The oldest ST game?
Asteroids is a true arcade classic that has been converted for every home computer. Not to be left out, Megamax released Megaroids in 1985 for the Atari ST. That's right, 1985 when the ST was a baby. Interestingly, they developed it using their own (and brand new) C programming tool. Now that's fearless!
The gameplay is, obviously, Asteroids and faithful to the original. Shoot the rocks for points but don't forget to blast the alien ships - for lots more points! Joystick controls are dead easy with Z and X rotates your craft and SHIFT to fire. Thrust uses ? key and SpaceBar activates a hyperspace when you're in trouble.
Graphically, it's different from the original; gone are the vectors in favour of bitmaps. The ST's high resolution looks stunning, and Megaroids' framerate is superb. The rocks sweep across the screen like butter off a hot knife. Thankfully, colour systems aren't forgotten, as it's compatible with medium resolution. But this is interlaced to produce 640x400 but with colour. That's right, essentially 640x400 in colour on your TV!!
Sounds are nothing more than you would expect for asteroids. They're nice and work very well. Especially when you remember this is a 1985 game for a 1985 computer. I'm really impressed all things considered.
Megaroids has an authenticity that I admire. The gameplay feels perfect, and I'm shocked that something this good was released the same year as the ST itself. I'm impressed by the silky-smooth framerate and flicker-free interlace support for colour systems. This is a wonderful conversion with bucket loads of rock blasting!!
Nah, it wasn't interlaced in med res. Straight up 640x200. However they did a good job of remaking the graphics for the halved vertical rez and getting as close to vector as you can on a 15khz raster screen. Plus it running in colour did mean you got a slight bonus... as I recall, the aliens came in different colours (including that ^%$&!!! little one), and as you moved through the levels the rocks became tinted differently as well. So basically against the flat black background, all of your ship (and shots/score), the rocks, and the aliens were painted in a unique colour. Not the most sophisticated approach to using a 4-colour palette but a very effective one.
ReplyDeleteAnd it remains one of the tightest versions of Asteroids I've ever played, and amazingly good value for what was, for us, a bit of magazine coverdisc freeware. We got *hours* of play out of it.
(seriously, they made it in 1985? hardly anyone was making good use of the ST hardware at the time. let's give them a 33-year-late pat on the back...)
look closer, it's interlaced alright. Hey, thanks for all the comments, really appreciate you popping over and browsing through what's here :)
DeleteI think I replayed it after leaving that comment but couldn't find my way back. It looks like (at least in emulation) it uses that strange not-actually-interlaced double buffer flickering technique which is often mistakenly called "interlace" on the ST (unless you can somehow convince the hardware to generate a half-line before the active screen area on half the frames and after it on the other half, you're not going to get true, 400-line interlace, but instead a Photochrome / C64 / Spectrum Hi-Colour like persistence-of-vision extended colour set).
DeleteSo it's admittedly at least half right, even if the ultimate effect is more one of flickeringly-applied anti-aliasing than true interlacing. It still works to improve the image quality I guess, allowing the full resolution of the original mono graphics to be used even in medrez, just producing an intermediate shade of grey (or colour tint) where a pixel was white on one line and black on the other instead of increasing the sharpness.
(Given the variable line lengths produced by some demo effects that are useful for sync-scrolling etc, it should be possible to create a kind of true interlace on the ST with sufficient tweaking of the length over several lines, just without much or anything in the way of upper-border overscan... or at least, without increased resolution in the upper overscan. But I don't think anyone's actually done it yet ... any so-called "interlace" thing I've seen is actually just hi-colour flickering. It's one of the key differences between the ST and the Amiga - the latter can easily do interlace in hardware, as it can insert syncs halfway along a scanline, whereas the former can't do it at all, other than the aforementioned concept which subtly alters the timing of *many* lines...)
The author spoke a bit about the interlaced screenmode on my blogpost about the game.
ReplyDeletehttps://bytecellar.com/2011/07/16/megaroids-my-all-time-favorite-asteroids-clone/
I remember visiting your site a while back, lovely STuff :)
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