Rumbo

Rumbo is a flick-screen platformer developed in STOS by Pete Halloran and isn't too dissimilar to Rick Dangerous with more than its fair share of <cough> similarities. The story is simple, our girl has been kidnapped so it's time we dressed like Rambo and tool-up to begin our valiant rescue mission.

After watching a short, but superb, intro of our girl being kidnapped the game begins inside the underground in caves - a place that only Rick Dangerous himself would normally explore. Within here are many rooms with a variety of tricks and traps - but many predictable ones like spikes to leap over. Also, there are some cruel ones like strange creatures who appear out of thin air without any warning. I hate him!

The first end of level boss is a giant bat but don't fret too much because it just moves up and down. It's lame and probably should have been left out if I'm honest. But Rumbo has come prepared for all these monsters and bosses and is loaded with more than enough ammunition, which is something I appreciate.

When level two begins it's more of the same, but with different graphics! However, there appears to be a bug that prevented me from completing the final(?) room: hitting a switch did nothing that I could see. Thus I found myself stuck with no way to venture on which is a huge shame because I was enjoying Rumbo until that moment. I'm now wondering if I've missed something stupidly obvious in the previous rooms?

Graphics are average Joe but do their job even if entering a new room draws at the speed of ST Basic. Sound effects are made up of a few samples; they're good and I especially liked the howel of death. Rumbo's tippy-tappy walk reminded this old gamer of Chuckie Egg 2 (ZX Spectrum version). I know I'm being daft, but I loved it and it broke the near-silence due to the lack of in-game music. Which is a shame?

I have really enjoyed Rumbo which is balanced and fun to play. Sadly, there's that bug on level two, but maybe it was me? I tried twice, but each time I got stuck. Ignoring that, Rumbo offers platform fans to be an avenging squirrel in a Ricky D world. This is cool so grab your bandana and download the floppy disk!

This is a fantastic game and here are some screenshots to tempt you to play it...

PC Ditto

Ugh, I hate Winblows PCs!!

I thought I'd have a quick play with PC-Ditto, an old emulator by Avant-Garde Systems. Now, please do note that I've never owned a PC in my life but I remember tinkering with the one (and only) Amstrad PC that our college had in 1987. So, I figured this would be a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Well, maybe!

For anyone interested, AtariCrypt has an emulator section with lots more :)

A stock Atari ST is more than capable of running this emulator fine. Many DOS programs will also run fine. However, you should forget it for games. I used my own Mega STe which barely had the horsepower to handle numerous games. So, in my video recording, Hatari is running a 16Mhz to simulate my computer.

The idea of using DOS for gaming or home computing makes me shudder. Terrible idea but, read on...

I had little luck with Castle Wolfenstein (a bad copy?) but Serpentine ran well.

How did it go with this DOS malarkey?

Surprisingly, I did have some success as you can see in the video which shows me booting DOS 3.3 and then loading a selection of rubbish games. The first is Serpentine, which was definitely the best of the bad bunch and I enjoyed eating the other slo-mo snakes. I then rebooted to try something called David's Kong. Ugh, this is absolutely laughable so please don't waste your time!

Next up was Bird-Brain which didn't seem to work very well because the keys specified on the main menu didn't work for me. Instead, I suffered rapid beeping sound which was rather annoying!! So yet another reboot was called for so I could try Castle Wolfenstein. Ohh, I had such high hopes for this game but alas it didn't appear to run properly and then oddly got itself caught in a loop?

I then loaded Space Commanders which slowed my Mega STe down to the speed of a Casio calculator for some insane reason. In the video recording, I could cheat by hitting CMD X to speed up Hatari but that didn't really help much. No loss anyhow because this is a ludicrously bad shoot 'em up!!

I was now beginning to lose the will to live and only had one game left: Buck Rogers Planet Of Zoom which is one of my favourite ZX Spectrum games. Sadly, it wasn't (umm) playable due to slow speeds but I managed a couple of minutes before PC-Ditto disappointly froze for some reason!

Oh boy, how did the PC win the computer war? The worst Kong and Invaders I've ever played!!

The CryptO'pinion?

This was fun and I enjoyed turning my ST into an Intel paperweight. Games will generally require more CPU grunt but I doubt anyone would abandon the ST's archive for these horrendous DOS equivalents? Of course, not being a hardware product meant performance was always sluggish, even on my 16MHz Mega STe.

PC Ditto did a grand job running DOS and its programs and utilities. However, I wouldn't bother using this for games - unless I had something beefy like a TT or Falcon. This is a pretty good product depending on your needs. But I'll stick with my Atari ST. So, with that in mind, we are left with one final thing to do: del *.*  😇

You can find PC-Ditto on AtariMania or by using Old Games Finder. You will also need the operating system and DOS 3.3 is downloadable from Atari-Forum thanks to Jake/Depression. I found many compatible DOS games on various different of websites - I liked My Abandonware. Enjoy yourself!

Commando

Elite did it again!

I remember trying to conquer this arcade shooter on my ZX Spectrum long before I got an ST. However, no matter how much I loved it, I sucked because it was so difficult. Thankfully, I've improved with age because I've finally beaten the first stage with its tricky soldiers. It's small victories like this that keep me going!

Unsurprisingly, our conversion has more glam compared to the Speccy. I think we received an authentic conversion with responsive controls, gorgeous smooth scrolling and everything is as spritely as it should be. The one-joystick/button method to control works well compared to the original arcade controls.

Commando is something I love and hate with equal measure so it's a good job this shooter is infuriatingly addictive. Highly recommended - if you can master its hideous learning curve!!

Grab a BB Gun and download Commando for floppy + hard disk.