International Karate Comes to The Amiga!

Way back at the start of November last year I reported on three Atari ST games that had been lovingly ported to the Amiga. Converted by English Amiga Board member Meynaf, the titles were Gauntlet, Joust and Super Sprint. All three games ran perfectly on expanded Amiga 1200's, and I found them to be extremely playable.
Maynaf's been pretty quiet since then, but earlier this week, and out of the blue, he announced that he'd ported over the beautiful looking International Karate from the Atari ST. Not only that, but he'd made it available for download.
Here's the game in action on an Atari ST;

IK footage captured by 2PeteShakur
Naturally, the online Amiga community were extremely excited by this news, downloaded it and started testing it on real and emulated Amiga systems.
Feedback from users has already started to come in, and with people experiencing the odd freeze, unusual colour schemes or the game running too fast with 28mhz 030 processors, it may be that Meynaf has to make a few tweaks and issue an update before we can get a stable and perfectly running version of IK on the Amiga.
Nevertheless, what Maynaf's achieved so far is already amazing work, and I suggest you get this installed on your Amiga at once.
You can download IK Amiga by clicking on THIS direct link, which points to an LZX archive. I would also suggest you keep visiting the IK link over on The English Amiga Board, as it looks like this may be the place to go to for news of any updates/issues.
Here's hoping that once Maynaf's finished tweaking this he moves on to more previously un-ported and exclusive ST titles.

Interview with Stewart Gilray (ex-21st Century Entertainment)

In today's update to the blog I bring news from the Retro Collect tearm, who earlier this week announced that they'd managed to bag an interview with ex-Amiga programmer Stewart Gilray.

Stuart worked on a number of Amiga titles in his earlier years, including Marvin's Marvellous Adventure and Pinball Fantasies, to name but two.

Here's the blurb from the Retro Collect web site;

"Joining the RetroCollect Squad this month is our very first special guest, Just Add Water's Stewart Gilray. Having spent an odyssey in the gaming industry - since the days of floppy disks & cassette tapes - this gaming veteran has countless enticing stories to tell, all of which lead up to how he became an inhabitant of RuptureFarms.

For those unfamiliar with the name, you'll have experienced many of Stewart's past releases without even realising. Having spent many years working for the likes of Hewson Consultants, 21st Century Entertainment, and of course Just Add Water; games such as Marvin's Marvellous Adventure, Pinball Fantasies, Gravity Crash and the more recent Oddworld titles have all been blessed by this British gaming icon.

But enough talking from us, Stewart has more than enough to say in the latest episode of RetroCollect FM. Discussing his colourful past, Stewart gets carried away by a wave of nostalgia discussing his early days including the ups and downs before arriving on his more recent ventures with Oddworld Inhabitants".

The podcast runs for over two hours, and is broken down as follows:

• Introduction and the early years
• The later days
• Gravity Crash and Just Add Water
• Oddworld Inhabitants
• Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee New N' Tasty

Download, subscription and information links are as follows;

Podcast Download Link - Click here
Subscribe on iTunes - Click here
Podcast Information - Click here

The Lemon/EAB Super League 2013 - Round 4

The latest round of the Lemon Amiga and English Amiga Board Super League is here, and for round 4 the two games are 2012's "Downfall" and "BabeAnoid" from 2003.

Downfall is a conversion of an Atari Jaguar game, where you have to keep your main character on screen while the screen scrolls upwards, whilst BabeAnoid, as the name suggests, is an Arkanoid/Breakdout clone.

Both games are public domain titles, and as such are free and legal to download.

The competition is open to anyone, and you're welcome to join in at any time.

Rules, screenshots of the games and links to download them can be found on this thread over on the Lemon Amiga Forums.

Get yourselves signed-up and take part!

Recommended Site - JD's K240 Page

Released by Gremlin Graphics way back in 1994, K240 was a complex but extremely playable strategy game, which I must have spent hours playing back in the day.

Clearly I'm not alone in my love of this ancient title, as fellow fan "Jonathan", has created a massive sub-section over on his web site detailing all kinds of tips, tricks, trivia and notes related to the game.

Those simply after tips to help play the game are well catered for, but those who want to know more about the game's copy protection, undocumented features, text strings, in-game history, and how the CU Amiga demo differed from the final product, are in for a real treat.

Don't be put off by the 1995 look of the site. Yes, it looks extremely basic, but it's the content that matters, right?

If you've got a spare 10 minutes, you could do a lot worse than give JD's K240 web site a visit. There's some great stuff there, and I found the content fascinating.

Pop over to: http://www.jonnydigital.com/k240

AMITEN SOFTWARE CD Compilation VOL I

The Spectrum and C64 scenes seem to be awash with not only new game releases, but releases that come as fully packaged products. The Amiga on the other hand seems to suffer from few new games landing on the platform, let alone ones that come in physical packaging.

Thankfully, English Amiga Board member Amiten, has just announced the physical release of "Amiten Software CD Compilation Volume 1", a compilation disc featuring a selection of complete games, game demos, tech demos and music from the Amiten label.

Here's Amiten with the details;

"I want you to know that I have available for sale 1 CD-Rom (limited units) called Amiten Software CD Compilation Vol I.

The CD includes three complete games (SPACER REMAKE / FISH and RUNPUFF)

Also included INSIDE the Intro and Mega Demo called "Just Forever" and and my last job 14 tracks of musical Tech / ambient / House.

As added features playable demos of AMIVANIA and AMIKILL.

The CD-ROM price is 10 € each shipping included worldwide.

It comes in a CD-ROM printed ligthscribe and printed cover.

Each CD comes with a serial number and is printed to register your copy by sending an e-mail to the address clubamiten@gmail.com with serial number thereby ensuring you get free updates for games SPACER REMAKE / FISH and Run Puff only when is avaliable.

The demos of the games AMIVANIA & AMIKILL are just and early demos of what will one day when they are finished and will be shared at the time otherwise are not included in the option of free updates.

I accept paypal as a payment" 

(Amiten Software CD Vol 1 - Cover)

There's far too much on the CD for me to cover it in this blog post, so I suggest you visit this massive post on the English Amiga Board, where Amiten covers each title on the compilation. You'll also find details there detailing how you can order an ISO of the compilation if you're not bothered about a full physical release.

"Snaky 2013" First Preview Footage

Here's something that'll interest all the puzzle fans out there - English Amiga Board member gibs, has just announced that he's working on a new snake-based puzzler.

Going under the name of "Snaky 2013", the objective of the game is to clear each level of fruit, while at the same time ensuring that you don't crash into your tail. Initially this is pretty easy to do, but this task gets increasingly difficult as the levels become more complex, and the number of fruit items grows, meaning your snake's tail becomes longer and longer.

Featuring some nice music, sampled Pac-Man sound effects, and even some basic cut-scenes, it's clear that work on this project is already at an advanced stage. Take a look for yourself, as gibs has uploaded footage of the game in action...

At present the game isn't available for download, and no date for the full release has been given. Naturally, I'll make sure that should any further news regarding Snaky 2013 surface I'll post it on this very blog. However, if you wish to keep up-to-date with the game's development progress, I suggest you follow this thread on the English Amiga Board.

Dangermouse Adventure - Latest Updates

Following a number of quiet months due to work commitments, Christian of AmigaPD.com seems to have really thrown himself back into the development of his Dangermouse themed adventure, as progress updates have been cropping up online on an almost daily basis over the past week or so.

The first of these updates covers the development of the combat routines, which are apparently now complete.

Here's Christian;

"[I've] completed [the] combat routine, [and] now need to add to all room locations where combat takes place - Fingers crossed just a case of removing REM statements. 

Ironically the longest part of the process was making the video as my screencapture software had expired and ended up spending ages converting various media files argh!!!!"

You can see the combat routine in action below;

With that completed, work has moved on to the title screen, and that's also been ticked-off. Here's what it looks like. It's a nice, clean and simple design.

(Note the Mencap logo. Don't forget to donate)

And finally, here's your chance to have some input on the game. Christian is looking to change a number of the room names to more Amiga related ones, and he'd like your suggestions.

For more information and to take part you'll need to head over to this link on the English Amiga Board.

AmiQuake 2 Reaches Beta 10

Things seemed to have gone rather quiet on Novacoder's port of Quake 2 to 68k machines, but in the last few days he returned to the English Amiga Board with a number of exciting updates...

"It's been a bit painful recently, I had to start from scratch a couple of times to understand some strange bugs I was getting. I think I've now ported this thing to AGA using about 3 different engines!

Anyway, I've now got the sound working well (at last). Sound is going to very configurable BTW. You'll actually be able to change things like the AHI audio unit & playback rate using the Quake console and using the menu you'll be able to switch between 16 and 8bit sound.

Memory consumption has also be a pain to fix-up, I've had to re-write most of the hunk memory allocation routines. It used to need over 80MB just to run the demo, I've now got that down to about 40MB, I still can't run the full retail game with 64MB but I haven't given up yet.

There's not too much left to do now really, I've got a couple of strange bugs that have crept in recently that I need to fix (probably as a result of my optimizations) and maybe I'll do some last minute performance tweaks. With a big project like this, you could carry on doing little performance tweaks forever so you need to know when to give up.

It's just about playable on my 060 now with sound + dynamic lighting and particles enabled using a slightly reduced screen.

I'd also like to add mouse wheel support for changing weapons if I get time".

A day or two later he returned with the comment below, and some exciting YouTube footage of the game in action on a real Amiga 1200.

"Finally got it running at a good speed on my A1200, a lot of people didn't this would even be possible on AGA 68k!"

As soon as I hear anything further regarding this project I'll update the blog. In the meantime, you can follow the progress of this conversion from the beginning to the present day by viewing this thread on the English Amiga Board.

Spectrum to Amiga Conversion - The Pyramid

Released for the ZX Spectrum way back in 1983, Fantasty Software's "The Pyramid" was amongst the earliest batch of titles for the system to move away from simply being a conversion of one of the current arcade games doing the rounds.

Coded by Bob Hamilton, with assistance from Darren and Ian Hamilton, the game saw you control Ziggy, as he descended through the 15 layers of The Pyramid. A pure machine code title, the game featured smooth, well animated sprites, and arcade style gameplay.


OK, so what does this have to do with the Amiga? Well, during a recent browse through YouTube, I discovered that back in 1992 the game was ported to Commodore's 16-bit system. As The Pyramid was a much-loved favourite of mine on the Speccy, I wanted to give the Amiga version a go, and thankfully, as the author of the Amiga version had commented on the video I dropped him an email.

Whilst waiting for a reply to my email a quick search on Google directed me to the Langford Productions web site, where the author Richard Langford, had detailed a number of his projects, including his Amiga conversions. Naturally, amongst that list was his Amiga conversion of The Pyramid.

Along with a couple of screenshots and a link to a YouTube clip of the game in action, sitting proudly in The Pyramid section are scans of The One's review of the game, which they award an impressive 88%, while commenting;

"The Pyramid game from prolific author Richard Langford is up to his usual excellent standard of presentation, winsomely embellished with little touches, animations, sound and music effects.

The game is ace value for money as it offers change each play, allowing you to take a different pathway through the pyramid every time. I'm the sort of person that likes to see all the different screens and nasties - so I consider this feature a major plus.

Langford has really thought about speed and graphic rewards here, producing a must for anyone who plays games for the same reasons as me."

Unfortunately, Richard's web site doesn't have download links to his old games, and so I was unable to fire the game up. Thankfully, Richard responded to my message really quickly, and attached the ADFs of disks 1 and 2. He also responded to my comments regarding how much I loved the Spectrum original

"The game was originally public domain software and was just written as a bit of fun. Can’t remember when exactly I wrote that game, but I’m guessing around 1992. Unfortunately at the time I didn’t have a copy of the original game which is why my version is not really much like the original at all."

Armed with the disk images I quickly set about transferring them back to floppy disk, ready for play on a real Amiga.

The thing that struck me upon loading the game up was the sheer quality of the presentation. The menu screens are well drawn, colourful, and they made me smile. Why? Well, there's a jaunty little tune playing in the background, and while cycling through the various intro screens one of them displays a small trumpet with buttons/keys. Each of these represents one of the Amiga's sound channels, and on top of each of these is a little green bug who depresses the buttons as the tune progresses. It's all very slickly done.

On to the game itself, and the same high level of production continues. The sprites are colourful, well animated, and move around the screen smoothly. Despite what Richard told me in his email, I felt that the game played very similar to the Spectrum original, but at the same time featured numerous enhancements. Special pick-ups increase your score, and each level features a gorgeous animated backround, which makes clever use of colour cycling.

The most amazing thing about all this is that the game was coded in AMOS, and just goes to show what can be done with the language if put in the right hands. Also, although coming on two disks the game loads quickly, and you're not left waiting long to get into the action. Very important!

If you'd like to try the game yourself, you'll be pleased to learn that Richard has been kind enough to let me make the disk images available for download, and so I've uploaded them to my web site. A zip containing disks 1 and 2 can be found HERE (556K).

For those unable or unwilling to get the game up and running on a real or an emulated Amiga system, you can see the game in action below.


If time allows I intend to investigate some of Richard's other Amiga titles in the not too distant future. If they're up to this standard then I know I'll be in for a real treat. In the meantime I'm going to give this just one more go. Happy zapping!

The Story of "Stalker"

I was hoping to blog about this discovery when news first surfaced, but due to other commitments I've not had time until now. On the plus side it has meant that I'm now able to track the complete story from beginning to end.

The whole saga began on the 27th February, when English Amiga Board forumite DDNI, uploaded this photo (see below) to the forum, and commented;

"This lucky chap just got a new A1200 from Petro. Any ideas what game this is on the screen? I didn't see anything on HOL."

A number of possible leads and suggestions came in from fellow EAB forumites, with fellow forum member diablothe2nd, coming up with some interesting avenues of investigation. However, Later than day DDNI got back to the forum, and posted the following;

"Hi I made contact with Jozsef Punk. He kindly sent me this information:
___________________

Stalker is a prototype of an Amiga game I developed with two of my friends about 20 years ago. The main unique feature of the game was the rearrangeable playfield. The player controls a two leg robot in a scene that is built by same sized blocks. These blocks are moveable in rearrange mode.

Developers are:
Ferenc Bardos - Graphics
Viktor Dara - Music
Jozsef Punk - Programming

If you are interested, I have different versions of demos of the game in adf files.
The game has never been finished and has not been released.
We did not find a publisher to finance the development.
______________

Hopefully I will have some .adf files to try soon".

Members of the English Amiga Board didn't have long to wait, as the next day DDNI was back, and gave the following update;

"Got the .adf files which feature four versions from 0.18 to 0.64.
This game looks like it could have been great.

So far there isn't much in the game, but the mechanics are all there. The graphics and sound are crisp and atmospheric. It seems like the only things missing now are the game levels... I have been promised the full source code and support documentation too!

I will share these if and when I have got the green light.

Stay tuned!"

DDNI was also kind enough to post up four screenshots of the game. You can see the full selection here, but here's one to whet your appetite. 

Later that same day DDNI posted-up a short follow-up message;

"So now I have the source code and a later version of the game. (sadly it has a Read/Write error. Can this be overcome?)

Jozsef has given permission for these to be shared publicly.

I will upload the adfs to the zone and provide the source code to anyone who wants it.

There have been no restrictions placed on the source code, but I assume referencing the original artist is an expectation".

EAB moderator Prowler, offered his services in an effort to repair the ADF, and in the meantime fellow forumite s2325 was kind enough to record and upload footage of the game in action to YouTube. The following day Prowler posted a quick update;

"I would say that there's a reasonable chance that the broken disk can be fixed.

Disk Block 1221 is at offset 98A00-98BFF in the ADF image. It's a data block, which doesn't appear to be massively corrupted, thankfully.

I will give it my best shot tomorrow in the emulator".

With Prowler busy working on repairing the disk, TheCyberDruid got to work on producing an entry for the game on the excellent Hall of Light web site. The completed entry can be found here.

Later that day Prowler returned with some fantastic news;

"Hey, I think I got the disk fixed!

The game now loads complete with background graphics, but the fix involved a certain amount of guesswork, so there may still be errors in the affected file (Stalker.data.1), so please post your bug reports here in that event (including what's needed to trigger the bug) and I'll have another look.

The fixed disk image will be up in The Zone shortly.

In fact, I can get all versions except 0.18 running in WinUAE with an A1200 KS3.1 configuration. Version 0.18 gives a Guru Meditation Error: 8000 0006 Task: 00203278.

It's a real nice-looking game, so I guess I ought to attach some screenshots here now..."

You can find the screenshots at this EAB link, and more here.

If you'd like to download the ADFs of Stalker you'll need to be a registered member of The English Amiga Board. If you are, you can simply click here.

Meanwhile, the Amiga Music Preservation Society have ripped the music, so if you'd like to download that you can find it at this link.  

The Amiga community should thank DDNI for his efforts which have lead to the discovery of this long lost title.

Who knows what the next undiscovered Amiga production will be.

New Port Incoming - Strife AGA

Released on the PC way back in 1996, Strife is a first person shooter that possibly pushes the Doom engine to its limits.

Featuring some basic RPG elements and the ability to talk to NPC's in the game, this FPS is a little different to the majority that came out at the time.

At this point you're probably asking "What does this have to do with the Amiga?". Well, in a recent post over on the English Amiga Board, forumite lantus360 revealed that he'd begun porting this over to AGA Amigas. Not only that, but he'd already made some stunning progress.

Here's his initial post;

 Hi guys,

"I got my A1200 setup finally up and running so of course i decided to set up a compiler and start messing around

I managed to get an AGA Port of Strife ported over in a few evenings of coding.

If you don't know what this is its an old FPS based RPG that uses the Doom engine by Rogue. It's the last ever title that used the Doom engine and its a really awesome game"

Keen to demonstrate how well the game was already running after only a few days of development, he continued;

"Here's a quick look at how its performing - note its running on a Blizzard 1260 060 at 50mhz. Speed is looking pretty good, I could probably tweak it faster. I don't know if an 030 will handle this. I'd say a minimum 040/40mhz to be considered playable"

It would seem that further tweaks are planned for this exciting conversion, as lantus360 finished his initial post by saying;

"I am certainly interested in squeezing as much performance out as possible so I will take a look at the DoomAttack source. Having said that I cant see it running very well on an 030. Maybe at one of the smaller screen sizes it might be playable

Right now I'm timedemo'ing at 17fps on my 060/50mhz. I'm not sure where that lies in terms of comparisons to other similar Doom engine games. I'd be interested in any numbers people may have as a guideline"

To follow the development progress and discussion of this game point your web browser over to this link over on The English Amiga Board.

Dangermouse Adventure - A Quick Update

Despite initially making speedy progress developing his AMOS coded adventure, Christian of AmigaPD.com found that due to work commitments development had to come to a near standstill over the past couple of months.

Thankfully it looks like his work pressures have reduced somewhat, and development on the adventure is now continuing apace.

In his latest development update Christian revealed what aspects of the title he'd recently been working on.

"Work continues on the Dangermouse text adventure game. I have now finished adding the correct image to all 400 locations.

What remains to be done is:
Test Luck Routine
Test Combat Routine
Test Inventory System
Complete End Game routine
Correct text alignment for locations 201 - 400
Make version available for play testing.
Correct text input routine so that player can only enter valid key inputs (simple else command returning routine to current location).

Last routine still to do - Save and load routine."

With a whopping 400 separate locations this looks to be an absolutely massive game, and certainly one you won't be ploughing through in one sitting. It could be time to dig out that graph paper and prepare yourself for an oldskool mapping session.

As soon as any further news surfaces regarding the Dangermouse adventure I'll post the details on this very blog. In the meantime you can follow the progress yourself by going to the AmigaPD web site at http://www.amigapd.com/ or the AmigaPD Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/amigapd?fref=ts

Retro Gamer 113 - The Amiga 500

Just landed in newsagents up and down the country is issue 113 of Retro Gamer magazine. Sporting an unusually sparkly white Amiga 500 on its front cover, this edition features a massive multi-page Amiga 500 love-in.

Although one of the sections covers essential peripherals, the remainder of the article is firmly rooted in gaming, highlighting some of the Amiga's finest titles, and explaining why these should be in your collection.

The magazine also covers some of the Amiga's rarest/collectable games, with (unsurprisingly) Mario Brothers rip-off The Great Giana Sisters being their jewel in the crown.

If that wasn't enough, there's a huge buying and rarity guide covering well over 200 Amiga titles, plus an interview with Amiga collector and Downfall Creator Graham Humphrey.

For more information, visit the Retro Gamer web site at http://retrogamer.net/

Physical Release for Tales of Gorluth?

In his latest work in progress update, "Tales of Gorluth" developer Viddi, has revealed that he's now completed the design and implementation of 24 levels, and that the game currently weighs in at around 10 megabytes.

He also explained that cut scene animations have now been added, and that the game features a lot of text, which he'll need help with when he comes to translating it into other languages.

Probably the most exciting part of the update though, is where he hints of a physical release;

"...thinking of professional printed inlays and booklets or even a pressed CD"

If this progresses beyond a mere suggestion I'll be sure to update you in a future blog post. In the meantime you can keep up-to-date with the game's development by following this thread over on the English Amiga Board, or by visiting the official Tales of Gorluth web site.