Maggie Diskzine

 

If you enjoyed Willies Adventures check out our report of a French Falcon platform game
called Blum which looks promising.
There's not many games which run under MagiC and of those that do we certainly haven't featured
any in previous Maggie columns!
That's all changed with the release of Static courtesy of the Reservoir Gods.
Finally we're delighted to feature some home grown talent - the first STOS based Doom clone
programmed by David Walters, and it'll be on the next STraTOS CD-ROM for you to try.
Next time we plan to bring you a report from the Easter Alternative Party in Finland which is
aimed at strange and obsolete computers with a strong Atari beat!
 

Richard Spowart and Chris Holland, The Maggie Team, Inc.
 

http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/maggie/index.htm.
 

BLUM

Entertainment
Shareware
Falcon only

A demo version surfaced in France last year and it hasn't really made any impact outside France - until now...

BLUM's own caption describes the game's origins admirably. This is a fancy platform game in a style which owes some elements to Rayman and Willies Adventures with a little bit of Super Mario Bros thrown in.

The plot is in French but, as with most computer games, the plot could be written on the back of a postage stamp. There's not much doubt our hero Blum is on some magical quest to complete the game and do away with some big bad guy right at the end.

On loading the game the rough-edgedness of this demo surfaces immediately - the game falls over messily. Experience suggests my Falcon TOS was not to its liking so I tried again booting with a later TOS version loaded from disk and no problems this time.

There's a lovely soundtrack, featuring lots of flute sounds - vaguely reminiscent of the Shadow of the Beast soundtrack and a screen full of graphical splendour, featuring a foreground, where all the action takes place, and a distant background.

The sprite you're controlling (Blum) isn't much to look at, a blob, with huge comedy eyeballs and feet, all the better to see oncoming enemies, and avoid them I suppose.
The game is very colourful and certainly gives the Falcon's TrueColor (320 x 200) mode a good thrashing. It's here the closest comparisons to "Willies Adventures" can be made. On close inspection the graphics aren't quite as polished as the Swedish game and the platform levels have a certain blockiness about them. Similarly the game engine isn't quite as smooth as it could be in places.

Bearing in mind this isn't the release version let's just say there's still time for some optimisation and tweaking and reserve judgement and comparisons until another time.

The controls offer a choice of keyboard (although these weren't working in my demo version) and Jagpad. There's a range of move/jump controls on offer and currently no weapons are available so you have to dodge the enemies. The two enemies I've encountered look like Monty Mole of ancient 8-bit game fame, and a bunch of deadly snakes no doubt there are others and surprise, surprise the documentation mentions something about an end of level big boss to deal with.

The final finished product should include several levels with distinctly separate graphical styles and will be released as shareware costing 100 French Francs (around ś10).

Overall this is a promising looking demo which needs the kinks and rough edges smoothed off before it is catapulted into the spotlight.
 

Trigon Software
Roland TOMCZAK
13, rue des d‚port‚s r‚sistants
44110 CHATEAUBRIANT
France
Tel:+ 33 (0)2 40 28 36 21
 
Chris Holland
 


Crown of Creation 3D!

Space, the final frontier, hang on, hasn't someone already done this?
Starts again and "The forces of the Federation are battling ceaselessly against the gorgeously gouraud shaded and nicely drawn battle cruisers of two alien foes - you can too, but be careful out there!"

We have the combined talents of Rebelsoft to thank for this first decent Falcon specific 3D Space game. It has been long time coming, and has come as something of a surprise to those who first saw signs of the game about two years ago.

Back then, COC seemed to be an ambitious but doomed demo preview, like so many which have crashed and burned already. The pre-pre-preview was long on glossy introduction sequences and animations, but short on gameplay. The 3D engine was promising, with some crude, but relatively complex 3D objects, a bit of light and dark shading, a few bitmapped explosions, a some crappy cockpit graphics, and that was it!

The precedents for 3D space games on the Falcon have not been encouraging. There was the heavily hoped for, but no-show Eclipse game, which was announced almost as soon as the machine arrived, but never got beyond a small scale demo of several fast, but boring 3D flat-shaded objects. This was supposed to be really state of the art, using the Falcons DSP for the 3D graphics.

On the other hand, other 3D space games have stayed firmly rooted to the ST. Frontier, the Elite sequel was written for the ST, but really needed the extra speed of a Falcon - but still ended up on the slow side.
How a DSP calculated version of Frontier would have looked, we can only speculate. Then there was Zero 5, by Caspian, which was really an STe game with a few enhancements for the Falcon, and used the blitter in both machines for its speed boost. Looking to the future, we've got Pieter van der Meers Falcon specific Solos Elite-a-like game and Marcus Binders mega-sized effort, Cosmic, but that's it!!
This leaves a rather large and yawning hole in the Falcon games market waiting to be filled, and Crown of Creation 3D is just in time to fill it.

The Plot, or "Oh must you"

It's actually pretty complex for a game of this type. You're a pilot within the Pan American Space Forces, and are disappointed that peace negotiations seem to be coming to a successful conclusion.. Hearing about a top secret project, you volunteer, and find out the real story behind the early conclusion of the war with the Asiatic powers. Yes, humanity faces a greater common threat, as bored with abductions of subnormal midwestern pig farmers and cattle mutilations, those pesky aliens have started on a full scale conquest attempt of Earth. You, in a Zero-5 style series of missions of progressively greater involvement, are to stop them..

You might think, "Great, that's enough plot, now get on with the gore-inspiring shooty/technical bits of the review!" But that most rare and unusual of creatures, plot development takes place throughout the game as you are updated, mission by mission, through a handy base terminal. Thus you find out more and more about the capabilities of the main enemy, the planet-pinching Srintrians, and the appearance of a further mysterious enemy, the "What the hell are they up to" Ke'nath. Here, you get progressive evolution of the game, with additional weapons and other useful ship add-ons, which steadily become more necessary as time goes on. More and more interesting ship types tend to appear as the missions pile up, and there is even an amusing little sideline of news headlines from the Earth of the mid-21st century delivered to you by the base computer terminal. In short the plot element of the game has been very well handled indeed!

Looks and sounds

One of the most memorable features of the early preview was the obvious effort put into the presentation, even at that early stage. No mere cheap and horrid quick demo knock-off this! If this ever got finished, it was going to be special! Happily, the finished game lives up to the early promise, There has been a little scaling down of the extremely ambitious pre-game animations from the preview. What you do get, is still of a uniformly high quality, from the lovely menu screen, through the briefing and arming sequences (all full screen overscan on RGB), through to the flight and fight bits of the game itself.

Considerable window-dressing comes with this game, with animated sequences for taking off and hyperspacing to the mission destination and these can be cut short at a keypress if you can't wait to get into the main game.

The cockpit graphics are now worthy of the rest of the game, and are also functional, with a series of status screens, some of which are accessible from the function keys, and all of them beautifully drawn. The top half of a 320x240 window is devoted to the main game action.

The enemy, the all-important 3D objects are DSP calculated, and look very good close up, which is always too close if you want to stay alive within the game! Generally, the Ke'nath have better looking ships than the Srin, although the Srin seem to concentrate on greater firepower, and attacking all at once.. The 3D graphics are a mixture of 3D polygons with some shading and colour variation, although no texture-mapping was in evidence. This was not needed and not an issue in a game of this type.

The object designer gets top marks for producing complex classy multi-polygon objects that looked several steps up from the normal bland STish 3D objects we're used to seeing. To complement these, several bitmaps creep into the game, distant planets, and some of the best plasma-looking explosions, when the enemy expires, ever seen in a Falcon game! If disaster strikes, you are "treated" to a view of your own ship expiring from an out of the cockpit viewpoint, and then a storyboard sequence of several superb pictures of what happened when the Srin conquered the Earth.

The guilt overload from this would surely inspire you to do better next time, although, once again, these can be skipped if you wish to get back, cursing, into the game again.

Sound is very well done too, with a range of digi-mod music in the title and pre-flight screens, and a range of sampled effects, explosions, and a very feminine digitised computer voice when things start to happen. Sort of a female Hal, (Hailey?) The sound is part of how you play the game, and not just window-dressing, as you are informed of progressive ship equipment failures, and smart missile warnings.

The high standard of presentation carries itself across, within the budget limits of Atari games in this day and age, to the packaging, which is a proper box, with a nicely presented bi-lingual (Deutsch/English) manual. The box artwork is a nicely understated mono affair and the manual is well laid out too.

How it plays

The gameplay has been kept fairly simple, and isn't a replacement for Frontier and its ilk. The nearest equivalent would be an arcade orientated game such as Wing Commander on the PC, or Zero 5 on the STe. There is a progressive element the further you get into the game, as you find out more about the enemy, get more complex and difficult missions, and new types of weapons and equipment to play with. This is a major point in the games favour, and stops it getting samey.

The actual 3D flight mechanics and 3D updating have been kept as plausible and fast as possible. All action takes place spaceside, there are no (as far as I have found) scenes taking place on a planet. This ensures that the speed of 3D updating is smooth and constant. Running on a stock 16MHz Falcon, I encountered no slowdown problems of the sort that bugged Frontier, and even cropped up to some extent in Zero 5. This is presumably down to the programmers use of the DSP for 3D calculation, and if so, they should be congratulated for this. This even applies when some ships with larger numbers of polygons appear.

The combat mechanics are fairly tough, just about the right side of challenging, and more akin to the hard but rewarding slog of Elite, than the glorified 3D Galaxians "stack 'em up and shoot 'em" approach taken by Zero 5. As a general guide, the Srin tend to be harder to kill than the Ke'nath. Control options include the Jagpad, as well as conventional joystick.

It does have that elusive "just one more go" factor all games strive to achieve. Constant saving of your pilot status whenever you complete a mission is a good idea too!!

For those people who achieve a certain level of status within the game, there is the option to go on a single-handed patrol flight. This is really an arcade mode pitched battle against various groups of enemies, without the mission related window dressing. This can be fun too, but ultimately quite difficult to survive!

Conclusions

Crown of Creation 3D is a brilliant game for space starved fans of the genre. The sheer amount of work put into all aspects of the game has ensured the long wait has been worth it. A benchmark game for the Falcon.

Chris Holland
 
 

Crown of Creation

Developer

Rebelsoft
UK distribution
16/32 Systems
Telephone
+44 (0)1634 710788
Email
16/32@premier.co.uk
Cost: £29.99
System :Falcon RGB/VGA

Ratings :
Graphics 93%,All parts of the show are of a uniformly high standard
Sound 85%
Combination of good modfile music and decent samples
Playability 91%
Very carefully done, not too easy, and just challenging enough to keep wanting to come back for more.
Overall 91%


Hellgate

71%
Entertainment
Shareware
ST/STe only 1mb memory minimum

This is another fiercely battling contender for the title of 'best Doom clone on the Atari.'

This is also the first STOS-based approach to the genre, yet again proving that anything Assembler language can do, STOS will have a pretty fair shot at as well. We have the efforts of SmartSOFT to thank for this game, which has been in gestation for two years.

The gameplay and presentation indicate a Wolfenstein/Doom style runaround
with reasonably nice presentation, with solid 3D geometry used to form the maze walls and the polygonal bad guys. The presentation is kept simple to keep the speed up, and there is a minimum of texture mapping. This might lead to the Sub-Station syndrome of getting lost in identical looking levels, as games of this type often rely on changing graphical ambience to find your way around the level. There is a full range of enhanced weapons to pick up, and energy/armour boost pick-me-ups scattered through the level.

The game is mostly mouse controlled, which works well, but with a little bit of choppiness in play. The game does not, thankfully suffer from
excessive slowdown. It runs on ST type machines, and even Pacifist
emulation happily, the current beta test/unregistered version does not
like Falcons though. It would also be nice to see how it runs on any accelerated computer as well?
This is a nice version of the game with some potential, and just a few rough edges to be smoothed out.
 

Chris Holland
 


Static

90%
Entertainment
Shareware
Falcon RGB/VGA 4Mb memory minimum

Chris Holland takes a look at Static, the latest immaculately presented opus from the Reservoir Gods...

The 'Gods have a proven track record producing Falcon games including Tautology and Double Bobble and this time they've have taken the simple Solitaire concept, which wastes zillions of office hours on Wintel machines, and transformed it into something much more interesting.

There's multiple players where up to four players with any combination of computer intelligence and human player, play against the clock and each other, hilariously sabotage the other players deck of cards with one of several cunningly designed jokers, including some real stinkers!

There's immaculately presented graphics, as good as anything available commercially, with several choices of card sets going way beyond the basic graphics seen elsewhere, the luxuriously appointed menu system, and the innovative "Draw your own high score" table backed up with a choice of killer soundtracks from among the best the 'Gods have to offer.

If you don't like games that screw up your elegantly featured MagiC set-up, then you'll be amazed to learn Static is even MagiC friendly and relishes the chance to run on a VGA monitor as well.

Static plays quite a mean game as a computer opponent, unless you take the ultimate step of dumbing down the computer intelligence to the level of PC Owner!

In short, Reservoir Gods have given us another heavenly game!


 ATOric v0.4

 An emulator with a difference!

We're all familiar with some of the great computers of the first  eight
bit  boom,  back  in  the early to mid 'eighties..  Who can forget  the
immortal  Sinclair,  the tremendous Commodore 64,  the brilliant 'Beeb,
and the Oric, erm....

Well  the  Oric  was one of those early  pioneer  8-bit  home  machines
designed   to   cash   in  on  the  easy  popularity   of   the   early
Sinclair/Commodore  machines,  and  the closest machine it  might  have
resembled was the good old rubber-keyed 48k Sinclair Spectrum, but with
a  calculator  style  keyboard,  and  better sound,  but more  of  that
shortly..

The parent company of Oric were a firm called Tangerine Computers,  who
sold  a moderately successful kitbuild machine in the very early  days,
which   solder-stained   hardware  freaks  gleefully   slung   together
themselves,  no  namby  pamby warranties and dealer support  for  them!
(Tangerine - Apple - Apricot - geddit?)

Once  the  original  small  scale  'hobbyist'  market  evolved  into  a
burgeoning  'home'  market,  Tangerine  decided to  do  something  more
'accessible' for the average punter, and the Oric was the result..

'Accessible'  may  have been the intention,  but some horrible  faults,
such as several nasty ROM bugs,  and a reset button that was underneath
the machine,  for gruds sake, meant that Oric was doomed to be an also-
ran, reasonably successful, but not the stuff of legend in the same way
as  the  Commodore  64..  A better version with a jazzed-up  case,  and
proper keys (and debugged ROM!) called the Atmos came along, but it was
almost  too  late,  a  further and more developed offshoot  called  the
Stratos  was  rumoured,  but  never saw release in the UK,  all  active
development going to France, the country where the machine seemed to do
best.. It dropped out of general view thereafter..

To look at,  the basic Oric looked like a light coloured version of the
Sinclair Spectrum.  The physical dimensions were very similar, the Oric
being  a  bit  slimmer  than the Speccy as I  seem  to  remember..  The
keyboard  was an improvement over the Speccy,  not being  rubber-keyed,
and  with  a  proper  single  key  input,  rather  than  the  massively
cumbersome 'keyword' system that Sinclair used.. It was based around an
8-bit  6502  CPU,  rather than the common Z80,  the graphics were, from
memory,  a  bit  better  than the Speccy,  and the sound had  a  Yamaha
soundchip  to express itself,  practically identical to the one in  the
ST! (Which says more about Atari hardware design than the Oric!)

In a nutshell then:-

The ORIC-1/ATMOS computers had the following hardware features:
- CPU:   1.0 MHz 6502
- RAM:   64 kByte, 48kByte usable without external hardware
- ROM:   16 kByte
- Video: 240*224 pixels at 8 colors+flash attribute
         (40 chars at 28 lines or 240*200 pixel + 3 text lines)
- AY-8912-3 or similar soundchip: 3 voices+noise
- built-in loudspeaker
- Parallel printer port (Centronics compatible)
- expansion port for disc drives etc.
- cassette recorder interface at 2400 baud
- TV modulator

Now,  a  kind  individual  by the name of Christian  Peppermueller  has
decided to reproduce this marvel of early pioneer home computer on  the
Atari..   Work   is   in  progress,   and  the  current  version  under
consideration is version 0.4..

This  is  very much on the road to completion,  as several things  have
been  done,  but  a  lot of work is still needed..  The basics are  all
there,   you  even  have  a  choice  of  original  ROM,  or  Atmos  ROM
(Recommended  for  sanity's  sake!) The full BASIC  and  stark  looking
command  line interface are present,  and this version of the  emulator
supports  tape images,  loaded as if connected to a tape recorder  with
the typed 'CLOAD' command,  but at hard/floppy disk speed if the images
are  in the same directory as the emulator..  These images can be found
on the Oric Webring, and seem to be freely available. There was also an
Oric  disk  drive  produced,  but there is no support as yet  for  disk
images here..

Some graphics modes are supported,  but there may be more work to still
do there..  The screen is displayed in overscan mode on the Falcon with
the 224 vertical pixel mode.. Sound is very well supported, as there is
a physical presence of the sound hardware and not too much to do there!
One  memorable  feature,  possibly the only one of Oric BASIC were  the
directly  keyed-in  sound  generation  commands  'Zap',   'Ping',   and
'Explode', and these all worked perfectly here!

Connection  to external peripherals is a bit of a no-no at the  moment,
and  the  other  feature of this early version is a  distinct  lack  of
speed..  There are two versions of the emulator,  a 68000 only version,
and a '68020 and above' version,  rather like Christian Gandlers famous
ZX  Spectrum  emulator..  On the ST,  due to the 'slow' 6502 emulation,
there  is  only 12% of the originals speed!  The Falcon clocks in at  a
more  hopeful 40% of original speed,  which translates to c.60% with  a
light accelerator like Nemesis or Centurbo 1..  The screen updating can
be tweaked,  but is still very slow,  the author reckoning that a TT is
the  minimum  platform to get full speed on  this  current  emulation..
Certainly  a  quicker version later on should be a  possibility,  maybe
close to full speed on a standard Falcon, and useable on an ST?

The keyboard is not fully emulated,  no SHIFT or CONTROL or similar, it
is suggested that there is joystick support,  but the games I tried out
could not find it..

The emulator comes with instructions in a .DOC file,  there is a little
online  help,  but  not to the same extent as the sophisticated  set-up
options and break-ins that you might get with other emulators.. This is
something  that  will doubtless receive further  development  in  later
versions..

Well,  what can run on it?  Firstly,  I tried the old route of fumbling
around  with  half-remembered  BASIC  commands  remembered  from  other
computers,  getting the hang of the command line text entry,  and had a
hellishly enjoyable evening knocking up a handful of pointlessly  silly
little programs of no merit whatsover.. This was what the early days of
home  computing  were all about!  No pressure,  no hype,  no bullshit..

There seemed to be little type-in material surviving in my historic old
computer  magazine  archive,  and what Oric BASIC listings  there  were
didn't  give  much  away,  being  heavily  dependent  on  cryptic  POKE
statements and odd lumps of machine code fitted in as well..  Still,  I
persevered,  and stretching the ZAP/PING/Explode commands to the limit,
managed  a  passable imitation of one of The Senior Dads  early  demos,
although the Senior Dads were still better, and funny..

I decided to browse the web for something more substantial, and pausing
only  to swoon with impressiveness at the size of the Oric archives,  I
grabbed a random selection of a couple of games and a demo..

(Software on the Oric,  that was something new to me, when the machines
were set up on the shop counters the first time around,  all I ever saw
were  blank screens with nothing running on them,  a bit like how  some
computer shops tried to sell ST's later on!)

They  all ran a lot better under the Atmos ROM,  a hard-learned  lesson
there..  The  games were an adventure,  sort of very pre-Dungeon Master
style,  which seemed to run,  but very slowly, and a breakout type game
with  French instructions,  which seemed to run quite well,  but lacked
any control over the movements of the bat at the bottom of the screen..
Probably  needs  full  keyboard emulation there..  The demo  was  quite
short,  but ran perfectly,  slow screen updating aside, we were treated
to  a  large  and chunky sprite bigger than the screen,  a  large  'old
school' scroller and sound indicator bars,  and perfect soundchip music
from 'Thrust',  which seemed to feature in a million and one Swedish ST
demos, c.1988!

Certainly,  from what was there,  it seems that the emulator was trying
hard to co-operate,  and with some more work, should be able to run the
majority  of  Oric software,  and with a bit more speed,  will graduate
from  being  just  a 'toy' emulator..  The file  sizes  are  pleasantly
historic  in  size  as well,  a major bonus  for  phone-bill  conscious
netheads..

At the time of writing, Oric seems to have developed an active internet
emulation  presence,  and even has its own webring..  According to some
news pages, there is even still now new software under development, and
seems  to  have  survived its transformation into  cult  status  pretty
well.. Worth checking out for general interest..

http://www.ensica.fr/oric/oric_english.html
http://www.ensica.fr/~frances/

# ORIC pages and EUPHORIC (PC emulator for Oric)
 

Advantages:

Unique on Atari, no other Oric emulation ever seen before!
Compact size..
Easy to set up..
Supports standard tape images downloadable from the internet..
Mostly compatible, probably very compatible later on..
Perfect sound emulation!
'Reset' in a sensible place compared with the original!
It's fun!

Disadvantages:

Very slow on ST, slow on standard Falcon..
Slow and jerky screen updating..
I'm not sure if the palette is correct either?
No full keyboard emulation yet..
Probably a lot of low-level stuff in general not implemented yet..
No disk image support..
Still  very rough and ready in current form,  not as developed (yet) as
other Atari emulators..

In conclusion, a nice effort, which will mature into something good, in
due course.. Worth getting in the meantime for curiousity value..