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[hariseldon]

Chase HQ

Before we go any further can we all just agree that this is one of the best bits of box art ever? It made me want the damn game.

ST Format Review

My Review

For this review I'm running Steem with my usual 1MB STFM (tried an STE but it did not go well). I've used a lot of Automation images so I thought I'd do a Medway Boys one instead - this is image 57. The image unrols down the page and then various slices of it scroll vertically as chip music plays, a graphics equaliser does its thing and the scrolly text does its thing. I've got a bit of a soft spot for Medway Boys intros as the first scene image I remember acquiring (in about 1998 or 1999 I think when I discovered ST emulation online) was their image with Kick Off 2 on it. I remember downloading loads of stuff from Tik's Atari Palace on Geocities and just being amazed it was a thing, and being stunned by being able to play these games on the PaCifiST emulator.

So the loading screen is nice enough - the game menu then plays over a demo run of the game which is a nice (and surprisingly modern) touch. Pressing fire gets you a little scene with a message coming over your pager (how 80s) and then straight into the game.

So the game gets started and the road movement is quite gentle, and the car is pretty easy to control, all the more surprising as this evening I've had quite a large amount of rum. Still, being professional for a moment, the road moves smoothly, and the sensible choice to use small sprites pays off (albeit at a cost of the road being wider than Silverstone F1 circuit - and I can say that because I've driven on it). I can even use my left hand on the joystick while my right hovers over the mouse to get screenshots, instead of my usual routine of trying to get a screenshot and then dying horribly (which is why my life counters and scores often look like shit in screenshots).

Here I am crashing into a criminal. I'm, not sure if I might be hurting my car doing this.

He's definitely on fire but I think I might be too..

And I pull over alongside the perp.

Got him! Nice sampled speech "You're under arrest" in contrast to everything else just being chip music.

So to discuss the game for a moment, it is undeniably smooth, but playing it for a while it becomes clear that the cost to graphical fidelity is perhaps too high. Cars look hideous, the road itself has non-stripey spells and they look awful, in a way it's another of those games stuck half way between 8 bit and 16 bit. Additionally, it's perhaps a touch too easy if I can play it half-pissed. Roll on Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge.

 

[hariseldon]

Star Wrek
No box available

ST Format Review

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STE, running TOS 1.62 instead of my usual 1.04 (which only works on STs). This didn't have a scene release but thankfully exists at http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-star-wrek-the-voyage-of-ussless_11381.html. Star Wrek got 15% which is the lowest score I can remember seeing in ST Format but hopefully someone can correct me.

The game is a text adventure ripping the piss out of Star Trek - I'm not a Trekkie sadly so the jokes might fly over my head but fingers crossed. While it's a text adventure, the developers were kind enough to put some simple images in to mix things up a bit, but they're mere decoration. The ST Format review talks of big problems with the text parser and a paper-thin plot, let's see if it's true.

It's never a great sign when they can't even be arsed to make the fucking game auto-run... ho-hum.

Sadly it doesn't quite know what to make of my request to suck my hairy ballsack. A terrible start, utterly unacceptable. In fact, none of my slightly-abusive drunken suggestions make it through the parser. Hmm.

Well for fuck's sake it doesn't even understand very basic stuff like look, examine, etc. At no point has it told me what room I'm in or what I can do.. this is a bad start.

I finally figure out it wants me to type 'y' to the "info (y/n)" prompt which gives the impression it skipped over...

Oh god, it's playing this fucking god awful single-note-at-a-time shitty chip tune that is insanely irritating every time I fucking get a new bit of text. Make it fucking stop.

Alas, I am defeated by a manual text check, given the fact that there is no fucking manual available anywhere on the internet. Perhaps it's for the best.

 

[hariseldon]

Warp

ST Format Review
See previous post

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STE, running TOS 1.62. This game got a release on an Automation disk - menu #285. This menu features lots of wibbly text, and it takes some doing to figure out the buttons to get each game, but I eventually figure out it's 1 for Warp, 2 for Italy 1990 (football game for the Italian World Cup). I gave the footie game a quick go for shits and giggles and it was awful - 2 frames per second, terrible controls, and it looked like it belonged on a Commodore 64. Clearly this disk was something of a dumping ground.

So let's remind ourselves of what Warp is for those who can't be arsed to read the ST Format review above (I have no idea how many people do - I just figure it's a nice thing to have and it runs alongside the central concept of the thread that I'm playing games from ST Format issues). So it's a shooter. The review complains that the ship is too small to see, and it's on a one-colour background - they describe it as more of a tech demo than anything else. Perhaps the devs came from the demo/pirate scene?

So the intro has the Grandslam logo flying into the screen followed by some wibbly text effects, then we get some cool chip sound effects as rain drops down the screen to give us the Thalion logo - so far so demo scene.

The game loading screen proper finally comes up, with some fairly catchy chip music.

Dear god how many preliminaries must we go through to get to the fucking game?

Great.. a spinning world animation and a spaceship flying out... Can I play a fucking game yet?

Ok cool we're on Mars.. can I play a fucking game yet?

Well that wasn't worth it. To summarize.. the ship rotates, that's wonderful, and it does so very very smoothly. It's not as small as ST Format indicated, but it's not very interesting to look at. Backgrounds are indeed pretty dull, and enemies appear to be mostly geometric shapes. The scrolling is super-smooth but it's worth noting it takes up a tiny amount of screen. Nope, it wasn't very inspiring, not worth the effort. I will say though that I've seen ST Format give worse games 60+%.

I thought I recognised the name, and it turns out Thalion are indeed ex demo scene, though no known links to the pirate scene. They would later create games like Enchanted Lands and No Second Prize, so they did get better. This was their 2nd game, so perhaps at this stage they were still learning the ropes. In a way the ST market was better than the modern market in that there was a place for developers to learn this way, where that's harder to do now.

 

[hariseldon]

So over the weekend I'll see if I can get time to crack on with Ghostbusters 2, Untouchables and Iron Lord. The latter I'm a little uncertain of. Then we can move on to my first ever ST Format, issue 8, which tbh wasn't a classic. Issue 9 (which annoyingly I didn't get as a kid) starts showing the big classics with Castle Master, Rainbow Islands, Midwinter and Pipe Mania, while 10 gets Dragons Breath and Space Ace as well as Ivanhoe and Escape From The Planet Of The Robot Monsters, 11 gets Theme Park Mystery and Player Manager, and 12 is an absolute motherfucking BELTER with Sim City and F-19 for starters, plus Dragon's Lair and Ghosts n Goblins. The cool shit is on its way, we're heading into my era.

 

[hariseldon]

Other Magazines (January 1990)
Taking a little detour I thought it might be nice to pick up bits of interesting content from Zero and The One. I won't be able to go all the way with The One since the ST variant is a bitch to get hold of, but hopefully there'll still be some decent content to be had.

The One's cover focuses on Midwinter, though they've chosen to represent it with a peculiar hand-drawn bit of artwork on their cover. We have the news that Peter Johnson, who programmed Wizball, Robocop, arkanoid and others had decised to quit game development, choosing to make soundtracks for videos for pregnant women.... ooooookay.

Some news on coming releases - Count Duckula was getting his own game, No Sax Please: We're Egyptian. The TV show was fantastic so I'm sure the game was shit. World Champion Boxing Manager was also slated for release, and Coktel Vision (makers of the Gobliiins games) had a game around the Paris Dakar rally scheduled - incongruously it seemed to have a section between levels where you watch a belly dancer. They don't make em like that anymore. We have previews for Treasure Trap which was still some way from completion if I recall - a game that intrigued me, but that itch was scratched by the Cadaver demo. Codemasters were planning their Fruit Machine Simulator - an ill-advised purchase by my parents which thankfully didn't turn me into an addict. Meanwhile CRL planned to release Trump Castle - not a game where you explore a castle populated by an evil Donald Trump, instead a gambling game set in one of his casinos - you can find it on Automation 202 if it interests you.


It looks like it was made in GFA Basic. They charged £19.95 for that.

Other previews include Cloud Kingdoms which looked pretty interesting back in the day, while Psygnosis were previewing The Killing Game Show which I swear had a long way to go til release. In terms of reviews, they have Midwinter 1 which gets a glowing 4-page review with a 95% rating, thanks to its innovative gameplay and incredibly impressive graphics, both in filled-vector and bitmap form. There's also an Amiga release for Super Cars, the brilliant top-down racer (well the sequel was amazing on the Amiga at least - I never played the first). Interestingly no ST magazines touched it - the only review I can find is half a page in Ace where it gets 790/1000. Other reviews include P-47 Thunderbolt (70%), Cabal (81%), Chaos Strikes Back (94% - astonishingly ST Format never reviewed it), Lost Patrol got 73% (I remember seeing all those ads with photorealistic graphics and being blown away by them - never got my hands on the game though, I think I missed the review and didn't realise when it was already out), Dragon's Breath got 89% (coming soon in STF).

Zero's cover focuses on a preview of a game called Awesome, which I can honestly say I've never heard of. Previews include Ramrod (never heard of it), BAT, Thunderstrike, Wings Of Fury, Tusker, Resolution 101, Escape from the planet of the robot monsters, Unreal (not that one), Conqueror (Virus/Zarch with tanks), Dragon's Breath, F19 Stealth Fighter, etc.

Reviews cover Their Finest Hour (sequel to Battlehawks 1942 - i'm keen to play it) on PC which gets 94%, Space Ace (Amiga) which gets a generous 80%, X-Out gets 91% on the Amiga, Supercars gets 89% (also Amiga), Star Trek V gets 76% (PC), Xenomorph (Dungeon Master in space apparently - Amiga) gets 89% and looks genuinely interesting but looks like it was never covered by ST Format so I might review that when we get to May (which appears to be when ST User reviewed it). Operation Thunderbolt (Amiga) gets 85% though gets described as a bit morally dodgy due to its depiction of a fictional not-quite-Libya and blowing up cats and dogs, Chaos Strikes Back gets 92% on the ST (I'd review it but it's hard and I'm too crap to do it justice), Chase HQ gets 79% which is perhaps a tad generous, while P47 looks a bit tedious but scores 75%.

Not sure how much demand there is for this extra bit - it takes a fair bit of time to do so I might just limit it to checking the magazines to see if there's a game ST Format misses that I need to cover.

 

[Havoc2049]

That Zero magazine previews and reviews some excellent games. I love BAT (The ST version has that amazing music cart. One of the handful of times I've actually used the cart slot on the ST. ), Resolution 101, Dragon's Breath, F19 Stealth Fighter, Their Finest Hour and Dungeon Master: Chaos Strikes Back.

Going back a couple of pages to where people first bought their ST. I bought a 1040STf, SC1224 monitor, Atari SMM804 dot matrix printer, First Word+, Pirates and Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception (RPG), at a local computer store called The Comm Shack in 1988. I used my savings from working a part time job and a paper route. The 1040ST had already been out for a few years and there was some good package deals out there. The Comm Shack was obviously a play on the words "computers" and "Commodore", but they also sold Apple and Atari computers and software. About 50% of the store was devoted to the popular Commodore 64 and the other half of the store was spilt up between the Amiga, ST, small Atari 8-bit section, Apple II and Mac. It was a magical store to me as a teenager. I upgraded to the ST from the Commodore 64c, which I had for couple of years, from 86-88. My 64c came with GEOS packed in and it was a really cool GUI and DTP package, but I had been accepted into Honors English in school and it was time to upgrade, as productivity software on 8-bit computers left a lot to be desired and disk access on the C64 line, even with the newer disk drives and the Epyx Fast Load cart was dreadfully slow. My ST fixed all that and I had some cool games to play as well. I sold my 64c set-up to a buddy and went and bought some more software and games, like Dungeon Master, Degas Elite, Silent Service, Ultima IV and a box of dot matrix printer paper.

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

That screenshot on Zero for Awesome was mesmerising at the time.

 

[hariseldon]

Ghostbusters 2

ST Format Review

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STE, running TOS 1.62. This game got a release on an Automation disk - menu #442. That seems quite late vs the other games in this issue so the question is was it delayed because they couldn't be bothered because the game was shit, or was it delayed because it was hard to crack? It's a film license and the ST Format review is rather damning of gameplay, while praising graphics. Let's see what we get.

We get a fairly simple cracktro with a skull and crossbones "Piracy is fun" graphic moving around and some chip music with a scroller. They kindly provide some documentation, which is kinda unusual. Apparently it's packed down from 4 disks (wtf?) to 2, which seems a nice upgrade on the released version.

We get a slick animated intro informing us that Activision presents Ghostbusters 2, with the movie's theme tune sampled playing over the top which is pretty cool. Quality actually isn't bad for an ST and while it's clearly cut-down it manages to get all the key points. It does enough to give me the urge to stick Ghostbusters on the Plex in a pretty big way.

So, I press fire to start, and get some little stills (very badly digitised) from the movie and some scrolly text, then we start the game. With LOTS of loading. Disc access is pretty horrendous. Lots of unpacking time too, which is what I get for being a pirate.

And then the infamous bombs - it's been a few years since I've seen them! Let's try with an STFM instead. More crashing. Let's try http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-ghostbusters-ii_9438.html instead. This game is proving to be a right bag of dicks.

Finally I'm being lowered into the sewer. Time to bust some ghosts. And this is utter shit. There seems to be very little connection between shooting something and something happening to that thing. Controls are laggy, the enemies are a bit boring, and the game really has very little to offer. I don't feel enormously motivated to go any further with this one, it's tried my patience in many different ways already, I'll go and do something less boring instead.

 

[hariseldon]

Untouchables

ST Format Review

My Review
For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STE, running TOS 1.62. This game got a release on an Automation disk - menu #223. We get treated to some tits. Thanks guys, I'd say that makes this the best menu yet. The music is shit but who cares, we have tits. Don't even care if the game is good now!

Quite a nice loading screen, well-drawn with a decent art style - and then we get the chip farting music that strongly resembles the absolute god-awful shit found on some budget game. Utter bilge, and very annoying.

So what we get is a run and gun (well, walk and gun) which is actually very smoothly animated, though the enemies aren't terribly exciting, and nore are the backdrops. Of course about a third of the screen is taken by the score panel which makes it a bit easier, and there's usually only 3 or 4 sprites on screen other than bullets.

Honestly it's a reasonably well-coded game, but it's just not very interesting. Sorry I don't have anything more interesting to say about it.

 

[lmimmfn]

Doesnt Untpuchables have to corridor sections which play similar to Cabal? Those levels are more interesting

 

[hariseldon]

Doesnt Untpuchables have to corridor sections which play similar to Cabal? Those levels are more interesting

It may well do, but the first level was so dull and I’ve got another 80-odd issues to get through - no time to waste on anything boring! Issue 8 is in progress.

 

[rnlval]

The Amiga released in autumn 1985, though.

But I concur, that around the time the A500 released they should have had some improvements in its chipset already, like a true 64 colours mode and wider sprites at least.
Problems was that the original Amiga 1000 was a flop, and they tried to get the money from it back with the cost reduced A500.

They should have AGA ready by 1990, and AAA in 1992/93 and they could have lasted a few more years against the PC onslaught at least in Europe.

(bonus: my Amiga 1200 setup.

I own a 1000, 500 and 600 as well...
)

According to Dave H, AGA chipset was completed in Feb 1991 which has enough time for 1991 Xmas season sales, but Commodore management delayed the release of A4000 and A1200 into Q4 1992 with limited unit numbers due to moving the factory from Hong Kong to the Philippines due to some manager can't control is His zipper.

With Commodore factories located in the Philippines, US government entities still have influenced over the Philippines, hence US EPA was able to tell the Philippines government counterpart to shut down the warehouse in the Phlippines. US EPA and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection killed Commodore.

US EPA killed GMT Microelectronics (management buyout, Commodore Semiconductor Group Mk 2.0) in 2001.


A4000 is similar to A3000plus in Feb 1991.

 

[hariseldon]

ST Format Issue 8 - Download

The World in February 1990
In the UK Ayotollah Khomeini renewed his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, a move which turned out to be the tip of a large iceberg we're facing today. A bomb exploded in Leicester. Other than that, not much.

In US news there was a pay dispute in MLB and Buster Douglas knocked out Mike Tyson. Voyager 1 sent back the famous Pale Blue Dot photo. US flights stopped allowing smoking on flights under 6 hours long.

Elsewhere in the world in the USSR the communist party voted to end its monopoly of power, opening the way for elections. Nelson Mandela was released. German reunification was agreed. Big news, all happening at once. I miss the days when news was so good.

On TV Sky Movies was encrypted and became Sky's first pay channel. Quantum Leap made its debut on BBC2. The Mitchell brothers arrived in Eastenders.

The film charts have Honey I Shrunk The Kids at #1, a good, honest fun while I know less about Sea Of Love and Internal Affairs. Overall though it seems a fairly weak chart.

The album chart sees Phil Collins remain at number one, but the rest of the chart isn't great. Tanita Tikaram is in at #3 off the back of World In Union for the rugby, Cat Stevens is at #6, I suppose we do at least have Technotronic at #8 with Pump Up The Jam so it's not all shit.

The singles chart has some absolute ABSOLUTE MEGA-BANGERS. Sinead with Nothing Compares 2 U (written by Prince) is an all-time classic, while I'll always enjoy a bit of Technotronic and can do the whole rap to Get Up at #2, Dub Be Good To me at #3 is fantastic, what a top 3!


The Magazine
Issue 8 came out in February 1990, which means I probably got it for my birthday, my first issue of ST Format. For that reason it's a big deal for me. This is where it all started, on my 10th birthday, I started to find out a bit about life beyond the Power Pack.

So the cover feature is about upgrading your Atari ST - in truth I don't think most people did more than perhaps upgrade from 0.5MB to 1MB RAM, maybe the single-sided disk drives got upgraded, but that's about it. The coverdisk features a full copy of GFA Raytrace. Where now ray-tracing is done in real-time, in those days I would write out some code to define a scene and then leave my ST on overnight crunching the image to produce some reflective balls on a checkerboard floor, as was compulsory at that time. There was also a program called Ani ST which was a fantastic little animation package which tweened your animations for you - another full program though this one had started off commercial before migrating to PD.

In the news, the STE's compatibility troubles continued, though Atari were beginning to get a handle on things, putting out fixes to public domain libraries for distribution. ST Format actually ran a feature on the STE fiasco (it was so bad that in the letters page they even advised someone to stick with their STFM and not bother upgrading) and I'm going to include it here because it is pretty damning stuff.

That's a big old list of incompatible games, and Atari blaming programmers isn't the brightest move, especially when it seems Atari didn't give the software houses enough time with the machine to get fixes ready to go. Atari were not a well-run company. On a positive note, the Lynx was finally shown at the British Toy Fair, though we all know how that machine went.

In hilarious news which frankly sums up the state of the industry at that time, a 17-year-old was running a mail order company (Xenon Technologies) and.. well I'll link to the page for the full story, but according to police he "cocked up his business" and his dad was sending letters to people awaiting goods and making sure cheques weren't cashed. Oh dear.

We get a review of Sequencer One, which would be given away on a coverdisk in a couple of years and would bring me into the world of Midi music as I plugged it into a Yamaha PSS-480. Very kind of STF to save me £79! The C tutorial continues, there's a DTP tutorial, there's Magnetic Scrolls bitching about how Sierra had deals with Tandy to help shift units and how Level 9 were pointless because they just copied other people's shit (meow)

Previews
Previews this month we have Cloud Kingdoms which looks fabulous, Kid Gloves which is a basic platformer, Never Mind which looks like it has a hint of Cadaver about it and the extraordinary Dragon's Breath which I desperately wanted as a kid but for some reason utterly unknown to me never got in my collection. We also have Psygnosis' Infestation (3d vector game about gassing aliens), Stryx which I know nothing about, the mediocre Emlyn Hughes International Soccer and Conqueror (Virus with tanks). More importantly we'll get the magnificent Midwinter in next month's issue. Which I didn't buy. Because I'm an asshole.

Reviews
Games reviewed this month:
Black Tiger (Run and gun/stab - US Gold - £19.95 - 70%)
Dark Century (Tanks in Raytraced Space - Titus - £24.95 - 52%)
Beverley Hills Cop (Movie Tie-In Multi-Game - Tynesoft - £19.99 - 49%)
Rings Of Medusa (Strategy? RPG? - Starbyte - £24.99 - 69%)
Gravity (Very peculiar space game - Imageworks - £24.95 - 93% Format Gold)
Dr Doom's Revenge (Spiderman/Captain America in 1v1 fighting and jerky scrolling minigames - 29%)
Austerlitz (War Strategy with typed commands in 3D - Mirrorsoft - £24.95 - 92% Format Gold)
Wild Streets (Scrolling beat-em-up - Titus - £19.99 - 71%)
Aquanaut (Dolphin fucking simulator - Addictive - £24.99 - 41%)
Kick Off Extra Time (Football - Anco - £9.99 - 49%)

Black Tiger looks like fairly typical fare for that time and yet I remember as a kid wanting to give it a shot, swayed as I was by pretty graphics. Thankfully I didn't. Dark Century is an interesting one in that it made the bold claim to be raytraced. The first raytraced game in fact. Now that claim comes in an issue distributing GFA Raytrace which would take several hours at best to render a scene, which would rather demand that I call bullshit on it, and yet ST Format were undoubtedly fooled.

Beverley Hills Cop looks like one that could be fun or could be shit - it's the traditional movie tie-in consisting of mini-games representing key scenes, though given the stand-out feature of Beverley Hills Cop is Eddie Murphy being awesome I'm not sure how well that would translate to a game. Rings Of Medusa is one I remember seeing as a kid and being wowed by the screenshots which really did look like something from another world. Being older I can appreciate they're probably mostly static but at the time they offered so much possibility and intrigue. I will probably have to give it a go, though I suspect finding a decent manual will be key to getting anywhere with it.

Gravity is such a peculiar-looking game, from the bloke who made Bomb Uzal - it's one I'll need to have a closer look at before deciding whether or not to review as youtube didn't exactly give much away other than that it has the worst intro music ever. Dr Doom's Revenge looks nice in stills but I had a look on Youtube and dear god it's awful. I reckon I'll take a look at Austerlitz - I have a vague recollection that I had one of these games as a kid and was shit at it but the concept always intrigued me, this idea that as a commander you're stuck in place and have to send orders to your captains via messengers who might get intercepted en route, those messages being text typed for the parser.

Wild Streets might be my quick and easy review, it looks lovely and got my attention as a kid. Aquanaut less so. I loved kick off (or more accurately Player Manager) but it looks like Extra Time is a dodgy cash-in. I vaguely recall Anco doing a lot of that kind of thing back in the day - this 'data disk' seems like nothing more than a basic patch tbh, charging a tenner for it is a bit rude.

So, there's a few there I'd like to take a look at, we'll see what time allows.

 

[lmimmfn]

Wild Streets is absolutely awful

 

[hariseldon]

Wild Streets is absolutely awful

That bad? That's a shame as the graphics look lovely.

EDIT: Found a Youtube - yeah I see. Lovely fluid animation but at a cost in that it doesn't seem to have much gameplay and collision looks ropey.


One thing - I think the 2D single-plane doesn't work as well as the 2.5D employed by Double Dragon, Golden Axe etc - I always got on far better with those games than the 2D stuff where you don't really have the range of movement to have any tactical options.

 

[hariseldon]

Other Magazines (released February 1990)
So looking at the previous time I did this I cocked up and got different months for The One and Zero. Oops!

The One - Issue 18 (March 1990)

The cover is a bit of a mess, with bits of E-Motion, Sudden Impact, TV Sports Basketball and Pipe Mania. They really needed to pin it down a bit. We have a preview for Cinemaware's Reach For The Sky - te problem is that while the screenshots look great, Cinemaware games just absolutely suck. No depth, shitty minigames, great graphics. That's them in a nutshell. There's a preview for Impossamole which I'm pretty sure I never saw a review for, and another short one for the magnificent Speedball 2. Inject it into my veins baby. We have a reveal for Chase HQ 2, Microprose making coin-ops out of F19 Stealth Fighter. March releases will see Gun Boat from Accolade, then the game that sucked days, weeks, months of my life, Player Manager (think Kick Off with a management game tacked on), Rock Star Ate My Hamster, Ski Or Die, Space Harrier 2, Rainbow Islands, Football Manager World Cup Edition, Pinball Magic, Dan Dare 3, etc - all these get passing mentions. We get an in-depth look at Infestation, a work in progress, and at Barbarian 2. More exciting is an article on Cadaver - I find it interesting how quite a few of these simply have the sprite sheets from games as well as actual screenshots. Cadaver was hugely impressive.

The reviews see E-Motion (92%) and Warhead (93%) review well though frankly neither interest me. The Colonel's Bequest (80%) on the other hand does - I don't think ST Format ever covered it so I've made a note to get to it when we reach its place in the timeline. The PC version is reviewed here, with no promise of ST/Amiga versions. Conquest (Virus/Zarch with tanks) gets 80% - hopefully there's an actual game there. Pipemania gets a well-deserved 89%, Stryx gets 68% for what looks like formulaic fare, Crackdown gets 88%, and TV Sports Basketball, with its lovely presentation in cut-scenes (though crude in-match graphics) gets 93%.

Zero - Issue 5 (March 1990)

Zero covers always looked classier than The One and this is no exception, with this one focusing on The Lost Patrol, a game of astounding graphical prowess. In the news we see that for the ST/Amiga versions of F-19 Stealth Fighter the US coding team was binned and a British team started from scratch. If that is the case that was an impressively fast turn-around given it was reviewed in July's ST Format (spoiler - 96% and one of the games I spent sooooooo much time on).

We get an extensive preview of Manchester United, a football game that doesn't look too exciting. More interesting are previews of BSS Jane Seymour and Castle Master. We have a bit of a group test on racing games, where Hard Drivin continues to pull the wool over the eyes of reviewers. At least the review for Indianapolis 500 was about right.

Lost Patrol gets 89%, the graphics are astounding. Pipemania gets 92%, it's still a classic. Midwinter gets 94% which is well deserved. Space Harrier 2 gets 85% - I think it got savaged in ST Format. Hex strategy Full Metal Planete gets 88%, Conqueror gets 75%, the fascinating Dragon's Breath gets 78%. Some classics in there no doubt.

 

[Havoc2049]

That bad? That's a shame as the graphics look lovely.

EDIT: Found a Youtube - yeah I see. Lovely fluid animation but at a cost in that it doesn't seem to have much gameplay and collision looks ropey.


One thing - I think the 2D single-plane doesn't work as well as the 2.5D employed by Double Dragon, Golden Axe etc - I always got on far better with those games than the 2D stuff where you don't really have the range of movement to have any tactical options.

Wasabim makes some great ST videos. He usually shows a fair amount of skill on his gameplay videos, which is nice compared to all the videos of people playing ST games poorly. At the end of the Wild Streets video, I was on the edge of my seat, hoping Wasabim would pull it out and finish the game.

Anyways, many years ago I made a wallpaper using a screen capture of the awesome intro screen to Wild Streets, for all the Atari Jaguar out there. I love 16-bit cityscapes.

 

[lmimmfn]

That bad? That's a shame as the graphics look lovely.

EDIT: Found a Youtube - yeah I see. Lovely fluid animation but at a cost in that it doesn't seem to have much gameplay and collision looks ropey.


One thing - I think the 2D single-plane doesn't work as well as the 2.5D employed by Double Dragon, Golden Axe etc - I always got on far better with those games than the 2D stuff where you don't really have the range of movement to have any tactical options.

Yeah, i remember it was bad so threw it on my Amiga 1200 earlier, played for a minute, its just dull and the controls arent great. The cat animation was good though lol

 

[lmimmfn]

I just setup my A1200 today, excuse the mess, waiting for Ikea desk delivery next week and feeling in the retro mood today so set it up on the kitchen table.

- Original Amiga 1200(had my original A1200 from '92 until September this year, busted it upgrading with Vampire and Indivision card, so picked another A1200 up within 24 hours of killing my own, need to fix my original)
- Black case( kickstarter based on original A1200 molds with signatures - like A1000)
- mechanical keyboard( kipper2k short run mech keyboard, is lovely though )
- v1200 vampire 128MB( FPGA accellerator, faster than motorolla 68060 with chunky mode support, would rather 68060 with Warp card but prices are stupid for 68060s)
- 64GB+ harddrive space( cant remember lol, have a CF card and SD card and theyre both huge)
- have ethernet support but need to set it up, have wifi PCMCIA card but cant find it lol
- 4Gig PCMCIA card for transferring files between PC and Amiga

Had some great fun with Apidya, Silkworm, Turrican 2 and a few demos( tbh was mainly trying to get an OSSC that i bought working).

 

[hariseldon]

I just setup my A1200 today, excuse the mess, waiting for Ikea desk delivery next week and feeling in the retro mood today so set it up on the kitchen table.

- Original Amiga 1200(had my original A1200 from '92 until September this year, busted it upgrading with Vampire and Indivision card, so picked one up within 24 hours, need to fix my original)
- Black case( kickstarter based on original A1200 molds with signatures - like A1000)
- mechanical keyboard( kipper2k short run mech keyboard, is lovely though )
- v1200 vampire 128MB( FPGA accellerator faster than motorolla 68060 with chunky mode support, would rather 68060 with Warp card but prices are stupid for 68060s)
- 64GB+ harddrive space( cant remember lol, have a CF card and SD card and theyre both huge)

Had some great fun with Apidya, Silkworm, Turrican 2 and a few demos( tbh was mainly trying to get an OSSC that i bought working).

You bastards are going to make me go and buy an ST or Amiga aren't you.

 

[lmimmfn]

You bastards are going to make me go and buy an ST or Amiga aren't you.

Lol, Do it, just do it!
A good option is a MiSTer, ok not original hardware but cheaper and close to timing precise( vs a Rasberry Pi) and can use multiple machines.

i could never do without my Amiga, i updated my previous post but i had my original A1200 from '92 until a few months ago and busted it reattaching an Indivision card(allows HDMI output for native CRT modes), was so pissed off not having an Amiga that i bought a new A1200 and collected it within 24hours lol. Was expensive @460euro but more important to have a working A1200 again
Really want to get my original fixed.

Ill probably pickup a MiSTer but will always have an original Amiga and working(hopefully)

Im still in awe at what these old computers can do, before i upgraded to a vampire accelerator on my Amiga i was playing nigh on full colour videos with audio on my A1200 with AGABlaster at 12-13FPS with a 68030/50 accellerator @ 768 x 576 or thereabouts, amazing and could have been done in the day if the software existed.

I went to Amiga Ireland last year and met Dave Haynie(was Amiga lead engineer at commodore), amazing guy to listen to and sound out to boot, great guy and a true legend in Amiga retroland.

My A1200 is probably worth close to my gaming Pc( which is no slouch with a 1080Ti)

I have an atari 7800 also but If i had the space or ever get the space im going to get a C64 breadboard, 128k speccy, 128k Amstrad(6128), Atari ST and Amiga 500(as that was my original Amiga), some day.... some day

@hariseldon aplogies for the thread derail on your excellent ST thread/reviews

 

[hariseldon]

Lol, Do it, just do it!
A good option is a MiSTer, ok not original hardware but cheaper and close to timing precise( vs a Rasberry Pi) and can use multiple machines.

i could never do without my Amiga, i updated my previous post but i had my original A1200 from '92 until a few months ago and busted it reattaching an Indivision card(allows HDMI output for native CRT modes), was so pissed off not having an Amiga that i bought a new A1200 and collected it within 24hours lol. Was expensive @460euro but more important to have a working A1200 again
Really want to get my original fixed.

Ill probably pickup a MiSTer but will always have an original Amiga and working(hopefully)

Im still in awe at what these old computers can do, before i upgraded to a vampire accelerator on my Amiga i was playing nigh on full colour videos with audio on my A1200 with AGABlaster at 12-13FPS with a 68030/50 accellerator @ 768 x 576 or thereabouts, amazing and could have been done in the day if the software existed.

I went to Amiga Ireland last year and met Dave Haynie(was Amiga lead engineer at commodore), amazing guy to listen to and sound out to boot, great guy and a true legend in Amiga retroland.

My A1200 is probably worth close to my gaming Pc( which is no slouch with a 1080Ti)

I have an atari 7800 also but If i had the space or ever get the space im going to get a C64 breadboard, 128k speccy, 128k Amstrad(6128), Atari ST and Amiga 500(as that was my original Amiga), some day.... some day

@hariseldon aplogies for the thread derail on your excellent ST thread/reviews

Tbh I don't think I'd want to do it with non-original hardware. It's not just the chips, it's the whole package, the sight of the machine sitting there, the feel of it, as much as it's what you do with it. At some point I'll definitely upgrade the man-cave (which is already pretty geeky with desktop pc, triple-monitors, VR, hardcore wheel and pedals, button box, joystick, flight yoke, and a bunch of other stuff) with some cool retro stuff - an A1200 would be nice, or a 1040STE. What's compatibility like on the 1200? Does it play most of the classics? I imagine there's patched releases to cover some incompatibilities now - or would I be better off getting a 600? I absolutely drooled over the 1200 as a kid. The Falcon was obviously a cool bit of kit but it never really had any killer games for it, where the 1200 did slowly get some traction before Commodore buggered themselves to death.

Btw that's not a thread derail, not even slightly. We're all lovers of 16-bit hardware in all its forms here, seems as good a place as any to discuss cool shit people have acquired, to me that's the thread going above and beyond what I expected and delivering something really cool. More is definitely welcome.

 

[hariseldon]

Rings Of Medusa

ST Format Review

My Review

For this review I'm running Steem with a 1MB STFM, running TOS 1.04. This is Pompey Pirates #37, quite a simple menu with a cool picture of a knight, some sscrolly text and a graphic equaliser in the border, along with a decent chip tune. It comes with a trainer if you need it - I'm going to try to play without it.

So, long story short, Rings Of Medusa (ROM from here on) is a strategy game. Medusa is turning your people evil and it's your job to find 5 rings, put the in a temple and thus force a fight with Medusa. To do this I need to earn money to fund an army to find the rings. Money can come from trading, attacking caravans, conquering towns and plundering their treasuries, finding raw materials, finding treasure and gambling in the casino. There's a 5 and a half page story to wade through (see link to manual below) if you feel the urge, but the objectives are reasonably clear.

So, I click and hold the mouse to drag my icon around, days elapse as I trudge the map. I find myself at a town with a good selection of amenities - I presume that clicking on them will make something happen. Graphics so far are lovely, sound is fairly standard sound-chip warble, nothing exceptional.

My attempts to buy some iron or gold or anything fall apart owing to no icon being available to buy anything - it appears to be greyed out. Ok, let's try the temple. I find out that there's a treasure at 14-04 S, 34-39 W. I'll note that down and see if I can figure out how to use those numbers. A quick trip to the bank and that seems easy enough to manage - presumably putting money in the bank keeps it safe should something happen to me.

I leave the town in search of treasure. Let's see what I find. Nothing. On to Gloria Springs. Disappointgly the town graphic is identical. I can't buy anything and I have nothing to sell. So, towns evidently aren't useful to me yet. Treasures too. Time to attack a caravan. Unfortunately I can't find one, but I get intercepted and lose everything, which leaves me a bit fucked.

So I go to a town called Falcon and discover the red flag icon on the right, if you're in a bank, robs the bank. Free money, excellent. I needed that as I had none. It only works once. Time to head to the pub. Let's bet my ill-gotten gains. I will of course save-scum until I win this game of blackjack. I'm cool like that. This is blackjack with weird rules. Thank god I have the manual. Ace is worth 11, the queen, marked with a D is worth 3, the jack (B) is worth 2, and the king 4. Peculiar. This explains my first few losses - I had no fucking idea what was going on. The letters I suspect are a product of the game being German. Maybe that's how germans play blackjack.

WOOHOO! I won and got some money! See the nonsensical cards?

So anyway I wander around and manage to buy things in one store and sell in another to make money, all very Elite, in fact one could easily argue that this is Elite in medieval times for most of the gameplay loop.

Eventually I ran out of steam a bit, but I can see myself giving it another shot sometime to see if I can do better in battle (which I suspect I would if I bought enough troops and fed them well). It's a good solid game which perhaps could do with slightly better documentation (the manual is terrible) and usability - the visuals are nicely done and the concepts are sound. Watching a lets play I found out that if I had scouts I could detect caravans and the likes, which would be very helpful. I had a good time in my couple of hours with it - if I wasn't looking to get more games played (with Midwinter, Damocles and Sim City lurking in the distance making me get a bit greedy) I'd have gone on longer and I probably will come back to it. I reckon I'd have had some fun with this as a kid. I had good instincts.

Resources
Manual: http://www.atarimania.com/st/files/rings_of_medusa_starbyte_instructions.PDF

 

[butane bob]

Just wanna say even though i'm not into the ST, threads like this are amazing. Carry on!

 

[hariseldon]

If anyone fancies following along - the manual for my next game is at http://lucasabandonware.free.fr/manuels/The Battle of Austerlitz.pdf - you can find it at Atarimania or look for Automation 245, Medway Boys 54 or Vectronix 471. The game is Austerlitz, and this review is going to take a bit more time and work than usual.

 

[lmimmfn]

Tbh I don't think I'd want to do it with non-original hardware. It's not just the chips, it's the whole package, the sight of the machine sitting there, the feel of it, as much as it's what you do with it. At some point I'll definitely upgrade the man-cave (which is already pretty geeky with desktop pc, triple-monitors, VR, hardcore wheel and pedals, button box, joystick, flight yoke, and a bunch of other stuff) with some cool retro stuff - an A1200 would be nice, or a 1040STE. What's compatibility like on the 1200? Does it play most of the classics? I imagine there's patched releases to cover some incompatibilities now - or would I be better off getting a 600? I absolutely drooled over the 1200 as a kid. The Falcon was obviously a cool bit of kit but it never really had any killer games for it, where the 1200 did slowly get some traction before Commodore buggered themselves to death.

Btw that's not a thread derail, not even slightly. We're all lovers of 16-bit hardware in all its forms here, seems as good a place as any to discuss cool shit people have acquired, to me that's the thread going above and beyond what I expected and delivering something really cool. More is definitely welcome.

If you can afford it get an A1200( plays all old 500 games plus the later AGA library) the prices in the past few years are skyrocketing.
I havnt done it yet but if you get one and caps arent replaced would recommend it( ill do it if i can get my orig A1200 repaired so i always have one available, i play it several hours per week normally).

99% of the Amiga library is patched to allow loading from harddrive and to provide backwards compatibility on the A1200 without any work, you can have pretty much all the Amiga library launchable from the OS e.g. (just took this pic now on my 1200)

To be able to do this it uses WHDLoad(launching games from the OS) and iGame which is the launcher im using here.
You really need a 68030 accelerator to have the perfect setup(just fast and responsive) and an OSSC or similar(converts scart to HDMI without lag and works on loads of retro consoles/computers) or an Indivision which converts Amiga output to HDMI. I prefer the former OSSC in hindsight as the Indivision mounts on top of the amiga gfx chip(multiple add/removes make it weak and can break your Amiga as i did ) so i prefer non obtrusive OSSC method( cheap scart to hdmi would do in the meantime)

Youll also need a CF card and HD cable for thwt and ideally a CF card with a PCMCIA card with CF card to transfer from PC to Amiga.

You're probably talking about 250-300 euro on top of an A1200 for accelerator, some ram, CF card, joystick, and cheap scart to hdmi and could add an OSSC or indivision and minor upgrades later( prioritize a new PSU).
You can also do it cheaper and upgrade later. There are other options for that if needed( e.g. Floppy emulator or ram board with no accelerator)

Its expensive but its not like it loses money

I also have a man cave with PC, VR, Wheel/Pedals, flight stick, arcadestick, 35" ultrawide, 50" tv, 105" projector. Its normally where my Amiga is but had to steal the desk to setup a WFH office so waiting for replacement to setup my Amiga proper again

Maybe post a "Wanted" thread in the English Amiga Board - https://eab.abime.net/forumdisplay.php?f=25
If replies are from a longterm poster you should be relatively safe vs ebay and prices are far more reasonable.

If you do take this route would love updates here on your progress( or even if you take ST route) and i can provide any help/info needed(if Amiga route) , im sure others here can provide same .

I would absolutely love a Falcon and wanted it back in the day but the prices are nuts

Will say this thread is what i consider most fun on GAF(not my own crap lol, your ST reviews with background era info )

 

[Nitty_Grimes]

You might also want to add the cost to having the Amiga re-capped too. I need to sort that out for mine soon. Just finding and trusting the person to do it.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

I went to Amiga Ireland last year and met Dave Haynie(was Amiga lead engineer at commodore), amazing guy to listen to and sound out to boot, great guy and a true legend in Amiga retroland.

And he likes beer a lot... Met him at Amiga32 and Amiga34 in Neuss, near Düsseldorf..
Great down to earth dude.

Got a Vampire1200 as well. Great little card.

And yeah, sorry for the Amiga talk in this thread of ST awesomeness.
But we are all 16 bit homecomputer brothers, aren't we? ; )

(add/edit: just checked, I knew I remembered reading your name on the EAB ).

 

[hariseldon]

And he likes beer a lot... Met him at Amiga32 and Amiga34 in Neuss, near Düsseldorf..
Great down to earth dude.

Got a Vampire1200 as well. Great little card.

And yeah, sorry for the Amiga talk in this thread of ST awesomeness.
But we are all 16 bit homecomputer brothers, aren't we? ; )

(add/edit: just checked, I knew I remembered reading your name on the EAB ).

As I said before, not that I own the thread or anything, but personally I'm more than happy to have Amiga chat in here - I had both, the wars are over, both were beautiful machines that made memories for all of us and shaped our lives in some way, fuck yeah.

lmimmfn you've definitely gone balls-deep there! I suspect it might be sensible for me to ease myself in gently - I've seen a re-capped 1200 on Ebay for £600 with 16GB SSD storage, pretty tempting tbh. That said, I should probably wait until I've got the remodelling done of the man-cave. Right now it's still got the previous owner's awful decor - yellow fucking artex walls on 3 sides and hideous yellow wallpaper on the 4th. I'm thinking I want to construct a wooden shelving unit with built-in monitor stand, keyboard/mouse stand, wheel stand, etc against the back wall which would give me the option of having a super-wide desk and thus being able to have an Amiga/ST with a CRT tv (they're super-cheap on Ebay) to give me a pretty decent setup.

 

[Aarbron]

[/QUOTE]

I just setup my A1200 today, excuse the mess, waiting for Ikea desk delivery next week and feeling in the retro mood today so set it up on the kitchen table.

- Original Amiga 1200(had my original A1200 from '92 until September this year, busted it upgrading with Vampire and Indivision card, so picked another A1200 up within 24 hours of killing my own, need to fix my original)
- Black case( kickstarter based on original A1200 molds with signatures - like A1000)
- mechanical keyboard( kipper2k short run mech keyboard, is lovely though )
- v1200 vampire 128MB( FPGA accellerator, faster than motorolla 68060 with chunky mode support, would rather 68060 with Warp card but prices are stupid for 68060s)
- 64GB+ harddrive space( cant remember lol, have a CF card and SD card and theyre both huge)
- have ethernet support but need to set it up, have wifi PCMCIA card but cant find it lol
- 4Gig PCMCIA card for transferring files between PC and Amiga

Had some great fun with Apidya, Silkworm, Turrican 2 and a few demos( tbh was mainly trying to get an OSSC that i bought working).

When did you order your Kipper2k keyboard? Ordered back in October 2019 and still waiting

By the way, is the Vampire worth it? I do have an Amiga 4000 with an '060 (modified Warp Engine by a Polish dude, running at 80mhz) - but the Vampire is sure tempting.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

By the way, is the Vampire worth it? I do have an Amiga 4000 with an '060 (modified Warp Engine by a Polish dude, running at 80mhz) - but the Vampire is sure tempting.

I think you are doing fine with that setup... No need for a Vampire.

 

[rnlval]

I just setup my A1200 today, excuse the mess, waiting for Ikea desk delivery next week and feeling in the retro mood today so set it up on the kitchen table.

- Original Amiga 1200(had my original A1200 from '92 until September this year, busted it upgrading with Vampire and Indivision card, so picked another A1200 up within 24 hours of killing my own, need to fix my original)
- Black case( kickstarter based on original A1200 molds with signatures - like A1000)
- mechanical keyboard( kipper2k short run mech keyboard, is lovely though )
- v1200 vampire 128MB( FPGA accellerator, faster than motorolla 68060 with chunky mode support, would rather 68060 with Warp card but prices are stupid for 68060s)
- 64GB+ harddrive space( cant remember lol, have a CF card and SD card and theyre both huge)
- have ethernet support but need to set it up, have wifi PCMCIA card but cant find it lol
- 4Gig PCMCIA card for transferring files between PC and Amiga

Had some great fun with Apidya, Silkworm, Turrican 2 and a few demos( tbh was mainly trying to get an OSSC that i bought working).

I have my near mint Amiga 1200 (Rev 1D4 motherboard) with Amikit's 8MB + 40Mhz 68882 FPU expansion card + backpanel 32 GB compact flash card(for file transfers with PC). I signed up for Vampire 1200.

 

[lmimmfn]

When did you order your Kipper2k keyboard? Ordered back in October 2019 and still waiting

By the way, is the Vampire worth it? I do have an Amiga 4000 with an '060 (modified Warp Engine by a Polish dude, running at 80mhz) - but the Vampire is sure tempting.

Yeah, the Kipper2k takes forever, however being realistic, i ordered it after the a1200.net keycaps and im still waiting on those , i ordered the kipper2k as soon as it went live in late 2018 and received mine around January 2020. The wait is definately worth it, AmigaBill on his latest youtube video just received his so they are still being processed, its madness that AotL didnt outsource the builing of them.

Congrats on the Warp, lucky you, i had a 060 on order in August for 400euro but was some issue with the batch so i gave up as 400 was the max i was willing to pay considering the price of the warp on top of that.

The v1200 is great, bit of hassle installing new cores on it and its annoying that theres no solution provided with it for integrating hdmi and ethernet into the 1200 case but i guess it is hobbyist and kinda fun to diy it, also annoying to have 2 outputs when using the rtg but its fine when using only native modes for workbench.
The card itself is great and im glad its only being used as a cpu accelerator with rtg gfx and using the original chipset, will be happy when ive it setup properly with ethernet.
Main thing with the vampire for me is its a solution moving forward when the older cpus are getting harder and more expensive to get and its being improved continuously, i dont much need for more power at the moment, one thing i would love is if youtube worked on an Amiga, that would be perfect

 

[Stiflers Mom]

When did you order your Kipper2k keyboard? Ordered back in October 2019 and still waiting

I have been waiting since 2017 for my crowdfunding keycaps, and a few months ago they told us that the extra colours won't happen cause of Covid. Yeah, thanks for nothing.
If not for those colours, I would not have ordered and paid that crazy amount of postage fee.

 

[Kazza]

Great thread @hariseldon , I'm very tempted to do the same and start a thread, but with the Mean Machines magazines.

Anyways, many years ago I made a wallpaper using a screen capture of the awesome intro screen to Wild Streets, for all the Atari Jaguar out there. I love 16-bit cityscapes.

Beautiful! Not gonna lie, I would have been all over a game like Wild Streets back in the day. Nice graphics, animation, beat'em up action (just like Final Fight! - or so I would have told myself), and a fucking Jaguar as a fighting companion. What's not to love?

 

[hariseldon]

Great thread @hariseldon , I'm very tempted to do the same and start a thread, but with the Mean Machines magazines.



Beautiful! Not gonna lie, I would have been all over a game like Wild Streets back in the day. Nice graphics, animation, beat'em up action (just like Final Fight! - or so I would have told myself), and a fucking Jaguar as a fighting companion. What's not to love?

Yeah I'm gonna give it a crack - I can see from the youtube videos fairly obvious flaws but the animation is gorgeous and it's just such a cool idea. Got to get Austerlitz done first though and that's not the work of a few hours!

 

[lmimmfn]

As I said before, not that I own the thread or anything, but personally I'm more than happy to have Amiga chat in here - I had both, the wars are over, both were beautiful machines that made memories for all of us and shaped our lives in some way, fuck yeah.

lmimmfn you've definitely gone balls-deep there! I suspect it might be sensible for me to ease myself in gently - I've seen a re-capped 1200 on Ebay for £600 with 16GB SSD storage, pretty tempting tbh. That said, I should probably wait until I've got the remodelling done of the man-cave. Right now it's still got the previous owner's awful decor - yellow fucking artex walls on 3 sides and hideous yellow wallpaper on the 4th. I'm thinking I want to construct a wooden shelving unit with built-in monitor stand, keyboard/mouse stand, wheel stand, etc against the back wall which would give me the option of having a super-wide desk and thus being able to have an Amiga/ST with a CRT tv (they're super-cheap on Ebay) to give me a pretty decent setup.

lol, yes, better with slow and steady ,£600 for a recapped 1200 sounds about right, they're usually £500-£600 recapped on ebay depending on condition.
lol@the decor, sounds awful, i had 20 hours from completion of conversion of the garage to a man cave and before guys were to come in to hang tv and projector screen so picked up some paint, did 2 coats on the walls and ceiling between 20:00 and 03:00 in the morning, guy for tv and projector arrived 6 hours later and seeing the room in the morning it realised it was day glow green( just like Only Fools and Horses ), haha, its awful but its staying
Shelving sounds great, especially if you have multiple systems and old game boxes etc.
CRTs are brilliant but huge, i'm glad i kept my 14" trinitron portable but annoyed i threw out my old multisync monitor about 6 years ago( thing was huge ).

 

[hariseldon]

lol, yes, better with slow and steady ,£600 for a recapped 1200 sounds about right, they're usually £500-£600 recapped on ebay depending on condition.
lol@the decor, sounds awful, i had 20 hours from completion of conversion of the garage to a man cave and before guys were to come in to hang tv and projector screen so picked up some paint, did 2 coats on the walls and ceiling between 20:00 and 03:00 in the morning, guy for tv and projector arrived 6 hours later and seeing the room in the morning it realised it was day glow green( just like Only Fools and Horses ), haha, its awful but its staying
Shelving sounds great, especially if you have multiple systems and old game boxes etc.
CRTs are brilliant but huge, i'm glad i kept my 14" trinitron portable but annoyed i threw out my old multisync monitor about 6 years ago( thing was huge ).

I've just been painting the hallway and built a cupboard for my raspi server and its assorted hard drives, various routers, electric meter etc - my first bit of woodwork since 1996. This is my first place I've owned so I've not had the opportunity to do this stuff before so definitely learning as I go. For instance over the weekend I learned never to ever use fucking gloss paint. Getting a room painted that quickly is impressive though - my hallway took 2 days for the first coat, though there were a lot of fiddly edges of lightswitches, doors, windows etc to consider and also the bit over the stairs was quite a challenge due to height. Still got a bit more to do - the hallway is all white now which is good as it was fucking dark due to not enough light really getting in, but I want some accent colours in there so I plan to have a dark blue on the outward facing parts of the door frames and orange accenting on the inside bits. Once that's all done I can start thinking about the mancave. Hopefully what I've learned from the hallway will transfer well to the mancave.

My reasoning for thinking CRT is a mix of laziness (not having to fuck around with adapters to connect to HDMI) and preservation (ie getting as close to the raw standard experience as possible). I had a 21" monitor back in the day (mid-00s I think, for my PC) that was an absolute beast. Picked it up for £30 from cash converters, it was awesome. It weighed a fucking tonne though. I'll definitely need to reinforce my desk!

In terms of design I'm thinking of having the wheel clamped to a piece of wood with a rail under the 'desk' area for it to attach to so I can add or remove it to the setup easily, with a similar arrangement for keyboard and mouse holders, maybe even shifter and flight yoke. Ideally I want to be able to reconfigure between work and play easily. The retro stuff would likely be more fixed though owing to the size of the monitor etc. Lots of design work needed for this bad boy.

 

[lmimmfn]

thanks yes, was surprised i got it painted on time. Stay way from gloss or use Satin Wood which is gloss but doesnt have that horrible shine( more matte effect ), thats what we used.
I feel your pain getting your own place and painting, took me over a year to finish( had to sand ~14 doors, skirting boards and paint them white along with all the rooms )
Never again, will get someone in next time , it is nice to do the first time though.

yeah, its good to have at least 1 CRT, besides retro stuff does look a lot better on CRTs.
I had the same idea for my wheel( something easy to setup/take away ), but i bought this desk at ikea( they dont seem to have them anymore ), this is just the stick ikea image:

I clamp the wheel on the self at the top where the speakers are and have the gearstick clamped on the side, bit of hassle but its nice to have it accessible and not in the way, also have all the VR stuff, arcade stick, flight stick etc. on the top of it.
Dont think that one would take a CRT though , its just about big enough for my 35" ultrawide though.
Setting up another desk beside it for the Amiga setup just waiting for delivery.

It'll be a lot of hard work/time to get everything sorted, but well worth it in the end.

 

[hariseldon]

Someone posted this in a Facebook group I’m in - it’s the final subscribers letter with the final issue of ST Format.

 

[lmimmfn]

I never experienced last issues of 16bit mags fortunately(was at uni so money was tight and more important things to spend on )
Looking back it would be very sad if that was your main platform, especially for those who hadnt the money to switch to consoles or PC, getting that last mag would have been a shock.

 

[hariseldon]

I never experienced last issues of 16bit mags fortunately(was at uni so money was tight and more important things to spend on )
Looking back it would be very sad if that was your main platform, especially for those who hadnt the money to switch to consoles or PC, getting that last mag would have been a shock.

Yeah the end must have been unpleasant though if you look at those last issues content is getting pretty thin on the ground and I think circulation was something like 15-20k so very few people were left who gave a shit by that point - everyone had moved on. I was pretty late moving away from the 16-bit world in that I didn't get a PC til 1996 (Pentium 166 with 8MB RAM and a 2GB hard drive if I recall, Compaq Presario, utter shitbox that couldn't be upgraded).

 

[hariseldon]

In other unrelated news - I've been looking around to find stuff that covered the pre-ST/Amiga Format years so I can fill some gaps and found https://retrocdn.net/Category:Computer_and_Video_Games_scans which is pretty awesome, going all the way back to 1981. Amazing stuff, and the covers of the magazines are incredible. Gorgeous artwork I guess because the games themselves were so fugly. Definitely a better, more innocent time.

 

[lmimmfn]

In other unrelated news - I've been looking around to find stuff that covered the pre-ST/Amiga Format years so I can fill some gaps and found https://retrocdn.net/Category:Computer_and_Video_Games_scans which is pretty awesome, going all the way back to 1981. Amazing stuff, and the covers of the magazines are incredible. Gorgeous artwork I guess because the games themselves were so fugly. Definitely a better, more innocent time.

Nice find, i was looking for a site that had the older CVG issues

 

[hariseldon]

So I had a bit of a flick through CVG and thought it might be fun to see some coverage from the dawn of the ST so Iooked around mid-85 to see if there was anything but there was bugger all other than some adverts selling STs (not even from Atari - this is from the companies selling all sorts of gear). It's odd as the mag was certainly covering Atari's 8-bit offerings. We have to wait til April 86 to get any substantial coverage so I've included it here.

No game reviews yet - indeed none of the game adverts even mention ST or Amiga versions, though that should perhaps not be a surprise when the ST on release was about £750 according to Silica's advert. To be fair, the fastest machines at that point seem to have been running at around 4MHz vs the ST's 8, and 64k seemed the norm vs 512k. That said, I think I underestimated the 8-bits somewhat, looking at what they were doing. My CPC464 was shit no doubt but the C64 could actually do quite a bit, and the article makes clear just how stark the gap from ST to Amiga really was. The Amiga really was an absolute beast. However, probably the thing that separates them isn't so much the numbers, 8 bit vs 16 bit or the RAM or how many colours - it's likely that what actually separated them was the move to a proper WIMP interface. That was the big qualitative leap that came with this generation. However, it does seem that the improvement in games over the years was as much down to changes in the business and improving skill of the programmers - certainly I can see that through the 8-bit years and the 16-bit years are no exception either. The shift from generation to generation is merely a raising of the ceiling rather than an immediate huge jump in existing quality.

(click to view the full size versions in a new tab)




The Amiga has to wait 2 more issues to get a roundup of software.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

Yeah the end must have been unpleasant though if you look at those last issues content is getting pretty thin on the ground and I think circulation was something like 15-20k so very few people were left who gave a shit by that point - everyone had moved on. I was pretty late moving away from the 16-bit world in that I didn't get a PC til 1996 (Pentium 166 with 8MB RAM and a 2GB hard drive if I recall, Compaq Presario, utter shitbox that couldn't be upgraded).

Yep, same here..
I was there watching the ST and Amiga being released, then getting an Amiga500 in late 1987, and gamed and coded on it up to 1991/92 I'd say and then lost completely sight about the 16-bitters. Just heard that Commodore bankrupted in 1994 and didn't even care much to be honest.

My friends had already upgraded to PCs in 1991 and were able to play Wing Commander 2, Lands of Lore and Ultima on 256 colours VGA cards. I was so envious, but just didn't have the money to burn on a new computer that would have set me back a couple of thousand of deutsche Mark back then.
I would have loved to have stay on the Amiga, if Commodore had shown a way to compete with VGA PC machines in 1991. when they released the 1200 with its AGA architecture in 1993 the bigger public didn't give a shit about Commodore and the Amiga anymore, and neither did I.

Got my first PC (a Pentium 75) in late 1995 and got back into Amiga stuff in 2006.

 

[hariseldon]

So this is the first mention of any gaming on the 16 bit systems, in the August 1986 issue.

Later in the same issue there was a supercomputer special. Doing this on my phone so apologies if it’s shit - I’ll reupload if need be

 

[hariseldon]

And a bonus from a Yugoslav magazine.

 

[hariseldon]

Also dug this out when the name Bandersnatch came up in the cv1 article above. Quite an interesting insight into the industry in the early-mid-80s.

 

[Stiflers Mom]

So this is the first mention of any gaming on the 16 bit systems, in the August 1986 issue.

Later in the same issue there was a supercomputer special. Doing this on my phone so apologies if it’s shit - I’ll reupload if need be

Those early times were so amazing and fresh.

Also, hard to believe what a cool company EA was back then.