Posts Tagged ‘atari st’
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Whattaheck: The HTML5 demoscene
11th Jul 20132Anyone who knows me knows about my love of all things linked to the Atari ST and Amiga demo scenes, going back multiple decades now. The site We Are Back has been actively converting lots of famous demo screens to html5. It’s great to see it has bought about the resurrection of some long since idle demo groups too. So here’s a very quick round-up of some of my favourite recent entries on the site:
D.O.C. Demo by SpeedStar
This is a legendary Amiga classic and very cleanly recreated.
Whattaheck by NewCore
This is one of the earlier Atari ST mega demos created by The Carebears (and friends). As was common with Atari ST demos you used the space bar to move from screen to screen rather than the mouse. On the main menu, as seen in the screen shot above, move to the DEMO NO. section and use the left/right arrows to change the screen and then space to load. There are 13 in total. NewCore has literally converted the entire demo, minus a few scroll texts, very impressive work indeed.
Hemoroids Rebirth by Hemoroids
This is different in that it’s an old Atari ST demo crew coming back from the grave and flexing their muscles with html5 instead. This is a brand new demo, made in a mostly old-skool style, but with new music, graphics and effects. Lovely to watch and even better in full-screen.
A La Melon by SoLo and TDK
Another new creation this time by SoLo and a bouncey chip track by TDK that’s a great tribute to the Amiga group Melon Design.
New demos get uploaded on an extremely regular basis and there is a very active Facebook group around WAB too. So if you have the desire to see some demoscene pixels blasted across your browser then I’d strongly recommend joining in.
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Flod 4 Released for JS and AS3 – New tracker module formats supported
4th Apr 2012
For those unfamiliar with Flod, it is a set of JavaScript and AS3 libraries written by Christian Corti, that can accurately playback lots of different Amiga, PC and Atari ST music formats natively. It supports all of the common formats: FastTracker II, Ultimate Soundtracker, ProTracker, NoiseTracker and lots more including DeltaMusic, David Whittaker, FredEd and Jochen Hippel format tunes.
There are download packages for HTML5/JS using the Web Audio API found in Chrome. Also available are the AS3 class files for Flash.
Check it out on the Flod page.
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Robotz DX – A PC Remake of the Atari ST classic
9th Jul 2010A long time ago I announced that I wanted to do a remake of a classic Atari ST game “Robotz” in Flash. Fast forward to today, and I still haven’t got around to it. However James Monkman (Heavy Stylus of RGCD) wasn’t as lazy as me, and set about creating this awesome re-imaging of the original.
Although it’s for Windows PCs only (as it was created in Game Maker 8) it’s a mighty fine game indeed! A lot of the limitations of the original have been removed, and the gameplay is faster, more frantic and basically more fun as a result. Check out this cool video to see what I mean:
The graphics are lovely, a faithful blend of rips from the ST original and some new pixel art. 505, Crazy_Q and Damo provide the stomping soundtrack.
If you remember the original, you’ve got to try this version of it.
Hell, if you just enjoy quality games – you’ve got to try Robotz DX 🙂
Loads more info and the download here: http://www.rgcd.co.uk/robotzdx/
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Silmarils Collection for the PC
25th Feb 2010
If you were a real gamer back in the early 90’s you owned an Atari ST or an Amiga (and some poor freaks also owned PCs). But all of you would have been aware of the game developer Silmarils. Renowned for an almost Cinemaware-like level of graphics and attention to detail in their games. Most of them are classic fantasy based such as the Ishar series. This isn’t surprising given that the company were named after the symbolic jewels central in JRR Tolkein’s work The Silmarillion. This love of fantasy was evident in their games, graphics and stunning box artwork.
I was pleased to read today that DotEmu will be releasing the Silmarils Collection for the PC on March the 10th. This includes 16 games. You can make out most of them from the box shots above. Personally I always thought the Ishar trilogy and the concepts of Robinson’s Requiem were superb, so as long as this collection is keenly priced I’ll be there. Hopefully DotEmu will have done as good a job on these titles as it did on R-Type and Street Fighter.
You can sign-up to their mailing list here: http://www.silmarils-collection.com and once released (March 10th) this site will probably also contain full details of the games. For now here is a link to their newsletter announcement.
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Octopod! One of my first ever games :)
17th Jul 2009While digging through a huge stack of old Atari ST disks I found one which contained a bunch of my first ever ST games and demos. Created with STOS these are extremely primitive pieces (even by the standards of the late 1980s!) but I found it amusing watching and playing them all the same.
My very first real game was called Octopod. It involved shooting octopus, which for no sane reason would drop a gold coin after they exploded in red meaty chunks. Shoot the coin and you got points. Don’t shoot the octopus fast enough and you lost a life. Playing the game back tonight I found it insanely hard! Either my reflexes are vastly reduced now, or it doesn’t run quite the same under emulation 😉
Eitherway I present you a video of Octopod (sans music, as Camtasia was being a dick re: recording inputs)
[swfobj src=”http://sandbox.photonstorm.com/octopod.swf” width=”660″ height=”478″]
At the start you will see it’s inside the STOS editor. At the time this was a quite nice place to work, and reasonably well featured. You could have memory resident programs loaded into membanks, so you could switch between say the compiler or sprite editor at the press of a few keys. The block across the top is where you’d assign a sequence of key commands to function keys. The nasty salmon colour scheme is my fault, the default was white text on black. Remember back then most of us coded using TV sets, so this could be quite painful after extended periods of time!
I do a “list” at the start so you can view the source code and have a giggle. Oh and yes, you had to use line numbers! Only with AMOS on the Amiga did they drop that restriction. You can find out loads more about STOS at the STOS Time Tunnel web site.
I’m now considering re-coding it in Flash as part of the GYM Board 30 minute challenge 🙂
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