STE'86

are there any "demos" or hack jobs that let you play the Dropzone fx library off the keyboard one sound at a time?

It was a proper single level demo of uridium which looked like the c64 version and was being touted round the developers stands at a show in the late 80s by it's coder.

Gentlemen, in the late 80s I remember seeing a prospective UK coders game demo of Uridium done in 2 bitplanes that scrolled MUCH better than released version. Does anyone else remember that or have in their OCD collection ? I was told at the time Hewson rejected it due to it only being 4 colour. I have just been telling Andy Braybrook about it and he never even saw it.

Has anyone on the A8 ever written or come across an in depth guide to dropzone, a real breakdown of patterns and tactics i mean?

i will get back to both of you when its in a state to play

ok will do. currently we are trying to get back to the point we left it at 2 years ago

anyone on here who was an activision badge holding Pressure Cooker ninja back in the day? (or even currently) we shall at some point in the future require playtester(s) for the c64 version and we found that with Frostbite we had great success by recruiting a tester from on here that was a badge holder, so we are going for the same system again. anyone with enough 64 "savvy" to get vice to work would be good regards Steve

we were asked by Dan some time ago not to do anymore work on the c64 version until the 2600 one was out. Its his IP so ofc we acquiesced.

nice job guys if u do anything else and want the c64 art, message me. we are looking at Pressure Cooker again atm

given my assumption that VBXE gives a serious amount of extra capability, can i ask why you have just lifted the graphics from the c64 arcade SE version unedited? are they just placeholder? I ask because I know that if i had had the opportunity to use c64 colour ram instead of complying with the legacy graphics code of commando 1985, the SE version would have looked very different to how it does. I am assuming vbxe gives significantly more opportunities than just colour ram would.

No, Tony didnt do a full one just analysed the control method code to make sure the c64 version felt exactly the same (drift and scroll slide etc) other than that the c64 version is a top to bottom recode with 8 bit charset in mind and hires hardware sprites. we added extra visual tweaks to all our conversions and in CC its was parallax scrolling clouds. I would have liked to get the sounds to match pokey more. I am very jealous of the the way the C64 coder who just just converted Seaquest got the sound to "sound"

Nice job, if you want to do a full on update for 800, i can provide you with the graphics from the 2019 c64 version.

out of interest how does this compare to the c64 version? is the c64 version the "full" version or like the truncated one?

nothing has been revealed. there was no WIP title art. it was written off many many months ago.

havent seen any microprose offerings so.... Pirates! Gunship Red Storm Rising and a shameless plug if u like 80s arcade games... Fix-it Felix

that wasnt my question tho. Jose is obviously using different colours to me. all his tones are coming from the same colour gradient whereas my light, medium and dark tones are all from different complimentary gradients to trick the eye into seeing more colour than is actually there.

its a 5 colour png file done with the PAL palette. it will need running thru a converter like Jose used.

is it possible for you to convert and test that in NTSC? I want to see if my colour selection is compliant and its just Jose's selection its having trouble with

can someone explain why the ntsc screenshots have different colours than the PAL palette? i was expecting shade variations as standard but it seems to have whole colours wrong.

LOL no right to indeed. u have had that image for over 12 months, what have u managed to do with it? bugger all. in fact you wrote it off. now everyone can see that its a viable option in 3 days. if theres one thing i hate it's quality artwork resources being wasted.

you mean the dead picture that you couldnt convert if your life depended on it which i made work to most peoples appreciation? Including i have to say the original artist. and its not about pushing the fcking hardware its about making something that looks good. the whole damned game is done in about 5 colours. your palace bedroom is extremely mono but thats brushed off as "atmospheric" so just belt up

yes it should. its a ghost image of the Prince I'm not 100% sure if the ghost effect on the right is designed to be animation motion or the shadow from the game. the effect works for either narrative so who cares? but yes it should be blue too. @José Pereira, try making the blue a touch less RGB blue by using the same shade of one of the other 2 blue tints,

looks like you are in for the mouse then guys. ain't coder ego an awesome sight.

what? apart from the fact thats as much colour as he can get on it its bloody wonderful yes. unfortunately its about 1/3 done and cant get any better. we can all do "fantasy island" art but unfortunately there isnt one of those modes on the a8 so compromise is the name of the game.

yeah, the problem is the greys are not really grey, they are all simply tonal placeholders for light,medium,dark shades for each element. so managing to preserve them all is obviously not going to help you in the end as very few of them would stay grey in the ideal final image.