These last few weeks while writing up the “Game of the Week”, I’ve encountered many interested people are less familiar with the old ST, or who just assume it is the venerable “Atari 2600 VCS” 8-bit game console everyone had back in the day. I thought I might demystify things just a touch this round before breaking into my game suggestion.

Atari certainly was known for the “VCS”, but also for their many 8-bit consumer oriented computers — the “Atari 400″ line, the “Atari 800″, or you may know XE, XL, XEGS, or other acronyms. I was a Commodore Vic-20 kid who wanted an Amiga, but our family went to the mighty ST as it was in the same class as Amiga yet infinitely cheaper.

What was the Atari 520ST? (and subsequent machines, 1040, Mega, STacy, ST Book, TT030, Falcon, etc)

Atari wanted to enter the 32-bit consumer general purpose computer market with a machine that could also play games. They knew their brand was a strong home computer and strong gaming brand, so they wanted to marry them and build a machine to combat the Mac at its weakest point — price. The Mac was also Motorola 68000 based, but very expensive and targetting business and education. Atari had recently picked up an ex-Commodore leader and wanted to repeat that companies success  story — keep or grow the home market right out from under lazy market leaders.

Anyway, all told the ST went from concept to production in around 6-months time; the hardware, operating system including Atari specific modifications, and launch titles all built in 6 months simultaneously, is quite an achievement. (Some fantastic stories of this stressful time can be found over at Coder Dad blog, who was in there working on the OS at the time.) The overall quality of the hardware design under such constraints is also pretty good. Sure, its not a strong gaming machine (no special video hardware like a SNES game console might have), no super strong audio hardware (instead, they used cheap parts TI was trying to dump), and few custom chips (compare to the Amiga which is full of them.) Looking at it another way, Atari designed day zero to have a very powerful base with few things in there to impede, and comprised of mostly off the shelf parts. The CPU to memory bus is very efficient, the OS although admittedly goofy was not ‘in the way’ too much and was extremely easy to use, and highly advanced for its time. This is a machine full of firsts — one of the earliest fully mouse driven graphical interfaces with windows and pulldown menus at is core, and including applications even my mom figured out how to use. We looked down our nose at those poor bastards learning to read their Word Perfect keyboard templates, while we had our clicky clicky interfaces.

So it lacked custom graphic hardware, it made up for it with typical Atari spirit and fast hardware, so the games were pretty good until they got eclipsed later by the Amiga. (The Amiga, while slightly slower to start with, was an expandable hardware design and so new models and new options really drove it onward, whereas years later the ST models were still more or less similar to the launch machine. Later beefier machines were much less popular and so their new hardware was never used beyond the original specifications. Few developers made use of the STE wider colour palette or blitter hardware and simply fell back to treating it like a regular ST.)

Anyway, consider — Dungeon Master, first graphical dungeon romp using a mouse. Populous — first god game. STacy was one of the first laptops, and I think the first desktop replacement laptop — a full ST on the go, with backlit monitor and hard drive (and a good 15-30 minutes of battery life, woowoo!) Many extraordinary titles (real time 3d with Carrier Command, say), not to mention an absolutely incredible application library (including even Word Perfect, I bet you did not know that.) Fantastic desktop publishing software (second only to the Mac, in fact the ST was quite a powerhouse in publishing circles), built in MIDI (amazing for musicians, barely used by home consumers admittedly), an all around great machine.

Atari succeeded — they built a machine in the same class as Amiga and Mac, yet at a fraction of the price. For a few years, Atari was king of its class.

Later models (STFM included a floppy drive and TV-out, then the STE with enhanced graphical/memory hardware, then the Mega line with business oriented detached keyboard and hard drives, and extreme machines like the TT030 and Falcon) just got increasingly behind their competition, but were still fine machines. Still, its the original ST which simply blew everyone away at the end of 1985 and begin of 1986 that I rave about today. It was not the best in any way, but all told, it was one of the greats. I ran a BBS from approximately 1987 to 1993 or so on that little beast!

Edit: Above I was referring to Atari’s goal of a 32-bit machine; in the end, the ST is a 16/32-bit as they said (hence “ST” – Sixteen/Thirtytwo).

Oh yes.

Plasticland

I’ve received a few notes regarding this ‘GotW’ effort; for one, since I mentioned I’d hoped to avoid the well-trodden path (reviewing the very best of the titles, and for the ST there are many) that perhaps I’m projecting to newbies only the mediocre games. Perhaps I should not avoid the true greats, or should do a special posting summing up a bunch of them, so that I can just point at it and say ‘therrums!’ .. I’ll leave that for a later date and instead review a title which _I_ really enjoyed back in the day. I don’t recall now if it was popular or not.  Another note questioned about genres .. as the ST was blessed with many very different kinds of games from text adventures to puzzlers to flight sims to wargames of every kind, I could easily strike gold for anyone reader only every once in awhile.. but alas I’ve not the time to knock out 5-10 of these per week to address one from each genre. Still, I’ll mull it over. There are of course a few very good ST fan sites such as Little Green Desktop, Atari Legend, Atari Forum, etc .. so feel free to hit them up :)

Inspiration for this post was drawn from a thought I had .. we all know that 3D ‘ages worse’ than 2D, and this comes quadruply so for flight-sims. While you can fire up Mario Br^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hGreat Guiana Sisters and always enjoy it regardless of how ghetto the graphics, firing up Microsoft Flight Sim 2 will be brutal nomatter how much the nostalgia. Worse still are that with flight sims using such comprehensive controls, they’ll never really be playable even if you wanted to, anymore.. at least on a handheld or games console. Still, going back in my mind to great ST gaming moments, one will never forget chasing down the train that circled the landscape in Falcon and trying to fly through the open door in one of the railcars. I’ll never forget when that realization struck that the screamers in Dungeon Master were both edible and would slowly respawn, and so could be herded into a room with a portcullus and trapped for an infinite food supply. I’ll never forget blowing the first planet in Captive, hacking the file format of Breach so I could make my characgter ‘uber’, obliterating an army with one spell in Phantasie, taking over Chicago in Roadwar 2000, and I could go on, since I was quite the ST nerd.

And I will not forget in _D/Generation_ the first or second Genoq employee I rescued who ran over to say hello, and then got shot in the back by one of the traps I had tried so hard to avoid for myself. That’ll teach those survivors to run over to their would be rescuers!

D/Generation is a proto horror-puzzler, a game with a sensor of humour and intelligence and yet was relatively unforgiving.

Platform: Atar ST featured, but also upon Amiga and PC. It is highly tempting for me to attempt a remake :)

Play Now: Any emu of merit will handle it for your platform of choice. OutcaST on the gp2x, CaSTaway on the PSP, and OutcaST on the Pandora or Wiz when I release it (soon!), among others. (Hatari runs it fine on desktops, Wiz and Pandora, as do STeem Engine and WinSTon and others.)

A note on the ROMs floating about: As always I recommend ripping your own original disks, for both concerns of legality and also since usually they provide the best experience. Of course they often back then had painful protections (looking crap up in the manual, laser burnt holes in the disks, and so on), so do as you will. I’ve collected numerous copies and cracks of this title and must note that even some of the beefier ST emus sometimes get confused during load (unpack) time due to something some of the pack groups did. Most of them don’t like my emus too much, and I never did bother to go figure out why .. still, my original disk and a very simple crack disk work fine. (If it has a scrolling or bouncy intro, its probably the one that will not work with OutcaST. If it has an intro that blinks by that you can barely notice, you’re probably in luck. Look in the ‘complete collection’ type sources..)

Review:

Now while the artwork is functional and not striking, the gameplay I humbly submit makes up for it. One of my favorite titles of all time (Time Bandits for the ST) is also … cute, but utterly fantastic. Being a retro fan yourself I trust you can look beyong what the years have done :) The game also doesn’t really have a soundtrack, so you’ll have to go with me on this one.

Suffice to say it is an isometric perspective with your character dropped onto the top of a tower to deliver a package; sadly this tower, owned by a genetic engineering company (Resident Evil anyone?), has been taken over by the experiments (the A/Generation, B/Generation, etc) and you’ve got to find yourself a way out. Essentially each screen is a mini puzzle unto itself, with a few multi-screen gimmicks (find a key here, use it there.) Initially the player starts with no weapon and your job is to figure out which things are harmful (monsters popping out the floor, rotating on the spot, bouncing around, etc, electrified walls and floors and other traps) and which things are not (computer terminals with messages, keys, pressure plates, wall switches, doors, other civilians.) Later you’ll locate a laser pistol whose shots will rebound from the walls, letting you activate certain gadgets arond corners.

Most of the gameplay is in timing — one monster will be pivoting on the spot so you’ll have to run around it in the direction of rotation to stay out of harms way, while heading for a wall to push a button, and in basic logic — do this, then that, then t’other, to open a door out of this room. Usually you have to clear a room out and activate or utilize various gizmos in order to proceed in any meaningful way.

Death doesn’t mean too much, which is good for what in essence is a puzzler more than an action game, but they do provide only a limited number of lives, which is a shame, but after a few matches you’ll have caught onto the ‘rules’ and will know where to step and where not to, and can really get into the meat of the game.

So if you’re looking for a game with arcade but not terribly difficult bits, and where you have to pause for just a few moments to think about how to proceed, this is a great oldie. It _is_ a bit tired to look at if you’ve not got the rosie glasses of nostalgia, but its a fun game that I’ve enjoyed in the past, and also recently on my mighty GP2x. Theres a certain sense of horror-comedy to it all which is pretty entertaining, so do be sure to activate (by walking into) computer terminals and plaques and so forth. Smell the roses, being careful they’re not attack-roses first :)

I made a screenshot from the first screen; notice the rotating worm-cannon on the left, and the cowering civilian on the right.

D/Generation

I posted an idea to one of my favourite hangouts (the GP32x site) and some folks showed interest. While writing a cross-platform game of the week column would be most awesome, it is not within my powers or my time limits I’m afraid, so I will stick to offering a Game of the Week for my beloved childhood platform — the almighty Atari ST (competitor to the Amiga, not the Atari 2600 if thats what you are thinking.)

Should you have any ideas or requests or reviews of your own, do let me know and we can collaborate (here or at GP32x or elsehwere.) Really, even folks want to jump in with C64 or Amiga or SNES or the like GotW’s let me know and we can do something possibly magnificent. But I do get ahead of myself.

My goal for GotW is to highlight a lesser known but still interesting title (where ‘interesting’ can mean very good, or interesting to me for some other cryptic reason that I will endeaver to explain.) So I need not delve into the richness that is Lemmings, Dungeon Master or Civilization (play them _now_ my friends!), say, when I can instead strike a deal with … well, let me step you through the many fantastic titles you might have missed week by week shall I?

SWIV

Platform: Atari ST featured, though also popular on Amiga (and to a lesser extent on the C64 and Speccy IIRC)

Play Now: Your emulator of choice for those platforms; OutcaST for GP2x and GP2x Wiz (also known as CaSTaway for the PSP) are verified, since I wrote them :)

Atari ST ROM: Comes in many options, but I have a Medway Boys crack I must admit is most handy as it lacks any protection annoyances and includes a Trainer option

SWIV is a vertical shooter (a SHMUP for fans of the genre) which is both pretty good and interesting for its technical merits. Developed, I believe, by the same folks who ported Silkworm to the ST from the Arcade, it is in my books the spiritual successor to Xenon 1 (not Xenon 2: Megablast) and Silkworm itself. What it inherited from those titles was the playability of airborn (in this case Helicopter) or ground (Tank) and a two player game where both are in play at once. Designing the levels for a single player who could be either form (chosen at start of the game) must have proven challenging but they did an excellent job — the game is not overly difficult, and is relatively lengthy.

Silkworm itself is a decent port of an excellent Arcade title; in that game (a horizontal SHMUP) the players move right; the chopper can only fire foreward and the jeep can fire any direction but of course has limited movement options.. these limitations added teamwork strategy, but did make the level design a little painful. SWIV is this same sort of approach, though in vertical orientation.

While not the very best shooter on the platform, it garnered excellent reviews at the time for its playability and a few specific features; I admit I encountered it late in the ST game — a few years ago while developing an ST emulator in fact — but I highly recommend it to ST aficionados. It doesn’t perform too many nasty hardware tricks if I recall, but does some very interesting things in the actual code. I should not know that except that it brought out some CPU emulation issues .. so I was in the unenviable position of working through their assembly code to debug my simulated CPUs operation and witnessed some of their trickery. While playing the game you will on occasion notice the floppy disk light up, without interupting game play — they were clever with their timing to pre-cache necessary sprites and level data during gameplay to avoid large ‘level loading’ pauses. They load before needing and unload after needing to free up memory, permitting the player to tromp through enormous levels without delay. They also do some trickery to keep a large number of sprites onscreen and in motion .. the most popular ST models had no hardware sprites so this was always a weak point in the machine, but the SWIV developers pulled it off better than most others.

In summary, SWIV is not a ‘bullet hell’ type of SHMUP per se, but it certainly was working its way there — you will regularly encounter dozens of enemies on screen at once in formation, or dozens of bullets to be avoided. Its a good looking and fun to play shooter where you can play as a tank or chopper.

Good times. Of course, I am a shooter man .. Sky Shark (Flying Shark) is my poison of choice and the first arcade cabinet I picked up.

Aside: My baby girl recently started speaking in 2-3 word sentences; last night when I tucked her into bed, she said “love you daddy.” Another life achievement down, and well.. it just doesn’t get much better than that one :)

Atari was a great company in so many ways, but I’ll not go into that here. Their last real console release was the Atari Jaguar around the same time as the Sony Playstation (original), and we all know who won that race. Truly it was no competition.. the Jag was a cool platform, but it really could not compete with these more 3D oriented machines. And a lot of its software was _terrible_ (and that is being kind.) Still, it maintained Atari’s playful feal with some games being very original, and always feeling like the designer was not so much a corporation but a drinking buddy. To me as a retro collector, an Atar fan, retrogamer and coder .. the Jag was always a like-hate relationship.

I mean, it had Dragon’s Lair on CD. *heart*

But it also had Kasumi Ninja, which is not even as good as Custer’s Revenge if you catch my drift.

Anyway, through my various moves I’ve dragged my poor Jaguar around, but today I’ve sold it off. A fine seeming lad picked it up and sounds like he’ll have some fun with it, for which I’m glad. I mean — we retro guys go through a phase of wanting to collect it all but in practice we just rarely have the space and eventually have to specialize. But more .. I like to get things into a good home, and if I’m not going to fire up this classy little beast, ever, might as well move it on along to someone who will. A museum piece kept in the dark is worthless.. a museum piece on display is worthy. So I’ll miss this little machine, this indestructable black box (none of this red-ring BS in old hardware!) .. but on the other hand, my home will be forever clean of Kasumi Ninja.

The term CRPG refers to Computer-based Role Playing Games, such as the current Oblivion, but tracing back through Eye of the Beholder and back to Temple of Apshai and so on. The earliest examples were more text based due to their mainframe origins, and later the slow transmission rates of modems. Enter EAMON .. I’ve not done any history lookups here but its going back to the Apple 2 days, and I experienced it on the almighty Atari ST .. so back around 1987 or so I’d guess I fiddled with the system.

As fans of “Choose Your Own Adventure” style books (Steve Jackson ftw!), my brother was an aspiring adventure author at the time, putting together little adventure novellas on pads of paper. (You number each page, and at the end of a given page you have options that give you page numbers to turn to should you take that action. The pages are randomized to make it hard to guess where a given series of actoins may lead. Ultimately there are numerous plot endings, but usually more than a few times your character gets killed along the way, forcing you to re-start. Fun stuff.) I remember going through the Public Domain archives of local groups, and through BBS file listings all over the province (racking up huge bills all the time through long distnace charges), trying to find (well, to be honest, pirated games) some adventure authoring tools for him. There were a few systems, including EAMON, but they were just too complicated for us. Still, I remember playing a few EAMON games.

Well, t’other day I stumbled across EAMON Deluxe, a port of the EAMON system to DOS a decade back. The beauty of this is that you can still run it today on your modern PC (and hopefully someday he’ll release the source so that it can be brought to Mac, Linux and so forth.) You could always fire up an emulator (Atari ST, Apple 2, C64 and so on) and play the games there but this makes things pretty easy.

Further, the lad has pulled all the many EAMON adventures together into a big archive, including user supplied reviews of the adventures. Now, I should note that EAMON was not a game.. it was a system, supplied with a few simple text adventure games. But the author supplied tools to make your own adventures and many did.. so there are literally hundreds of additional goofy little text adventures. (These are of different style than the pure “IF” Interactive Fiction games I’ve gone on about before; those are pure adventure games with no dice rolling, no skills per se and include such classics as Zork or Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. EAMON is one of the first CRPGs, in that you play a character who increases in powers and gold and gear and so on over playtime, and also is a less lofty academic pursuit; the EAMON gamelets are not novellas in adventure form, but early examples of kill-and-loot games.) Fun for short bursts, which hits a certain spot in my heart.

One facet of the system I admire is this .. you have a character and you pick an adventure to play through; the character persists between adventure gamelets.. so while you might be in a fantasy gamelet (the majority) one time, the next could be sci-fi. The EAMON system defines the system, and suggests certain damage levels.. so while a new player might have 20 hit points before dieing, a slight damage hit is 1 damage, while a heavier stroke is 2 or 3 points, say. So you take your character including gear game to game and grow him over the lifespan, regardless of the actual adventure the character is in.

That is pretty ahead of its time.

Anyway, if you want to try a quck text hack and slash game, that plays and feels like a light text adventure, and definately hardcore retro.. EAMON could be just the thing.

I may just have to look around for some source.. porting this to a handheld could rock my socks :)

If theres any doubt about my being a nerd with a capitol En, pull up a chair while I out myself most ashamedly.

Likely everyone knows that I’m a classic arcade machine collector (R-Type and Pacman are part of everyones gameroom right?), which translates into my ranting about “the real thing is the only way to go” and that emulation “just doesn’t get it right” (which is funny, my being an emulator author and all.) Of course, I don’t always have time to swap game PCB’s (pc-boards) in a machine just to fire up a game – though I do like to say “big toys for big boys” and pull out really big cartridges. Next in line is to crack out a real retro console such as an Atari 2600 or Super Nintendo (or my beloved STacy) — but they’re usually stored away somewhere in a box. (Well, I do fire up Empire – Battle of the Century once in awhile on the STacy) So whats a knurd to do when hes too lazy to head down into the basement or dig around in dusty packing boxes to find his Vic-20? Sure, fire up an emulator on your local PC or laptop of course. But how do you simulate the ‘real machine feal’ with an emulator? How do you get as close to the metal without digging out a console that weighs more than its age?

Stelladapter – plug your 15 year old joystick into your PC, thats how. Yeah baby. Well, at least I’m not running a D&D campaign right now ;) I’m looking at you n008.

Another photo (2)

Another photo (3)

What is it?

Stelladapter is a Joystick-to-USB adapter for letting you plug good old classic joysticks into a modern PC. For example, you can dig up your old red Wico Bat-Stick (see the topmost picture) – a 9-pin joystick we used for our Commodore Vic-20 and Atari ST – and plug it straight into your laptop via the Stelladapter. The device was originally intended for the Atari 2600 emulator Stella presumably, but it works with pretty much any PC application expecting a Windows joystick (since Windows will accept any USB game controller.) I’ve not tried it, but apparently the Stelladapter works on Mac OSX as well, and I’m sure with Linux/FreeBSD/etc with the right driver setup since it just simulates a standard PC digital joystick.

I was giggling like a schoolgirl while tearing open the packaging shipped right from Atari Age; a small little box packed with foam bits and containing a little ziplock baggie. The adapter itself is just a couple inches long and an eraser thickness.

Compatibility

Pop the adapter into the usb port and you’re pretty much good to go. I’m not much of a gamer, especially in Windows, so I headed over to the control panel and found a test utility that verified it was working. Firing up STeem (a very good Atari ST emulator) and I had problems controlling left and up.. curious. Fired up STew instead (another fine ST emu) and it controlled like a dream — no delays in control and it worked out of the box with no configuration. Third I tried Stella (duh), and it too worked out of the box (I played Chopper Command and Frogger.. teehee!) Next I’ll have to try Cosmic Cruncher and Spiders of Mars in a Vic-20 emu.. w00t!

The adapter should work with any 9-pin joystick; theres a million and if you’re older than 5 I bet you’ve got a dozen in your basement somewhere. It also supposedly (I didn’t try) supports the 2600 driving and paddle controllers, so you can get the true Warlords experience. Nice.

As mentioned above, it should work with most modern machines and operating systems.

USB?

My laptop is pretty old (5 or 6 years!) and features only USB1 (most machines are USB2). The Stelladapter works perfectly on the machine.

There doesn’t seem to be any joystick lag even though I’m running it on the older USB spec. Slick.

(The joystick is stiff as heck though.. I suppose 15 years of dead ants are within the mechanism, so I’ll have to work it out a bit.. or if it was always like this, it explains why I sucked at games back then :) It _really is_ much easier with cursor keys.. like I always said ;)

Summary

Construction seems solid; performance is good – no delays in response from stick to PC. Compatibility with applications seems good so far, with my limited testing… and I don’t anticipate problems with any software that supports USB joysticks or ‘Windows Game Controles’ (when in Windows.) The price is attractive at $29.95USB.

Summary: A big win!

There are other options out there as well; theres a floppy controller that features joystick ports and a SID chip for doing serious emulation with as well, with original floppies. It seems a little pricey so I opted for the Stelladapter instead. (That was the CartWeasel or somesuch.)

Previously, I wrote about my favourite or notable Atari ST games and the posting turned out to be fairly popular — a good way to jog the memory or find games if you never actually had an ST (or wide exposure to its game library.) With emulation being so popular, retro-gamers everywhere have all the past platforms available.. but no idea how to operate them, or what to look for if they do. (It can be funny sometimes when some 14 year old writes to ask some obscure GEM question.. how to rename a file in the mouse based GUI, etc. Weird stuff to get in your inbox :) Anyway, we all had different machines as kids (ahh, back in the day when there were different machines!) so we’re all needing to find out what to fiddle with. My family went from Atari 2600 to Commodore Vic-20 to an Atari 520ST and I proceeded to skip over the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis platforms until much later, so my gaming experiences are very different to the ‘average gamer’.

Not that I have time to actually play games of course, but you all know that I love making lists of every possible thing :) That said, I’ve started a few threads on one of my favourite message boards to ask what peoples favourites were and to help build a list of things I’d like to try when I do get time, and to amuse everyone of course! Now, I am hoping to receive an old-school joystick-to-USB adapter soon, so time will have to be made..

A quick summary follows.

Oh, I just found a site that does this, but doesn’t cover so many platforms. While it does cover SNES, it doesn’t go into Vectrex or Amiga for instance, so its not very comprehensive.. but its a good start, and I’m sure other sites abound.

For my thread about best and notable Commodore 64 games, our fine friends ar GP32x posted the following lists: (If an asterisk(*) preceeds, then it was mentioned that many times.)

• All monty mole series
• All the Dizzy Games
• Allycat
• Alter Ego (still love it, though it doesn’t work on GP32…)
• Anything by jeff minter
• Anything by shaun southern
• Archon 1 + 2
• Armalyte
• Armalyte
• Attack of the Mutant Camels
• Axis assassin
• BC’s Quest for Tires
• Beach Head
• Beamrider
• Beat It!
• Bomb Jack
• Bounty Bob Strikes Back
• ** Bruce Lee
• Bubble Bobble & Rainbow Islands
• Buggy Boy
• CJ’s elephant antics
• Commando
• Cosmic Causeway
• Crazy Comets
• ** Creatures 1&2
• Draconus
• Drelbs
• Driller
• Dropzone
• Encounter
• Fiendish Freddy (big top o’ fun)
• Firetrack
• Flimbo’s quest
• Frankie goes to Hollywood
• Gaplus
• ** Great Giana Sisters
• *** H.E.R.O.
• Hagar the Horrible
• Henry’s House
• Hunters moon
• Hydrax
• ** IK+
• **** Impossible mission 1+2
• Invade-a-load
• Iridis Alpha
• Iron Man
• Jack the nipper
• **** Jumpman Jr.
• Katakis
• Kettle
• ** Kikstart 1 & 2
• Klax
• Krakout
• Labyrinth (basically the predecessor of Maniac Mansion)
• ** Last Ninja Series
• Law of the West
• Leaderboard
• M.U.L.E. (VERY great game!)
• Master of Magic
• Mayhem in Monsterland
• ** Mega Apocalypse
• Mercenary (1 and 2)
• Metro-Cross
• Mission Impossible
• Mr Do’s Castle
• Murder on the Mississippi
• ** Nebulus
• Nemesis
• Nexux
• Omega Race
• Operation Wolf
• Overlord
• P.O.D
• *** Paradroid
• Parallax
• Park Patrol
• Pipe Mania
• Pitstop II
• Powerdrift
• ** Racing Destruction Set (very good if played with 2 players and your own tracks)
• Rampage
• Ramparts
• Ranarama
• Slapfight
• Spindizzy
• Super Pipeline 2
• Thing on a Spring
• Thrust
• To be on Top
• Trailblazer
• ** Turrican 1 + 2
• Turrican 3
• ** Uridium
• Vendetta
• Voidrunner
• Warhawk
• ** Way of the Exploding Fist
• Wizard of Wor
• ** Wizball
• Wonderboy in monsterland
• World Games
• Zenji

So there you go.. quite a list, but a bunch of classics I’ve heard of or played, and a pile of stuff I’ve never played. Lots to do on a rainy day :)

A lot of people are planning to move over to the GP2x handheld console – be they former or current GP32 (the companies prior device) owners or people coming completely in from the green. As a GP32 owner and fan this is great news — GamePark (now GamePark Holdings) are fairly clueless in a lot of ways, but (like Commodore!) they know to keep prices low to the ground and encourage third parties to get into the mix. (Yes, you read right, a company who actually encourages you to rip open their devices knowing you’ll enjoy it, tell all your friends, and need to buy another when you kill your SMC slot.. right Squidge?)

Anyway, for now, I’ll try and avoid going over what a GP32 is in any great detail, and what the GP2x will be… except to summarize something I’ve been saying a lot lately. So now I can just point to this posting and say “see there” :) Oh, and that the GP32 ’scene’ is a lot like the old Amiga and Atari ST and Commie scenes were — its _fun_.

The past

The GP32 is well loved by its fans as being the top emulation machine around right now, despite its rather anemic specs. An ARM CPU with no FPU (and that can usually only clock up to 160MHz or more) attached to 8MB of RAM and an SMC slot – not much and all off the shelf.. but it does feel pretty good and offers controls that don’t cramp you up (I’m looking at you, Tapwave.) It offers a really sexy bright screen (too bad its sideways in RAM!), and a really simple SDK thats free and Free courtesy of the Free Software Foundation and gcc (again, I’m looking at you Tapwave!), though it lacks the sexy black finish and touchscreen (again, looking at you with sad eyes, Tapwave!) Due to the ease of coding and familiarity of tools, the GP32 quickly became ‘the’ machine to port homebrew games and emulators to.. it was easy to do, fast to do, and the result was loved by the scene members and really.. the emus are a total blast. Course, only a few dozen developers are active at a time but this helps create mystique and makes for a tight friendly scene of people hacking away and helping each other. (And thank god for gp32x.com and Evil Dragon!)

The present

The GP32 is pretty much unheard of by most gamers and coders, since its created by a small Korean company and distributed only through little importers such as Lik Sang, GBAX and various individuals. Good kachet, but not so good for sales. Naturally, people have hacked away at their Palm OS and Pocket PC PDAs, and done wonders on the GBA and Sony PSP consoles. The PSP could be king (and really is a _great_ emulation platform right now) were it not for Sony constantly trying to suppress the scene and homebrew development – eventually, users will have to decide between getting new games, or sticking to old games and homebrew, and thats just not cool. But for now, the GP32 is the king of open handheld game consoles, and the PSP is tops for handheld consoles with bastard intentions.

The GP32 has no special hardware and is relatively limited, but works well due to the dedication of its developers and scene. The Tapwave Zodiac was a better machine in almost every sense, but the company business model just couldn’t hold up against the tide that is Sony and Nintendo. The Zodiac, over the GP32, sported 200MHz (a little clockable as well) processor with fast architecture, a bright touchscreen with a 2d GPU for scaling, smoothing and blitting, and rechargable battery and enormous pile of RAM. The Zodiac was pretty good kit for emulation and homebrew, but the companies choice to back a commercial compiler suite pretty much made homebrew non-existant.. so the GP32 remained king.

The PSP on the other hand is easy to develop for due to the hard work of the PSP SDK team (among others) and is also based on gcc-and-friends. With a fast CPU (333Mhz!) and aggressive chipset as well as full 3d GPU, its a sexy piece of machinery. No touchscreen, but long rechargable battery life, a gorgeous bright display, analog and digital controls.. its a great emulation platform — and lets face it, theres millions out there so lots of potential admirers for your homebrew. Too bad Sony is out to get the scene…

Nintendo’s DS is another good solid platform; a little harder for people to homebrew with since they need to first acquire a special adapter to enable homebrew to occur (ie: additional cost and effort), and a little harder to develop for.. its still a popular machine due to the dual screen and touchscreen action. Like the GBA (though superior to the GBA in every way), the NDS doesn’t have a beefy processor so no serious emulation will occur (ie: Amiga etc.)

The Future

So I would argue that the near future of mobile emulation essentialy boils down to two main contenders – the Sony PSP and its ‘now it works, soon it might not’ mentality, and the GP2x which hopefully will adopt the mighty GP32 community.

So how does the GP2x stack up?

The GP2x is another machine built mostly from off-the-shelf componentry.. no touchscreen but another big and bright screen like seen on the existing GP32 ‘BLU’ (backlit) models. This time she’ll have lots of RAM (64MB seems to be the goal), which puts her in the same boat as the venerable Zodiac – enough RAM for SNES and NES by far.. but also enough for Amiga, Atari ST, and even Neo Geo CD (oh baby!).. even enough for emulating a number of classy Capcom arcade games and the like. Gamepark has always been pretty good with controls, so we expect the GP2x (to be released soon) to have good controls, and this time a SD/MMC slot instead of the long out of date SMC card system.. media will be cheap and fast.

The point

But as we all know.. emulation is about processing power, and the GP2x could shine here.. but not right away. The GP32 faired pretty well on its lowly 160MHz or so, but everyone wanted more. With the PSP we see that 333MHZ can do pretty well (especially with a GPU behind it), but I’ve long said the sexy point is about 400MHz and up (maybe even 600). The GP2x takes a twist – rather than offer a single piece with high speed, it will offer two 200MHz processors with some specialization in function. (Clocking may be possible, but we won’t know until we see the machine.)

What does this mean?

(This is why I made this post –>) A direct port to the machine will run about as well as any other 200MHz machine, such as the Tapwave Zodiac. The machine has the potential to work really well, with the dual processor arrangement.. but it will take some work for developers to port a single-threaded application to a multi-CPU arrangement to actually use that second CPU effectively; in fact, we can assume most applications will be single-CPU based and run at 200MHz, while a few others will use one CPU for heavy lifting all the time, and use the second CPU for ‘bursts’ to save on performance (say, for audio generation or screen scaling, while the main game engine does its business.) After a bit of time, the second CPU will be used more heavily, and after even more time I’m sure both CPUs will be working double time.. but right up front, it’ll act like a 200MHz machine.

But for those developers who take care, it could really pay off. Lets just hope Gamepark provides some cache for the chips, and arranges the system bus so as to minimize contension between CPUs. Otherwise we lose a lot of performance hopping on and off the bus..

Omega was released around 1988 or 1989 for numerous platforms, from 8-bitters like the Apple II through to 16/32-bit platforms like the Atari ST (and Amiga?) where I experienced it. Let me quickly summarize and say.. its a game whereby you assemble and arm robotic tanks and ’script’ or ‘code’ their behaviour for combat in an area filled with other ‘coded’ tanks.

Historically, I know of a few (not many!) ‘coder’ games, such as the classic C-Robots (and variants), though at the time this was I think a first for me (aside from screwing with bad Logo samples in the Atari ST Logo book :) In the last few years a couple of games have come out like this, but its essentially a lost genre. While ‘construction set’ games (Adventure Construction Set, Pinball Construction Set, Wargame Construction Set…) flourished and eventually evolved into the enormously popular modding community we have now, there seems to be no active replacement for this interesting game style.

• Game: Omega
• Platform: Atari ST (Apple II, Amiga, C64, etc.)
• Distributor: Origin
• Players: Solo and arena multiplayer

Now, I’m ‘reviewing’ from memory as I’ve not fired up this game in more than ten years I’m sure, yet it will forever be imprinted upon my brain — games with a multiplayer component were rare (even if this was a non-live form of multiplayer – but I’m ahead of myself.)

Overview

Omega was essentially a rudimentary IDE – a shell that offered several subsystems: a tank designer, a script editor, and a runtime arena for the actual combat. This was cool stuff, but what made it freakishly addictive was the primitive online component — with a modem you could dial up to the Origin BBS and hang out with fellow players to share strategies and scripts, and most importantly — share tanks for running in your arena. Furthermore, Origin hosted tournaments whereby players could submit their own tanks for running in the master arena round robin, with the winner getting… well, I didn’t win so I don’t recall ;)

A tank by any other name…

Tanks were built up from a number of futuristic components – a chassis, a weapon, a scanner (for ’seeing’ the board), and I think an engine or motor. Essentially, the player could control numerous aspects of the tank though I think you had limits that were raised as time went on (a cashflow system perhaps? My memory fails..) The trick was ‘fatter’ tanks weren’t always the most desirable — many very successful vehicles were smaller and faster with lighter weapons (and smaller script as well.) Still, there were only so many physical design constraints, though I recall pouring over the options to suss out slight advantages with various combinations until my brother (a few years older than I) whipped up a matrix and determined ‘best fits’ for various cases. He always ‘breaks’ games ;)

Scripting the ‘AI’

Scripting was the real meat of the game, however. You could pretty much do ‘anything’ (as far as I was concerned) you wanted, and it definately stroked the ego of a young coder-to-be as it rewarded devious scripts (though being a highly primitive language proved frustrating since I knew there was better out there.) The game was nearly identical (in terms of features) on the 8-bit platforms, though delivery was sharper on the 16-bit machines (running smoother and a little fancier) – this allowed even battles between tanks designed on a Commodore 64 and an Atari ST. However, the 8-bit machines had stiff limits and so these same limits carried over to the 16-bit platform versions — a tank could only have so much script ‘code’ to control its AI brain. To cover this up, the Origin developers put in a ‘AI size’ system whereby new players were limited to a short amount of script, and after they’d conquered a number of ‘bosses’ their script size limit would be that much larger – though it would never be large enough for really complex scripts. Still, this size limit forced a certain clarity of vision upon the player — building too many ideas into the script just wouldn’t work out, so better to refine one strategy and implement it as tightly as possible.

The game designers further applauded the good scripter (’good’ in terms of the Omega language, not in terms of real coding :) for making small tight pieces of logic as each ‘instruction’ to the tanks virtual CPU cost a certain amount of ‘time’ and thus a tank with small logic blocks and fast weapons could out-maneauver a slower thinking heavier tank. Cool stuff.

The language was a primitive dialect of BASIC, with specialized commands for various operations such as ‘move forward’, ‘rotate tank left’, ‘rotate turret right’, etc. Each command took a time slice to complete, often depending on the class of tank component involved. For instance, if a player tank had a “90 degree scanner” (as opposed to say 30 degree scanner) then a ’scan’ (the tanking seeing whats in front of it) would take a few moments, while a 30 degree scan was faster (if memory serves.) Naturally, it was more efficient to get a 90 degree view with a 90 degree scanner than 3 scans with a 30 degree scanner (since you’d have to scan, rotate the turret, scan again, etc), though if your logic was designed just so then perhaps you might not need a wide scan to operate effectively.. as you can see, the interplay between your script and physical design became crucial.

An example I recall was a boss tank – the Panda. If memory serves, that sucker would work its way towards a corner of the map (a real corner, or a corner made in the trees of the chessboard-like playfield) and camp out, with a 90 degree scanner. It would scan every few moments (but not all the time) since it was guaranteed to see most of what it cared about since being in a corner, and thus it could spend its time firing at approaching vehicles. I remember it being a challenge until after watching the arena a few times and realizing that the player tank had to be customized to attack it differently than another tank..

Lastly, some very cool operations where included. There was a limited form of tank-to-tank communication so the player could operate a team (of his own tanks). This sort of scripting was the sort of thing that would bend the player mind and I’m sure was good for an upcoming developer in the late 80s… though I also recall it wasn’t really useful, as tank-to-tank comms took a few timeslices and left you vulnerable to faster tanks.

Running the arena

The arena was simple — select a map (you could download new ones, or make your own I think) and however many tanks you’d like, or play through a campaign which was a series of contrived map+tank combinations (where the enemy tank was created to fit the map well). While the arena was running, you could see a ’satelllite overview’ of the playfield — a green pixel representing a forest square, a brown pixel flat dirt, and various colours for tanks. You couldn’t see a lot, but you could see a devious tank burning down trees and coming around behind your tank — enough information so you could design a tank to work better next run through the gauntlet! Remember, while the arena is running the player cannot interact with the tanks — the script would live or die on its own merit, and you could alter it for the next run.

Online opponents..

After beating the included boss-tanks (10 or 15 maybe?) you were pretty much done — we didn’t know anyone else with the game, and my brother was nearly always a better gamer than I — so I had to ring up the phone bill. Being a young idiot at the time, I was forever in trouble with my parents for abusing the modem and dialing long distance to the next city over… or the next country over, in the case of Origin’s BBS. Still, we had to fetch down new tanks to war against, and I even submitted into the tournament (and got creamed) a few times. This was the shiznitz of 1989!

Some of the best tanks we fought against were downloaded from the BBS — former tournament top-placers. You’d download the ‘runtime tank’ only, not the human readable script, so would have to run through the arena endlessly to figure out their behaviour. I remember one – Panther (I think; some jungle cat name) – took us weeks to really master, and even then it’d take us much of the time. This sucker had a sneak-attack mode and a run-into-the-trees mode, and was coded quite efficiently — it would escape in such a way as to either get away (to return and attack later) or to be followed where it would get the advantage. Traditionally, our tanks would ‘track’ after another tank and this guy would just trash you if you followed after him. (If memory serves, this sucker would dig a passage into some trees, and when it saw you behind it would just start firing without looking for awhile — a very fast way to shoot, especially with its fast medium damage weapon.)

Clearly, this game was one you could really get into. If you didn’t have the time.. forget it, you were dinnered.

At a Atari User Group meeting, Martyn brought it up.. so there were others I suppose..

Overall:

• Graphics: 6 out of 10 (the ST could do much better)
• Sound: 7 (again, the ST could do better, but.. its a quiet-style game :)
• Gameplay: 10 (if you could get into it, otherwise 2 ;)
• Replayability: 8 (back in the day, due to the BBS) and 5 (today, no active community)

Omega didn’t look or sound as pretty as it could have (likely due to its 8-bit and 16-bit cross platform action) but it was very deep and addictive, something a lot of games still lack today.