|
|
Post by CPC4EVA on Feb 25, 2005 4:22:38 GMT -5
just wondering wat ur thoughts were on developing games for Amstrad CPC  * did any of you guys spend much time on the machine ? * Were there any problems you encountered when developing / converting to the cpc ? * Why in games such as Yie Ar Kung Fu did the c64 get the full conversion and cpc got about 90% of the arcade conversion ? The c64 version of Yie Ar Kung Fu had all the enemy fighters and pictures of enemy before you started. * In c64 version of Gryzor you had to press the space bar to jump but in the cpc version you only had to press up on the joystick. * Ocean produced most of the games for the GX4000 console but the console failed - what are your thoughts on this console and why it failed ? * Has anyone ever seen a copy of Chase HQ 2 from OCEAN on Amstrad cartridge - It is believed to have been released but no one in cpc community has seen it. great site by the way - keep up the good work lads ;D |
|
|
|
Post by Brian Beuken on Mar 7, 2005 16:14:08 GMT -5
Ha, yie are kung fu...theres a memory..well I didn't actually write it, though I later did the 128K speccy version that did not get released.
But I did own the company that wrote the amstrad version, the speccy version and had a crack at the C64 version but we failed so Dave Collier took it on at Ocean.
I wrote most of the Amstrad and speccy, sprite systems for it.
The reason was memory, the CPC only had 64K of memory, and 32K of that was set aside for screens (we used a hardware switch to swap between 2, 16K screens)...though thinking back, I can't remember if we swapped the screens or stored the backdrop....either way we gobbled a lot of ram for screen.
That only left 32K to fit the code, the backdrops and the sprites in, all of which were highly compressed and expanded at runtime...quite a feat at that time, I was pleased with that...so there was shortage of memory to fit it all on and basically we could not do it. So a couple of characters were dropped and the backdrops loaded in turn with no animation.
The C64 was a bit more effective in its use of memory, had smaller screen size and having 4 colour sprites (the Amstrad had 8 colour software sprites...we used the extra bit as a compression flag) the C64 sprites were simplier and used up less memory. So Dave Collier was able to cram a lot more into the C64 memory....and thats why it was more complete.. The Amstrad looked better and though a bit slower (again the C64 had better faster sprites) I thought it was a more faithful version.
I always liked the Amstrad, it was a nice machine, reasonably fast and colourful but jsut lacking in ram, I often wrote really cool things only to have the scale cut back to fit in the RAM....happy days
|
|
|
|
Post by CPC4EVA on Mar 7, 2005 23:23:27 GMT -5
Hey Brian thanks for the reply  really interesting....... if you did 128k versions of cpc games would you have been able to get around limited ram ? Like if YIE AR KUNG FU was a 128k version could you have produced a more faithful version ? or was the extra 64 not even worth using..... What company did you own ? What other cpc games did you produce / take part in cheers big ears |
|
|
|
Post by Brian Beuken on Mar 8, 2005 10:44:19 GMT -5
Hey Brian thanks for the reply really interesting....... if you did 128k versions of cpc games would you have been able to get around limited ram ? Like if YIE AR KUNG FU was a 128k version could you have produced a more faithful version ? or was the extra 64 not even worth using..... What company did you own ? What other cpc games did you produce / take part in cheers big ears Accessing the extra RAM on 128's did give you more room, but it had to be banked in 16K chunks and was a bit tricky to use. By the time the 128K machiens came on the scene though the 8bit systems were on the wane and Amiga's and ST's started to dominate, so we never really pushed the extra memory systems as hard as they could be. And like most publishers Ocean did not go back to their old catalogue and rework the games to 128K. The bigger market was always for 64K games so most of the games were written to that size, and the extra memory discounted most of the time. I used to own/run a company called Timeslip Software, and we wrote a few minor CPC titles (including Yie Ar)before I went to work for Ocean. After that I worked at Icon Design and wrote quite a few things for them...Then went freelance for a number of years. Before moving into consoles, and Game Boy in particular...then I formed a company called Virtucraft that did well for a couple of years before going bump. Altogether I wrote over 50 titles personally and was involved in 30+ more in various roles, so I guess I was productive. |
|
|
|
Post by fgasking on Mar 8, 2005 15:14:02 GMT -5
then I formed a company called Virtucraft that did well for a couple of years before going bump. Don't suppose you have a contact for Roy Bannon who used to work there? |
|
|
|
Post by davefb on Mar 9, 2005 3:59:40 GMT -5
Don't suppose you have a contact for Roy Bannon who used to work there? roy went to acclaim manchester after that. . lorraine might know someone who knows someone.. |
|
