Where Time Stood Still Conversion on Hold

Denton Designs' isometric adventure, Where Time Stood Still, was one of the first games to really make use of the extra memory in the 128K Spectrum, cramming a huge open world environment onto the 8-bit platform. The game also saw DOS and Atari ST releases, but an Amiga version failed to surface.

In an effort to rectify this, and at the same time get stuck into a mix of cracking and converting, English Amiga Board member Galahad, announced back in April that he was in the process of converting the ST version over to the Amiga.

Here's what he had to say regarding the conversion process;

"[I'm] using WHDLoad as a development tool to [quickly] develop the Amiga version. Once I have the controls and the YM emulation sorted, I can then master a proper 512K ADF version so that EVERYONE can play it, not just WHDLoad people.

[I've] still got to do the conversion for controls, so once I have the controls done, then I'll worry about sound. It's not much of a tune, but it would be good to have it included. Because I don't think I've got enough memory left for an Amiga module, the ST music will have to suffice.

Maybe YM emulation won't be as easy as I think, but that's the fun of doing the work. If it was easy, all these games would have been converted years ago".

Things looked to be going extremely well, as this footage uploaded to YouTube shows (the screen pixelisation is an encoding issue and not present in the actual game);


Further status updates were posted to the English Amiga Board between April and July, with the last appearing on the 28th of that month, which read:

"Strange bugs slowing it down, might have to optimise my ST to Amiga screen conversion routine to stop it happening."

Things went quiet after that, and with the end of October fast approaching I dropped Galahad a quick PM to see if any further progress had been made.

I received a response within an hour, and was informed that due to work commitments no further progress had been made since July, and at present he didn't know if or when he'd be able to resume the project.

It's a shame this conversion has ground to a halt, but home and work commitments come before retro gaming. If this project gets up and running again I'll let you know.