version. A rotating tower is just nothing special for the Amiga - on a machine with so much power it almost feels like a low-budget title

 

There's nothing wrong with it though, besides the flaws the game design generally has.

Also all enemies look ugly, since they are drawn with a weird vertical venetian blinds technique. (Maria must have interesting technical limits here )

Actually, 7800 Tower Toppler uses hi-res artifact color. I don't know if any emulator handles it properly, otherwise it looks like alternating bright/dark vertical lines.

Is there a TV screenshot available somewhere? Would be interesting to see how it's supposed to look.

Is there a TV screenshot available somewhere? Would be interesting to see how it's supposed to look.

A Google search turned up a few fuzzy examples:

http://www.atari7800.org/screenshots/Tower_Topplerscreen.htm

http://vormedia.com/?p=235

 

 

Also, apparently someone ported it to Linux: http://www.happypenguin.org/show?tower%20t...er&start=40

 

I've toyed with porting it to the 2600 before, but never got very far...

Is there a TV screenshot available somewhere? Would be interesting to see how it's supposed to look.

http://www.vormedia.com/images/games/78_tt_02.gif

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W9iDia4DhU

Tower Topper for BeOS, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Hmmm... I wonder what this could look like on a 2600?

Hmmm... I wonder what this could look like on a 2600?

 

Some mock-ups were posted in this thread, but I'm sure that you could do much better!

 

Chris

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W9iDia4DhU

 

Ah, here on the TFT I can see something. At my home CRT the vid was pitch black

 

Is there any emu supporting this effect properly?

(The latest MESS seems to no longer run on Win 98 SE, it constantly crashes during the launch-scan it performs)

 

Hmmm... I wonder what this could look like on a 2600?

 

Some mock-ups were posted in this thread, but I'm sure that you could do much better!

 

Thanks Chris. I was remembering that I once read some ideas regarding replicating the effect on the 2600, but I couldn't find it myself.

Not sure if it's worth a try though, the PF seems way too coarse to me.

Thanks Chris. I was remembering that I once read some ideas regarding replicating the effect on the 2600, but I couldn't find it myself.

Not sure if it's worth a try though, the PF seems way too coarse to me.

The rotation could look smoother with "delayed scrolling".

 

Or unroll the tower into a wrap around, fullscreen playfield. Either with or without (delayed) scrolling.