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Really?
Ehm, I bought Sam in july 1991. In the ad &
prices sheet there was also Quazar Surround. It was advertised like Prince of
Persia years before it actually came out, or what was it???
---------------------------------------------------------- Mgr.(MSc.)
Ale� Keprt (also known as Aley) [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** www.keprt.cz *** ICQ: 82357182 Dept. of
Computer Science, V�B Technical University Ostrava, CZ - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - www.cs.vsb.cz----------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, May 01, 2005 3:04 PM
Subject: Re: 10th Anniversary!
Well done Colin - congratulations on the 10 year anniversary.
Sounds like a great idea to convert the Gremlin games. I seem to recall
someone on the list saying something about Auf Wiedersehen Monty a while ago.
Do you know what happened to that?
Here's to ten more years!
==Matt.
Well
yesterday was a special day.... the 10th Anniversary of Quazar!
For
it was on the 29th April 1995 when I had a stand at the third
Gloucester
show, where I unveiled the (2nd) prototype of the Quazar
Surround soundcard,
marking the start of Quazar!
And that was just
the beginning of what has really taken up a heck of a lot
of my time
since then! As you may be aware a few new products are in the
pipeline
such as the Mayhem Accelerator, and issue 12 of Sam Revival is
nearing
completion and will be being sent out shortly.
And here's some juicy
tidbits of news taken from the next issue of Sam
Revival to wet your
appetites about a few other things I am working on when
ever I get a few
free minutes...
Hydrasoft Games
---------------
I have recently
bought the rights to several old Sam games, and a pile of
unreleased
stuff from Pete King, formerly going by the name Hydrasoft. Pete
had two
games released back in 1996 and 1997 - Conquest and Mage Fire, which
were
published to a limited extent by Zedd-Soft (run by Michael Stocks
/
Zodiac Magazine). I was also involved with the two titles way back then
by
adding support for the Quazar Surround soundcard to both of the
games.
I had previously secured permission from Pete to use Conquest
and Mage Fire
on the Sam Revival coverdisks (and you'll find Mage Fire on
the coverdisk
with Sam Revival 12) but now with owning the titles I can
go further with
them and I am already planning a revamp of Conquest to
update all the
graphics and sounds. What I have to do now is go through a
massive pile of
disks to look at all the unreleased games. Expect more
news soon!
Gremlin Graphics Games
----------------------
I
have received permission from Andy Davis of Alchemist Research to use
old
Gremlin Graphics games on th e Sam. Now instead of just adapting the
ZX
Spectrum versions to run on the Sam under emulation (as was done on
the old
Blitz diskzine back in the late 1990's) it is my aim to create
full Sam
versions of some of the classic games for inclusion on the Sam
Revival
coverdisks.
The first game I am looking at is 'Thing on a
Spring', originally released
back in 1984 for the Commodore 64 and
Amstrad CPC only. Thing on a Spring is
a bouncy and fast platformer and
with some carefully planned scroll routines
it should make the transition
to the Sam with few problems.
Now the music for any game is very
important for me, and I am planning to
feature the original SID based
music (for use with the SID interface) as
well as a new rendition of the
tune for the normal Sam SAA1099 soundchip. I'
m pleased to say that
initial work on the game remake is underway, and the
SAA1099 version of
the music is already complete! The SAA1099 music track
was carefu lly
composed by David Suzuki-Sanders (who also composed the 'About
as SID as
its going to get' SAA1099 track on the audio CD with the last
issue of
Sam Revival.)
The second game I am looking at converting is
'Harlequin', one of the first
games I ever played on an Amiga, and one
that immediately impressed me with
its graphics, music and playability.
Harlequin is another scrolling platform
game, based in a fantasy
dreamworld with very colourful graphics and a
thumping soundtrack, and
was released only for the 16 bit machines in 1992 -
the Atari ST and the
Amiga.
So why should the Sam be left out of such a great game? No
reason I think!
So far I have converted over the graphics for the first
level from the Atari
ST (easier to capture via an emulator than the Amiga
version), and for the
main scenery and characters only 12 colours were
used so this conversion was
quite straight forward. My aim is to convert
across the whole of the first< BR>level as a test, to see how well I
can get the game engine to work. However
as this game does involve full
screen scrolling and some quite large sprites
I will be writing it to run
with the Mayhem Accelerator to give the Sam the
speed it needs to move
everything around.
(Of course the magazine will have all the
screenshots of work so far, and
they will also appear on the new site at
www.samcoupe.com at the end of the
week!)
And hopefully all going
well, there'll be a few surprises of more new stuff
throughout 2005
too....!
Here's to many more years to come....!
All the
best,
Colin
=====
Quazar : Hardware, Software, Spares and
Repairs for the Sam Coupe
April 1995-2005 - Celebrating 10 Years of
developing for the Sam Coupe
Website: http://www.quazar.clara.net/sam/
and http://www.samcoupe.com/
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
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