Amiga Addict magazine - Psygnosis - Issue 07 July 2021 by Simulant

BRITAIN'S BEST-SELLING (ACTIVE!) MAGAZINE FOR AMIGA USERS

ISSUE No. 7 JULY 2021 £4.99 / $6.50 / €5.50

TAKING FLIGHT

SPECIAL

Psygnosis take us under their wing for the inside story

60 PAGE EDITION

IT'S GONE FLOPPY... AGAIN!

July 2021

Ea gl e To & C m om Va ato pu m , A te pi ra r W & re C bia ar O o n N rio S3 ve i r .2 ra gh , T ge ts ur bo ,

(See details of this month's AA demo inside...)

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

MEET THE ADDICTS We give the acronym "AA" a whole new addictive meaning... Is bigger really better?

COVERDISK CAPERS! This month's AA coverdisk is a playable demo of Blitmap's Slayers of High Toro. A ﬂoppy disk sticky label can also be found within these pages (please have strong words with your newsagent if not!!). We were so impressed with this game in our Issue 5 review, it was awarded our highly coveted AA Recommended accolade. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have! Download via the QR code or at: www.amigaaddict.com/coverdisk07 ISSUE 7 - JULY 2021

I must admit we have been winging it a bit this month with our seven-page feature! Ravi chats with Mike Clark and Bill Pullan to get the inside story about their time at Psygnosis (see page 21). We hope you enjoy this bumper edition of Amiga Addict. It has been a lot of work, but we've all had a hoot! - Jonah Naylor (Editor)

Jonah

(wears beaver fur) editor@amiga-addict.com

Ravi

(has totally tropical taste) ravi@amiga-addict.com

Josh

(ﬁghts with honour) josh@amiga-addict.com

Paul

(a dark horse knight) paul@amiga-addict.com

Best Amiga packaging or box art? "Beneath A Steel Sky. That simple silver-on-black box cover logo is legendary - inside the box is a beautiful backstory comic book by Dave Gibbons." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "Only one game really springs to mind when you think of a super fast blue spinning hero who saves wabbits in a green hilly grassland: Wiz 'N' Liz!" Which game would you like to be sucked into? "A lot already make me feel like I'm in them! Especially management sims like Theme Park, Sim City, Ultimate Soccer Manager or Detroit." Best Amiga packaging or box art? "Most Amiga boxes were black, or dark, like rock albums. One of my favourites was Brian the Lion. The name and game itself were not good. The white box stood out with lovely tropical vibes." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "Walker by far, being able to control that giant Walker mech, with the mouse for aiming and keys for movement. Loved the time travel and tiny pixel men." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "Leisure Suit Larry." Best Amiga packaging or box art? "My favourite box art would have to be Anarchy. As someone who likes art, I love the amount of detail in the cover picture." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "The ﬁrst game that comes to my mind is Second Samurai AGA for sure, playing as a samurai and throwing knives to defeat dragons and monsters is my cup of tea." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "Arabian Nights, who wouldn't want to go on an adventure, be a hero and kiss a princess?" Best Amiga packaging or box art? "The Secret Of Monkey Island. Beautifully drawn cover and shows some key characters - easily looks like it could be a poster for a movie." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "Blood Money. It has an amazing introduction and music. Back then, I was better at shoot 'em ups and this was a fantastic one." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "Batman The Movie - Gotham may be dangerous, but imagine being Batman! Those gadgets would help you survive, plus you get The Batmobile!"

AA DEMO PLAYER TIPS We've included some useful tips on how to play Slayers of High Toro within our coverdisk download. (Ian - "My tips are 1. Load Game 2. Don't Die 3. Win!") Also see our review in Issue 5.

The above graphic is called The Kingdom Panel (visible when you have a palace selected). We've added it here for reference - use it with our instructions to quickly get playing like a pro!

Ian

(watch out for the scythe) ian@amiga-addict.com

James

(loves the AA cover) james@amiga-addict.com

Best Amiga packaging or box art? "I have a soft spot for the Oh No! More Lemmings cover, with it's Where's Wally?-esque levels of detail, as lemmings face their certain doom." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "I love Benefactor - the tiny sprite graphics give it a ton of personality and the music is some of the best on the platform." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "I'd love to be whisked away to the world of Settlers, and sit eating fresh bread in a corn ﬁeld as everyone goes about their business." Best Amiga packaging or box art? "Anything by Roger Dean (there are quite a few on our front cover!) or Bob Wakelin is sure to look amazing, but for nostalgia reasons, I'm going to go for the Silicon Dreams trilogy box." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "So many games that stand out, but I'm going to be boring and say it's got to be Lemmings." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island. You get to be an over-privileged posh kid having a jolly spiﬃng adventure with your mates on an island!"

Best Amiga packaging or box art? "There are too many big box games to choose a favourite... I think the actual Amiga retail "packs" like Cartoon Classics and Desktop Dynamite are really cool and very memorable." Your favourite Psygnosis game? "It won't run on my Amiga 500, but I do like Wipeout 2097 for PPC Amigas." Which game would you like to be sucked into? "The Simpsons: Bart Vs The Space Mutants. Not really because I want to take on mutant aliens, (¡ay, caramba!) but being Bart would be a lot of fun!" hannah@amiga-addict.com

Hannah

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The Rolling Stones once sang, "You can't always get what you want." Wise words indeed there Mick, but we won't settle for our readers only getting what they need! So after an informal meeting over a multiplayer game of Hired Guns - and another new team member joining (welcome Josh!) - we all agreed that we must keep trying our very best to give AA readers more. We want to showcase more games, include extra interviews, bigger features, and the very best software! So here are the fruits of our labour. For Issue 7, we have increased the page count up to a whopping 60 pages. Not quite the pagination of Amiga Format in its heyday, but its still a great milestone! We've also added another virtual coverdisk (see right), and included our second Antstream gaming tournament (details on page 30)! We hope to keep giving all you Amiga addicts out there even more for your hard earned cash.

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ISSUE 7 - JULY 2021 REGULARS Editorial, Meet The Addicts & Coverdisk Capers.............................................3 Amiga News.........................................................6 Keyboard Warriors & Back In The Day.............7 Back Issues & Subscriptions.............................27 Amiga Addict Merch..........................................37 What? Amiga Pie................................................57 Next Month in Amiga Addict...........................58

Our cover story focu sses Amiga's m ost proﬁci on one of the ent publish ers.

AMIGA FOCUS

ON SCREEN Microcosm...........................................................28 Arabian Nights...................................................32 Turbo Tomato.....................................................34 Turbo Sprint: Graeme Cowie...........................36 Knight Rider 77..................................................38 Six Of The Best...................................................40 Gold Standard: Ruﬀ 'N' Tumble......................42 CD32 Corner: Simon The Sorcerer..................44

TESTBENCH StarShip Next Generation.................................8 Competition Pro Extra USB.............................45 Amiga Scraptop Part 2......................................46 RGBtoHDMI........................................................47 AmigaOS 3.2.......................................................48 Upgrades Old & New........................................51

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AMIGA INSIGHT

N ONSCREE

BITING BA CK! Ian check s in for th e latest wit h the Gun' at Ap 'Big ollo.

ODS! MIGGY M iga It's an Am t as o n t Jim, bu it! w o n k we est g ig b 's A A Testbench t! section ye

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WHAT FOWL PLAY! Paul adds another mag feather to his cap while researching the history of an often forgotten (but much-loved) British comic series for gamers.

Eagle and The Computer Warrior...................10 The Creative Revolution: Brilliance................18 Audio Oddities: Vol 2........................................55

A Journey Into Apollo: Origins........................14 Psygnosis............................................................21

CONTENTS

PSYGNOS IS

PAGE 21

PAGE 28 of gaming rs your ﬁx e s v li e d A A ospective iews, retr with interv test releases! and the la

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WORTHY UPDATE, OR CODS WALLOP? Jonah is to ugh on AmigaOS , as AA te sts version 3.2 to discove r if it can de valuable n liver any ew feature s.

*Amigas were used, but not harmed, in the creation of this magazine.

WWW.AMIGA-ADDICT.COM • TWITTER.COM/AMIGAMAGAZINE • FACEBOOK.COM/AMIGAMAGAZINE • Editor Jonah Naylor • Deputy Editor Ravi Abbott • Art Director Joshua Kelly • Games Editor & Art Assistant James Walker • Community Editor, Staff Writer & Proof Reader Ian Griffiths • Features Editor & Staff Writer Paul Monaghan • Advertising Manager & Staff Writer Hannah Clark Amiga Addict is an independent publication. Its publisher (Simulant Systems Ltd) has no connection with Commodore, or any subsequent Amiga rights holders such as Cloanto/Amiga Corporation. The views expressed in this magazine are those of the individual writers' opinions only, and are not the opinions held by Amiga Addict magazine or its publishers. Amiga Addict is a registered trademark.

We take great care to ensure that what we publish is accurate, but cannot be liable for any mistakes or misprints. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without our explicit permission.

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PUBLISHED BY

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Email your news & press releases to magazine@amiga-addict.com

Amiga Years) left oﬀ, looking at the history, artwork and innovation of Amiga demos: www.editions64k.fr

It's A Dogﬁghter's Life An Amiga version of Capcom's arcade classic 1942 is nearly ready for release. Ported by agermose, the game is in Alpha testing and is already conﬁrmed to have two-button and CD32 gamepad support. We can't wait for a full review!

Bouncing Into The Print Mag Club Boing! is a new 52-page French Amiga magazine, with Issue 1 available now! Very best of luck guys! Find them at: https://boing.attitude.online.fr Can You Spell Follix? A slick new puzzle game entitled Follix has recently been released for AGA Amigas. It is a sort of clever mix of Tetris, Boulder Dash and Scrabble! The game is addictive, with nice sampled speech and beautiful music - all coded in AMOS. You can download Retream's Follix for free at: https://retream.itch.io/follix

Bean Versus The Animator Released 17BitRetro have now released the full version of Bean Versus The Animator (as featured on AA's Issue 5 coverdisk!). Available at: https://17bitretro.itch.io

An Old C64 Favourite Chris Murray's C64 and Atari 8-bit platformer classic Henry's House is being ported to Amiga by 8bit2amiga. Follow their conversion progress here: www.8bit2amiga.j.pl A Better Sensi On MorphOS Cool_amigaN and jPV^RNO have been working hard to produce the Real Amiga Sensible World of Soccer Total Pack. Currently available for MorphOS only - a release for OS4 is planned, with a 68K version also not ruled out. The pack, the culmination of over two decades of content updates, adds a range of new features, tournaments and play modes: www.amiga-addict.com/swostotal

Even More Violence More classic MS-DOS FPS games are becoming available for accelerated Amigas. Exhumed / Powerslave, which uses Ken Silverman's build engine, has now been ported, and is available on Aminet: www.amiga-addict.com/exhumed

Hired Guns Amiga CD32 A dump of an unreleased beta version of Hired Guns CD32 has been found at archive.org. Interestingly, the game isn't fully working, but the dev files have also been included to assist anyone who may wish to try to finish the project. Fancy a go? www.amiga-addict.com/CD32HG *Rare* Amiga Game Listed On eBay We know what you're thinking... but this time it is rare! A boxed Amiga version of Magician's Dungeon, complete with manual and warranty card, was recently purchased on eBay for 892 Euros. www.longplays.org bought the graphical text adventure game so that it could be preserved. A longplay video has since been created and the disks have been dumped over on Internet Archive. This is the first time any information has been recorded online about the game. AA's own eBay searches also turned up some unboxed floppies, but we have lost James, who is still up in his parents' attic scavenging!

Cyberpunk 2021... GDG Entertainment have just released a new cyberpunk adventure game for OS4. Download the Cybersphere demo to test it out: www.gdg-entertainment.it

Arcade Or Amiga... Seko over on the English Amiga Board forums has been working on a new RoboCop remake. Currently, the project is just to test how well arcade-style graphics can be implemented on Amiga 500 hardware. Progress is being made quickly, and we wouldn't be surprised if this soon becomes a full version of the game. Stay up-to-date via EAB here: www.amiga-addict.com/RoboCopArcade

An Epic Adventure Awaits Project - Quest: Chapter I is an exciting new Amiga adventure game from Electric Black Sheep. Gameplay is in the classic Zelda or The Chaos Engine topdown style, with good graphics and sound. This ﬁrst game level (or chapter) uses the engine from Project Horizon, which is another game currently under development. Download and name your price: https://electricblacksheep.itch.io

Expand That Expansion! Terrible Fire creator, Stephen Leary has announced the TF1200. The expansion card works with the new Buffee 68030 accelerator by Renee Cousins and team (see AA Issue 3 News). Stephen's latest board enables the Buffee to accelerate any standard Amiga 1200. Not only this, but 8MB Fast RAM and IDE with DMA support is included. Visit: www.buffee.ca

Books About Demos IndieGoGo crowdfunding for Volume 2 of a stunning Amiga demoscene book series has been successful. Demoscene The AGA Years picks up where the ﬁrst book (The

AMIGA ADDICT

Who Needs The Internet?! Popular Amiga BBS hosting software AmiExpress has just been fully rewritten by Darren Coles in Amiga E programming language, and updated to version 5.4. The new version is open source too, so there is no better time to start your very own bulletin board system: www.amiga-addict.com/ami-xpress

July 2021

Send your reader comments & letters via email or Discord: magazine@amiga-addict.com www.amiga-addict.com/discord

Keyboard Warriors (Basically just send anything in - we'll probably print it!)

Undeserved Praise, But We'll Take It! I'd like to take this opportunity to applaud the entire team for creating a fantastic new magazine for our beloved Amigas after so many years. The stories, articles and reviews remind myself of games which simply blew our minds at the time. The graphics, the music, the animation - wow! Not to mention rekindling my love of browsing listings of PD demos in the magazines of the time, and listening for hours to the amazing demo music. It all evokes many happy memories from a

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Dare To Boot it? Here is my reimagined horror themed 1.3 boot screen, created in Personal Paint using my A1200. Pretty chuﬀed with the result, 16 colours HiRes. I've even had the actual creator of the original boot screen - Sheryl Knowles - give it a like on Facebook, which has pretty much made my year. I've named it Floppy Boner. Keep up the good work with the mag! - Gideon Tebbut (via email)

A New Model? Sta I'm not sure if you're planning to add a bakery Let r ter section to your ﬁne magazine, but if so, here is my submission. My father-in-law oﬀered to make me a cake for my recent 40th birthday, and I gave him the brief of creating a cake to commemorate the life-changing moment of receiving the Amiga 500 Plus in 1991. I think he did a pretty good job! PS. The 333 series refers to the cake being a 2/3 scale model of the A500. - Mark Dunning (via Email) Is this real? Come on, I wasn't born yeast-erday! So you can have your cake and eat it? We are in knead of one of these!

simpler, happier time, when playground politics was limited to whether you were a proper computer fan, and hence had an Amiga; or an arcade fan and had a new Nintendo or Mega Drive. I know which camp I was in (and still am!). Thank you once again. Long live the Amiga and long live your publication. You've got a very loyal reader in me. - Paul John (via Email)

In January 1991, the United States - along with forces from 34 other countries - initiated a declaration of war against Iraq. This was the largest coalition of nations since World War II, resulting in one of most devastating conflicts witnessed in modern warfare. The purpose was to fight for democracy; to eradicate Iraqi troops from Kuwait and its neighbouring territories... though many believe that gaining control over oil pipelines was the real motivation! Whatever your stance on the Gulf War, there is no question that Saddam Hussein was a brutal and tyrannical Iraqi leader. Propaganda was rife on both sides and the conflict certainly had a lasting social impact. In the West, a generation of parents and children tuned in to the related news broadcasts on a daily basis. So much war coverage on TV (building up to and during the Persian Gulf conflict) had a strong influence in popular culture afterwards. The Amiga had titles such as F-15 Strike Eagle II, War in the Gulf, Combat Air Patrol, Persian Gulf Inferno, Desert Strike and others. There was even a virus named the Saddam Virus!

BACK iN THE DAY '9 1

The Dawn Of A New Era

Amiga Software & Games

At The Box Oﬃce

Music News

The ground-breaking CDTV (Commodore Dynamic Total Vision) home multimedia entertainment system is launched. Most games are repackaged A500 oﬀerings on CD-ROM, including Defender of the Crown, Sim City, Turrican and Battle Chess. An impressive range of multimedia and educational software is also available, such as The Hutchinson Encyclopedia. The system even allows audio CDs to be played!

The ﬁrst version of TVPaint is born, a powerful animation program (Ed. - "I wonder if Tecsoft imagined it living on for 30 more years? The 2021 version is still used by Netﬂix and many professional animators!"). 1991 also has stacks of notable games such as Lemmings, Alien Breed, Exile, Moonstone, Lotus Turbo Challenge 2, Altered Destiny, The Secret of Monkey Island, Turrican II, Heimdall and Lords of Chaos. 3D Construction Kit also debuts.

Cinema-goers confront the relentless T-1000 killing machine in Terminator 2 - as if the original Terminator wasn't hard enough to beat?! Dr. Hannibal Lecter is also a somewhat menacing onscreen presence this year, played by Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. 1991 also treats us to Thelma & Louise, JFK, Hot Shots!, The Addams Family, The Naked Gun 21/2, Hook and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Ravi "A personal favourite of mine!").

Grunge breaks big! The most popular band is Nirvana with smash hit "Smells Like Teen Spirit" - causing most of the UK's youth to buy woolly jumpers! Metallica release their self-titled album ("The Black Album"), opening track "Enter Sandman" peaks at number ﬁve in the UK Charts. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" charts as the Christmas Number One, renewed song interest is due to Freddie Mercury sadly losing his battle with AIDS.

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STARSHIP

These are the voyages of the starship Amiga. Its mission to boldly go… oh damn who broke the warp engines! That's how it goes right?

TESTBENCH

GENERATION “Captain, receiving a signal through time and space - this seems to be an ancient signal emanating from Earth in the year 1993! They require help or the whole universe will be destroyed. The source seems to be Wales Sound!” ”Whale sound, Mr Data? They’re ancient sea mammals. Are you sure this isn’t the probe that James Kirk dealt with in 2286?” “No sir, Wales as in the old Earth nation-state. It seems to be emanating from a singer in an area called Hollywood, designation ‘Tom Jones’.” The captain looked stunned. ”Engage!” As Data tries to work out what Hollywood is, he accesses the NG CPU in his head running OS4 and MorphOS dual boot, and curiously ﬁnds a program with the same name. Hollywood is arguably one of the most powerful Amiga NG native applications, and is fantastic both in concept and implementation. Not enough is reported about this software and its Amiga roots,

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so let's look into this amazing creation. Hollywood is a multimediaoriented programming language. This essentially means it's an easy way to quickly produce games and programs. One of the killer features is that this system doesn’t only support Amiga anything you make in Hollywood can be compiled and outputted for iOS, Windows, Linux, Android and MacOS, as well as PPC Amiga and classic AmigaOS3. So if you learn the ins and outs of this program, your Amiga can become a development environment, and you can pretty much chuck your program on anything that will accept it. Multimedia-oriented programming might sound like it's not very powerful, but don't let that fool you - Hollywood can produce some impressive stuﬀ! It has support for 3D programming with Galore GL, support for APKs, Raspberry Pi support, a sandbox container for development and plugins to add additional sound and video support. The whole system can be extended via a whole raft of plugins to become a beast of an environment to develop in. The latest version will work on Amiga (yes, even OS3.x), Windows, Mac and

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Linux. It just feels right on Amiga NG and runs really well, feeling like Scala’s dad with a lot of shine, polish and extra features. And remember Scala could be pushed to some crazy limits by advanced users using genlock and video. It was not just the simple presentation software it seemed on the box, and Hollywood feels this way too. In fact, it even supports Scala scripts with the Malibu plugin. Another essential addon is Hollywood Designer, a WYSIWYG GUI for the platform, making it easier for even beginners to create something amazing. Hollywood has really helped spur on Amiga NG development, with applications like RNOPublisher (PDF editor), AmiStore for OS4, AROS Broadway Media Center and many others made using it. I hope this software continues to be great and is taken up by more Amiga users with more plugins and users in the future. It could be something truly stunning, with great Amiga roots. Data suddenly realised he had been spending too much time checking out this software, and set a course for Earth 1993 to meet Tom Jones. “Hold on Data,” interrupted the captain, “before we arrive I need to drop a Captain’s Log.”

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Eagle and The Computer Warrior - Paul investigates how comics helped to promote Amiga games in a unique way "Warriors, come out to plaaaaayyyyyyy." One of my earliest memories of moving to Westhoughton (part of Bolton Borough) at the age of six is a trip to the barber's. It was run by a mountain of a man named Barry. Ex-army, his haircut options were either short back and sides... or a "number one", two of

AMIGA ADDICT

the most basic haircuts available. As he snipped away, he always had a cigarette in his mouth, which often meant bits of ash would fall on your head. Times were a lot diﬀerent back then! “What's this got to do with games?” I hear you cry. Well, bear with me. The

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ﬁrst thing to know is that this is where I discovered the world of “classic” comics. Lots of kids would be sitting around waiting for their haircuts on the average day at Barry’s, and to keep us quiet, there was always a stack of comics. The Beano, The Dandy, 2000 AD - all the British greats were there.

Eagle was extremely successful, selling around 900,000 copies of its ﬁrst issue, but eventually ran into problems later in its life, and ceased production in 1969 due to lack of sales. During the run of Eagle, and in the years that followed, many comics “aimed at boys” were launched, including The Victor, Battle and Tiger (the latter being responsible for the popular footballing strip, Roy of the Rovers). By the time the 80s arrived, Eagle had returned too (in 1982, to be precise), published by Fleetway and featuring Dan Dare's great-greatgrandson as the lead comic strip. Fans of British comics would be in for a treat over the next decade, as Eagle served up many memorable characters to join Dare, such as Doomlord and Detective Zed. The publication absorbed several other comics over the years, including Battle and Scream. The original editor of this relaunch was experienced hand Dave Hunt. I was lucky enough to have Dave share some of his memories with me of how the return happened: "The New Eagle was very much born of Group Editor Barrie Tomlinson’s ambition to relaunch an updated Eagle comic for the kids of the 80s. Along with many thousands of other enthusiastic children, Barrie had also read and enjoyed the groundbreaking and prestigious title as a youngster in the 50s. Aided and encouraged by Managing Editor Gil Page,

they eventually pitched the idea of resurrecting the Eagle title to Editorial Director John Sanders and, thankfully, JS thought it a good idea and gave it the company’s full ﬁnancial backing. I, personally, was between titles at the time, and so was available to take on a new project, and John, Barrie and Gil thought I was the right man to be onboard as its editor. You can be certain I was extremely pleased and proud to take up this enormous challenge! However, while it’s OK giving any title the goahead, at the time it was just a blank canvas, and you can be sure that many hours, days, weeks and months would be spent during its creative planning. I always knew I would have the support of a team of top scriptwriters, nurtured when I was editor of a war publication called Battle Picture Weekly, to back us up with the stories that we would eventually develop for The New Eagle. The new title was eventually launched with a fanfare of trumpets and to great media attention, and thankfully proved to be a huge success with its new readership." Eagle's return was in a very diﬀerent time to when the original run ended in 1969. Computer and video games were gaining popularity each and every year, and it wasn't long before Eagle tapped into this exploding market. Dan Dare himself featured in several games for 8bit and 16-bit computers, and during Eagle's second run, they often featured the home computer scene with game reviews, competitions to win software and the like. "As the original Eagle title had been ground-breaking for its readers in the 50s, we were determined the New Eagle publication would also be up-to-date with the latest important trends that might be of interest to kids who now read our publication... and so the emerging technology revolution taking place at the time was, we felt, a very vital area to be covered. But in the early 80s, computer games were still in their infancy, and so we were always heavily reliant on

freelance reviewers who understood the technology better than ourselves and knew what made the games work." Although game reviews didn't feature every week, whenever they did, the comic featured as many mini write ups as possible. Back then, it was mainly the 8bit machines that were featured. As mentioned, various competitions were run in the comic to win some of the latest software, courtesy of US Gold and Activision, two of the biggest games companies at the time. In 1985, a new comic strip began in Eagle that aimed to further extend its games coverage. Originally called Ultimate Warrior, the strip revolved around a boy’s adventures inside real life versions of computer games. It soon changed its name to The Computer Warrior and ran successfully until the comic folded in 1994. As a kid, seeing the likes of the Ghostbusters game as a comic strip in Eagle was amazing! I had played it on a friend's Commodore 64, but this new way of covering games was something else. Dave shared with me how the idea of the comic strip ﬁrst came about: "Those brilliant scriptwriters I mentioned earlier - two of them were most deﬁnitely Alan Grant and John Wagner, who sometimes co-wrote together. After completing yet another competition in Eagle's pages with a games company called US Gold, where their games were the sponsored prizes, I suddenly had the idea to do a story with this company where the reader would be involved in the story plotting and featured as a “computer warrior”. US Gold liked the idea and gave it their full support, but now I had to get a good scriptwriter for the story too. I recall discussing the idea with John Wagner over a business lunch, and if I’m honest, I don’t think he was too impressed with the idea at the time! But with the added carrot that the writer would also be supplied with - and could retain - the latest games software at the

A few examples of the excellent artwork that helped build the games worlds.

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Eagle was a British weekly comic book, originally launched in 1950 by a vicar from Southport, Lancashire as a wholesome alternative to American comics. It included a number of comic strips that are still well known today, such as Captain Pugwash and the English translation of Hergé’s Tintin, but by far their most popular creation was Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Dan Dare featured in the comic for most of its original run, often on the cover, and told the story of a pilot in the Interplanet Space Fleet as he attempted to foil the schemes of his archenemy, The Mekon.

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time, he said he would discuss the concept with Alan and see what they might come up with. The games company would have no input into our story plotting, other than using the latest game in a ‘virtual’ tie-up with the selected Eagle reader. The Computer Warrior was eventually created, and to me it was really no surprise when it proved to be a huge success with the readership." The plot of the comic strip managed to fit within the world of Eagle's other strips. A mixture of science fiction and horror, Computer Warrior soon made an impact. The main protagonist was Bobby Patterson, a teenager that was - like many readers - heavily into computer games. Starting out as quite a simple story, Bobby set out to save his friend Martin, who had become trapped inside his computer's "real life facility" via a code he had discovered. Yes, it may sound far-fetched now, but as already mentioned, its sci-fi concept was a good fit for Eagle. The original premise had ten challenges for Bobby to complete (and thus save his friend), set by The Computer Warlord, who was there to stop evil escaping into the real world. Once the original setup was established, the world of gaming was ready to be covered in a unique way for the following nine years. Over 45 games were used as challenges for Bobby to defeat (and for other players too... but more on that later). Several games featured were fictional, but the rest were based on some of Activision and US Gold's biggest titles of the 80s and 90s. The earliest challenges included well-known titles such as Wizard Of Wor, Ghostbusters,

game market. Originally Commodore sent us the computer games to play for ourselves (myself and John Wagner), but John and I were such crap game players, it was taking us far too long to come up with the scripts. So we asked if they could send breakdowns of the games they wanted shown - and we worked from these breakdowns instead." Grant and Wagner had enjoyed a writing partnership before joining Eagle, both having experience working on 2000 AD. Wagner even created Judge Dredd, one of the biggest names in comics! Like Grant, Wagner wasn't too into the games scene when he began writing Computer Warrior. He too cast his mind back to 1985 to recall how the strip came about and the challenges he faced: "I believe the idea was put forward by a games company, you’d have to ask the editor at the time (Dave Hunt, I think). Could be US Gold that you mentioned. But they ran out of games we could feature, so we had to widen our parameters (this led to some ﬁctional games being used as stories). I don’t know what the agreement was with the games companies. I/we played a few of the games at the beginning, but it was very time consuming and in the end, when I was writing the strip on my own, I asked the editor to get someone else to play the games, video them and send the video to me. I did remain fond of Wizard Of Wor though, which I think I played oﬀ and on till my C64 gave out." With Eagle being weekly, there would be a constant pressure on deadlines (just

"...John and I were such crap game players, it was taking us far too long to come up with the scripts." Silent Service and Kung-Fu Master. "How did they put these 8-bit games on paper?" I hear you ask. Well luckily, I spoke to the original writer of the strip "D. Spence" (a pseudonym of Alan Grant) - who shared some of his memories. "I'm fairly sure the original idea came from the editor, Dave Hunt. He was keen to keep up with the burgeoning computer

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like Games-X, covered in Issue 3). Some Computer Warrior strips could be between three to ten parts, so having someone to play these games for them was a massive help. I did ask John if Activision or US Gold ever gave feedback on the strips, but he didn't think they did. The partnership lasted for the duration of the comic's run (the only other strip to last for the whole run of the publication

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was Dan Dare itself), so the artists and writers must have been doing something right! It was great publicity for the games companies too. Computer Warrior had several phases to its run. As mentioned, the original plot was about Bobby trying to rescue his friend from the computer, by completing ten challenges and becoming the eponymous Computer Warrior. These challenges lasted 83 weekly issues... but it wasn't just the games that were the challenge. Real life problems were covered too. Being a schoolkid, Bobby had to work around homework, detention, angry parents, swapping his BMX for games, and, to top it off - a trip to a psychiatrist! Looking back at the strip now, it shows how well Grant and Wagner did at capturing the challenges a modern (by 1985 standards, anyway) teenager might face. As a child of the 80s, I knew what a big deal games were to me, although Bobby obviously had the risk of getting stuck inside a computer permanently! In various issues, he is shown having to sneak onto the computer late at night, whilst his parents sleep (something we have all done!), and in others arguing with his dad over gaming time. Although, it should be noted that this leads to a "you'll feel the back of my hand"-type threat (something fitting to the era). After the final challenge, Computer Warrior did take a small break for several issues. The original idea had come to an end. However, Bobby's break from Eagle didn't last too long, as a new writer and artist would take over the strip and take his adventures to the next level. For myself, this was a fantastic period, as I started buying Eagle myself. More importantly, the games featured were some of the biggest titles available. This new phase of the strip had Bobby return to the game challenges, no longer free to ignore them. After becoming a Computer Warrior, his skills were needed for a much tougher challenge - to find The Ultimate Warrior (not the wrestler!). The Computer Warlord had called upon all previous winners of the ten challenges to take part, with one winner from 17 challengers needed to stop the

"...it was linked to actual games, and when it went into colour - it really took oﬀ." late in the comic's life). For the strips, I would receive a script which had the storyline and as much reference material as the editor could ﬁnd – this would be the game itself, any advertising associated with it, as well as the aforementioned screenshots." I asked Mike what made Computer Warrior so popular, and the idea of readers being involved:

Despite completing the latest challenges and being promoted to The Ultimate Warrior (spoilers!), the war wasn't over. Various evil forces from The Nightmare Zone threaten to invade real life and destroy the world! Only one man (well... boy) could stop them… (I think we all know who!). Bobby agreed to take on these ﬁnal challenges, on the condition that, if he wins, all the other Warriors would be released safely. That wasn't the only reward Bobby received however once the Computer Warlord passed away, he took over the role, keeping the dark forces trapped forever.

"The reason it became so popular is that it was linked to actual games, and when it went into colour - it really took oﬀ. Several of the stories featured readers. They had to send a photo of themselves so I could draw them actually playing the games in the stories."

The third phase of Computer Warrior was a fantastic idea. With Bobby's new role, he gave Eagle readers a chance to enter a game of their choice and be put into the comic strip. To put your minds at rest - no readers were harmed or became trapped in the computer!

Bobby was stripped of his Computer Warlord role by the Council of Warlords in phase four, and demoted back to the Computer Warrior role. This meant, once again, he would be taking on the new challenges himself - this time under the direction of a new character, Warlord Baal. Again, some well-known games were featured, including Amiga titles such as Black Tiger, ESWAT, UN Squadron, Dynasty Warriors and more. These were games I played a lot at home, so these issues of the comic felt even more special.

Artist Mike Dorey worked on Computer Warrior for around 200 issues and stayed until the ﬁnal issue, Issue 505, dated January 1994. Mike was kind enough to share his memories of working on the strip: "I tried playing some of the games featured, but it either took too long or I couldn't progress far enough through the levels; so the editor arranged to send me screenshots of the diﬀerent stages of the games – much easier for me. I remember a couple of years ago, when I was at the London Film and Comic Con, there was a cosplayer dressed as Chun Li from Street Fighter 2 - she looked pretty good! (SF2 was featured as a challenge

This period of readers being featured didn't last too long. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Turbo Outrun and ﬁctional game Slay Ride were games used as part of the scheme, before the comic strip entered the fourth and ﬁnal phase.

In 1991, Eagle’s content was reduced. No longer a weekly comic, Eagle went to a monthly schedule. With longer to produce their publication, the quality improved, but this was still a massive change, and it clearly meant a reduction in Computer Warrior too. Eagle would last almost three years in the new format, before ﬁnally closing its doors in 1994. The ﬁnal era of Eagle was mainly made

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up of reprinted stories, for all apart from Dan Dare and Computer Warrior. At this point, this was the only comic I still bought regularly, as I wanted to keep up with Bobby's adventures. Only a few more genuine game properties were used in these latter days, but they were big ones: Mercs, Street Fighter 2 and the ﬁnal ever game - Another World. SF2 was one of the biggest games of the time, so to see Bobby take on the likes of Dhalsim and Zangief was amazing as a reader, as well as a games-mad teenager. Another World only lasted a few issues, but I feel that the Amiga classic based on the character escaping an alien planet was the perfect way to end Computer Warrior. To last nine years was a fantastic achievement, as so many other strips (and comics) came and went in that time. I asked original writer Alan Grant why he felt Computer Warrior lasted so long: "I think Computer Warrior lasted because of the ever-growing popularity of the computer games market. I don't think the character of Bobby played much part in it (though I may be wrong)." John Wagner had some thoughts too: "Computer games and the idea of playing them for real must have strongly resonated with kids." And his favourite memory? "Giving the bloody thing up!" As Dave said in his memories, John may have not been too keen to work on Computer Warrior, but for myself and many other readers, the strip is a source of many happy memories. I want to say a massive thank you to Dave, Alan, John and Mike for their time answering questions, as well as the other people that worked on the strip. I sometimes wonder - if Bobby ever did return, what games challenges would he be facing today?

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evil escaping from The Nightmare Zone. This second era featured some of the biggest US Gold titles, and being in the late 80s, many of these were Amiga titles too, with the likes of Gauntlet, Thunderblade, Roadblasters and - a personal favourite of mine - Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders. It took almost 150 weekly issues to tell this section of Bobby's story. One by one, the other Computer Warriors failed and were trapped in The Nightmare Zone forever. In one challenge, Battleﬁeld 3000, Bobby's dad loaded up the game and was accidentally taken inside, giving Bobby even more things to focus on (a neat twist to the series I feel).

A Journey Into Apollo: Origins - Tentatively wearing garlic with his cross to hand, Ian talks to the Apollo team leader we work together, each team member using their resources their skills, their time - to help in our goals.

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We have people who have a very deep hardware background like myself and some friends from IBM; we have people who are more on the software side. Of course, if you develop stuff, you also need to test stuff a lot - this is a very important part and we have people who are very good at carefully testing to find all the bugs. So there’s a whole range of skills, from musicians to artists to coders to playtesters. It’s like a big company, but it’s made out of volunteers who do this because they love the Amiga. And I have the role of… the quarterback, the team captain, the drummer who drums how fast to row! Because of my history coding on the Amiga a long time ago, and working for IBM, Sony, and Huawei - I’m a mixed breed. I jump around in many areas, and work together with the rest of the team in different fields. The original members of Apollo Team at the bring-up party of the Phoenix card in 2014, (L-R) Gunnar von Boehn, Jens Kuenzer, Christoph Hoehne.

Vampire accelerators have been on the market for over six years now. But where did the Vampire and Apollo Team start? In many companies I’ve worked for, I met Amiga fans. Even 10 years after the death of Commodore, many of them were still heartbroken. We often got chatting and there would be discussions where we would say, “Ah damn, on Amiga this would have been so much easier to do.” Or, “Damn, we need to use this UNIX stuﬀ here on the supercomputer we are building for IBM on Amigas this would be so much more straightforward.” One of my colleagues, Thomas Hirsch said, “You know, I’ve been working on the Amiga chipset for quite some time now, I’m rewriting it in logic.” We thought this was an awesome idea, and we asked how we could help. All of us pitched in and said, “This is awesome, this is really nice, it’s great that you are doing this let’s revive the Amiga.” And that’s how it all started.

A1k.org forum owner Robert Wahnsiedier (in blue) with Gunnar and Thomas Hirsch (founder of NatAmi) on his left.

When it comes to making more of your classic Amiga, there’s a number of options on the table, with new hardware coming onto the market every year. But there’s one name that has been whispered in hushed tones for years: Vampire. With a number of impressive cards on the market, and their own standalone solution pushing the Amiga in new directions, Amiga Addict decided it was time to get behind the scenes with the company that put together Vampire: Apollo Team. In this two-part series, we’ll be looking at the origins of Apollo Team, the design philosophy and what the future holds, all with the help of Apollo Team team leader and general allround everything-doer, Gunnar von Boehn. Let’s start at the beginning. For those that don’t know, who are Apollo Team?

So what was the aim of the Amiga revival project? We wanted to continue where Commodore had stopped. Commodore last created the Amiga 4000 with the AGA chipset, the 040 CPU (Motorola came out later with the 060), and we thought, "OK, we need to make a machine that is fully compatible, which can run all the older games, which everything works on, but we want to continue where Commodore stopped so we need at least an 060 - but we want to add more features, more memory, more capability. To produce what Commodore might have produced after the Amiga 4000." The ﬁrst step in building a viable new machine was to secure a processor. Working in the chip development, Gunnar knew it would be best to go to the source:

It’s very simple actually. The Apollo Team is a team of volunteers, all over the world, who are united by the wish, or dream, or desire to revive the Amiga. We are all true Amiga fans, deep in our hearts, and we all got hurt very much when Commodore died. We didn’t expect it. We didn’t want that. I suﬀered from this for many years. [laughs]

We were very optimistic, young, impassioned. Bill Buck, behind the Pegasus Project and MorphOS, was the guy who got the contacts with Motorola for that project. I knew Bill and he arranged a meeting for us with the Vice President of Freescale Semiconductor (formed when Motorola sold oﬀ its semiconductor division)! We were very optimistic, so we said, “We need the 060 CPU, we know it’s not produced anymore. But we need it to revive the Amiga.”

We are a team of 20-25 people spread out all around the world. With the internet today, you can have a “pen friend”, so to speak, in another country - and brainstorm with them i.e. how to write a new table, or how to solve this or that. This is how our team operates - we are online 24/7 (or as much as we can), and

Motorola basically laughed at us - they said, "The team that made these CPUs is gone, they are dead or in old people’s homes now. We don’t have the team anymore. We don’t have the blueprints anymore. And you know, the fab which produced them is also gone! So there’s no chance for us to make these

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chips anymore. We would need to re-do the chip, in a new process for a new fab; we’d need to put a new team on this." Working in chip development for IBM at this time, I knew what that meant. We were working on the G5 for Apple, and Apple’s buy-in to get the chip was $40 million! Motorola were telling us "even if you put $1 million on the table, it wouldn’t be enough." And I knew this was right. So we shelved our dream to revive Amiga. But, of course, that wasn’t the end of the story. Or this would be a short article! That was frustrating. But working at IBM full time in chip development, we ﬁgured, "We know making a CPU is a really big job. But how about we start this, and do it after work! And we work on the new 68K. While we work on it, why don’t we use all the knowledge that IBM and Intel collected in the last 20 years after the Amiga died." Chip development had continued and people had found out a lot of things that helped to make faster CPUs. So if we could use this knowledge on how to make smart CPUs, we could make a processor outclassing every single 68K Motorola. But it would take many years, of course. That’s how the whole project started we started 14 years ago, dedicated to work on this. The codename was NatAmi (Native Amiga) - we didn’t want emulation. We wanted to revive, in our opinion, the true virtues of the Amiga; that you have a CPU which is very programmer-friendly, very powerful; where with a few easy-tounderstand, very human-readable instructions, you could solve big problems. So you need just a few instructions to calculate the Mandelbrot set, or to do a sinus scroller. The instructions themselves are very powerful, you can do maths stuﬀ simply. This enables the programmer to do great things without writing endless lines of code. To us, this was a very important virtue -

The NatAmi with 060 CPU card running at 110MHz.

The ﬁrst Vampire accelerator, the 600 V2, in 2015.

you have a machine that empowers the coder to write cool stuﬀ, and he can focus on solving the problem, but the code is still clean and readable - you can go away and come back two days later and still understand what you wrote. I truly believe that the 68K architecture was unique in this way, that it gave so much clarity to the coder. It really made it so much fun to code for.

wrong! When Thomas retired from the team, we looked at what we had produced and said, “OK, we did a good CPU, but I think we did a lot wrong.” So we threw it all away and took what we had learned as design goals... and started the Apollo core again from scratch.

The Amiga chipset has some awesome ideas - the Copper controls the display, you don’t put this workload on the CPU. You have all these DMA channels. In the PC world, the CPU has to carry all the data around in memory, but on the Amiga you tell the hardware “Please play me this song, it’s here in the memory, start now - I’ll come back when you’ve ﬁnished,” and it does this all automatically. It’s a very clean, advanced design and we liked this very much - we found it very sad that PCs you can buy today don’t have this.

Igor [Majstorovic] came to us: he had the clever idea to make an accelerator that used an FPGA and he wanted a CPU to use in this. At this point in time, he was trying to use the TG68 chip from Tobias [Gubener], a very simple 68K clone with limited features. He was looking for high performance, caches and features like an 020 or 040 might have. He sent me emails asking how he could add these features to the TG68, and I told him, “You can’t. This is not designed for that, you will never reach your goal. Throw it away, start again from scratch. Oh, by the way, we actually have this chip you want to design already!"

We wanted a machine that truly followed these great ideas of the Amiga concept, while adding a few things that the original Amiga team always wanted to do, but couldn’t because Commodore died. There was the AAA chipset where they wanted to have True Color features, they planned 16-bit audio for the chipset and had prototypes, but it didn’t come to market. This was how NatAmi got started. Thomas left at some point - he was the “brain father” of this whole thing - he found it took up too much room in his life. At this point, we renamed the team from NatAmi to Apollo Team - Apollo is the CPU core we developed for the NatAmi. The core team working on the CPU core - Christoph, Jens and me, all IBM guys - we stayed together and continued to work on the Apollo core. There’s a saying in house building: the ﬁrst house you build for your enemy, the second for your friend and the third is for you. Which I assume means that you learn while you build what you did

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So how did the Apollo core end up in the Vampire cards?

He was very fortunate that we already had a working high-end CPU which was aimed for the NatAmi project. There were actually some NatAmis built, but only like 12-15 units. So Igor was producing these accelerators, all the logic was inside the FPGA and everything came basically from the Apollo team, so he was the vessel, the empty glass where we put the content. So the memory controller, everything which makes the features of the card, we provided from the NatAmi times. Igor joined the team his part was very important because he took care of producing these accelerators, while the “brainies” and the team continued to develop... We hope you’ve enjoyed a look at the origins of Apollo Team. Join us next month, as we pick Gunnar’s brain for more about the Vampire! We're not done just yet this issue, over the page we have the latest from Apollo Team.

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On the left of the A500, the Phoenix card.

Fire and Ice

AMIGA INSIGHT

- Ian looks at the new Apollo beasts bursting onto the scene Apollo Team’s products change all the time. Previously, their accelerator range extended to the Vampire 600 V2, 500 V2+ and 1200 V2. As part of our interview, Gunnar shared their new line, based on the Vampire V4 tech: the Apollo FireBird for the A500, A1000 and A2000, and the Apollo IceDrake for the A1200. These new cards jump up to the new V4 technology used in the standalone unit (more on that next issue). You have the 080 core as usual, and a ton of memory 512MB to be precise. But why else should users of classic Amigas be excited about the ﬁre and ice of the new range? On each of these cards, you have two IDE controllers, where you can connect two devices to each in theory. I do not recommend connecting two devices on the CF card channel because they do not like that - nothing to do with the Amiga, it is the CF card interface. But you could connect an old Amiga hard drive or DVD burner. If you have the power and space. You have the 100Mbit Ethernet designed to use Amiga DMA - allowing you to access the internet in a decent way. You can download from Aminet, listen to web radio. You can connect to your local network - with a PC with Samba you can share ﬁles, which is also very useful. You have USB on the card too - all of these new accelerators have two USB ports, so you can plug in those new USB joypads, which I very much like. I grew up with Competition Pro and these kind of joysticks were very high quality and lasted a long time. We all know these are not produced anymore, but there are very high quality joypads produced for the Xbox, for example - I tested many joypads and they are far superior to what Commodore did for the CD32 controller! [laughs]

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You might notice on the pictures below that the Vampire name is not mentioned at all. We’ve all got used to referring to Apollo products as “Vampires”, so is there a change in naming convention here? Yeah, to be honest we used to have this NatAmi name when the whole project started. For the CPU, we always called it the Apollo Core, and the team always called itself the Apollo Team. We also had diﬀerent cards that we called Phoenix, for example - our internal project name for the V4 is Phoenix. So we were always on that kind of naming scheme. The Vampire was named Vampire because of Igor - this project was his proposal and he was soldering the cards, so we thought yeah, let him choose the name for that. The FireBird and IceDrake are not done by Igor. They are done here in Germany. So we picked names which we found more appealing. As you might notice, I have a strong AD&D and Warhammer background. I was a big fan of Archon, the Amiga game. You know, with the ﬁrebird, the dragon and the unicorn and so on. So our new product names come more from this. My fellow A600 users out there might be wondering where their new V4 card is. Unfortunately, the A600 makes things a little tricky… See the Amiga 600 - I very much like the small size of it. At the same time, it doesn't have an expansion plug. It was never designed to be expanded. There is a plug where you can add a memory module, but they didn't connect all the wires that you would need to put a CPU card there. The Vampire 600, which was designed by Igor, it piggybacks on the CPU, you put it on the CPU. But it has a number of

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drawbacks. First, if the card becomes big, you’ve got a lever effect on this plug, because this plug is not designed to hold a card. Also the A600 gets pretty warm. It's not that anything gets broken, but it means that you have a movement in the PCB. Every single time you turn it on, and it gets warmer, it will expand minimally, and this can lead to problems with the Vampire connection, because the plug is not designed like a real expansion plug to really hold that strong. There is a potential for the card to get loose, and getting loose means not running and this makes people unhappy. We have like 20 people in the team and working on three cards in parallel is too much for us to be honest. It's already a challenge and we still have the other old cards to support and provide updates for... so I can't work on a special solution for the 600 right now. So when can we expect these new cards to arrive? In my experience, these things are always unpredictable - no company and no project I ever worked in were able to predict how long what we call “the bring up” is. You plan for something to work and then you produce it, but we are all humans and humans create errors. So I can't say if there is a human error in the next batch, but if there's not then they should be production-ready next month. This is our hope, but I cannot promise, we will see. We will produce a small batch first for the team, and we'll test it. We have stocked all parts for mass production - we have stocked a couple of hundred FPGAs and everything is there ready. So we are prepared if, say, our first batch cards are good. With some luck, we could start shipping the first cards in September.

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The Creative Revolution by Gareth Qually

- Time to get out the digital paints and brushes... three times (don’t ask). Another admission: by the time I picked up my copy of Photoshop 2.5 - the ﬁrst for Windows - I had already abandoned the Amiga. I didn’t want to leave the platform, mind you. I just needed speed for my 3D work, and a 486DX4 100Mhz just stomped all over my puny A500 for such things. I managed to take Imagine across with me, but Photoshop seemed like a good replacement for Deluxe Paint at the time. And, for the most part, it was. I was using it primarily to create textures for my materials in Imagine, so it ﬁt the bill pretty well. I still missed DPaint a lot, however. Being able to pick up a part of an image and paint with it seemed so normal, yet Photoshop just couldn’t do it. And forget about 2D animation - it was still decades away for the powerhouse package from Adobe.

The Beginnings of Brilliance Let me preface this by admitting that it has been decades since I last used an Amiga painting application. I know, I know. How can I look at myself in the mirror? My only excuse is that I was busy raising a family and moving continents…

My main painting applications on the Amiga were Deluxe Paint III and IV, along with OpalPaint on my dad’s A4000 when he was not using it for his business. I was aware of some of the other packages that were available, like DigiPaint (actually, I think we owned it, as we had a DigiView digitiser), but I do not remember using it at any point. I missed out on many of the other

Jim Sachs' amazing work adorns the packaging. What a treat!!

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packages that were out on the platform. Personal Paint, TVPaint and Brilliance are three standouts that people commonly cite as some of the best amongst the procession of graphics software for the Amiga. I have them now though, and what will follow will be a joyous voyage of discovery through art. And so we come to the ﬁrst package I want to explore: Brilliance. I remember seeing that cover artwork by Jim Sachs and being totally bowled over. It was, and still is, a prime example of extreme talent using the Amiga. When looking into Brilliance’s history on the Amiga Hardware Database website, I discovered that the originators of Brilliance were Digital Creations, the same company who brought the DCTV to market, a unique product that acted as both a digitiser and a means to view 24bit images and animations on a stock OCS Amiga. They had a close working relationship with Progressive Image Technology, who made their hardware products, while Digital Creations covered the software side. Eventually the companies merged, along with a breakaway group from NewTek, to form Play Inc. An interesting story unto itself. Among those Digital Creations developers credited with creating this wonderful program are: Anthony Pabon, Stephen

Three disks away from painting nirvana.

White, David Porter, Bill Barton, Randy Jongens, John Botteri and Troy Gillette are the software developers credited for creating this wonderful program.

Image courtesy of Alexander Svensson

Adobe! Take notice. This is how you make a manual.

I spent the ﬁrst few hours doing the initial set of tutorials, and that was enough to get me up and running. This was a gentle introduction to the painting environment, with small steps covering each function or tool. This manual, combined with some time playing with each tool, was the best way for me to learn and for the knowledge to stick. Very well done to the manual authors, Bob Eller, Jim Meyer and Dennis Hayes! The user interface reminds me somewhat of the Quantel Paintbox I used to use. The Paintbox was a dedicated computer-based paint system that revolutionised the television, advertising and music video industries in the 80s. Having the tools at the bottom of the screen makes sense, and oﬀers a somewhat more natural-feeling approach compared to a mix of vertical tools and menus.

Incredible technology, but not quite portable.

The user experience has clearly been thought about quite deeply - using the right mouse button to expand a tool to a second menu that pops up below the main one is just brilliant, and similar to, but not quite the same as Paintbox, which replaced the current panel with the new one. The idea in both cases is to have focus on the tool you are using, along with the options relevant only to that tool, and I really appreciate this way of keeping a clear space in your mind to think about only what you are doing at that time. There are keyboard shortcuts associated with most, if not all of these mouse-driven actions of course, which speeds up your workﬂow immensely. For example, pressing the space bar toggles the panel interface on and oﬀ, allowing you to paint with a full screen. Truly a great example of an innovative user interface. I ran Brilliance through emulation, as my A1200 is not back from its recap yet. I also gave it a try on my fake A4000 with P96 drivers. It all played nicely, until I wanted resolutions that were outside the original Amiga’s video mode boundaries, at which point it

The Brilliance toolbar is eﬃcient, but it can get quite large!

60-odd pixels high, and your window into Brilliance's power.

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With the software installed and ready to go, I needed to learn how to use it. It can never be overstated how much a manual will affect the learning experience and joy of using software for the first time. The writing style, the layout of the text, how the manual is bound, even the type of paper used. Dare I say... the smell of the manual? It all creates an environment and experience that will be pleasing to the user and stay with them, right along the learning curve. I can think back to the pain of having to read the After Effects user manual compared to the ecstasy of perusing the 3D Studio Max manuals. OK, I may be showing a side of me here that my wife and kids like to mock, but suffice to say the Brilliance manual is just…just…brilliant!!

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COMMU NI ARTICL TY E SUBMI SSION

Da Vinci would be proud.

proceeded to crash the entire machine, with that glorious lack of warning that we are all accustomed to on the Amiga. So, what to create for this article? I am by no means a great illustrator. Pixel art is one of my loves, but certainly not one of my skills. No laughing in the back there! It has been some time since I have used and played around with pixel art style paint packages and painting indexed colour images. The modern paint world has spoiled us somewhat! So I had to get my head around this older way of working, and realise that a lot of modern tools and workflows simply did not exist back then. The result was a lot of repeated work and lessons being learnt. First Steps For my first piece, I thought I would bring together a graphic typographic style with one of my favourite games, Hitman. First step was to create the logo - a classic example of postmodern grotesque typography and Bauhaus geometry. The program dealt with vector-based fonts with ease, which is a godsend, as I was having nightmares about having to recreate large versions of the bitmap fonts. Very quickly, I was using the stencil tool to mask out parts of the image that I did not want to disturb with new work. When you don’t have layers (AAAARRRRGGHHH), it becomes very Use It Or Lose It! Gareth is a firm believer in firing up some of the Amiga's best creative software and really putting it to good use. This is why he has provided the actual files used in this issue's Brilliance article so that AA readers can also have a try! Download Gareth's test files for reference at: www.amiga-addict.com/creative02 Thanks for a great article Gareth!

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I wonder if we should get a demake of this for the Amiga... Random exploration is encouraged in this software.

valuable. Actually, it reminds me when Photoshop did not have layers, and you had to temporarily float part of the image to work on it, then flatten it back down. The stencil tool has two modes that were particularly useful: masking out based on colour, or by just painting a mask. With just these two simple tools, I was able to do so much! It really does highlight how simplicity and limitation gives one room to push one's skills. Part Deux For my second piece, I thought I would do some freestyle sketching. When using the pen tool, I really liked the stipple feel it gave on screen. It felt like it was a sketching tool and it gave me free licence to mess about. I ended up finding myself doing a landscape. This is where the gradient tool would be fun to use. Back to the manual... The tutorial ran me through the basics. The various fill modes were quite impressive, and to be honest, I don’t think Photoshop can do fills like this, even today. I was initially expecting gloriously smooth gradients, but I had forgotten I was working with 256 colours - at some point, I would hit a limit to the colours available to me. With that piece of old knowledge relearnt, I made sure to keep to around three to six shades per colour. Having control over the dithering really helps define the look you are going for. Once I had the gradients in place, I was in the groove and not ready to stop experimenting. There are different paint modes available to a lot of the tools, and this was my cue to jump in and play some more. Now, I can’t remember if DPaint had such paint modes (Ed. - "Some of them, yes!"), but having them in Brilliance really allows you to get the look you want a lot more easily. I messed around with darken, lighten, smooth and smear,

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and had a lot of fun doing it! Smear in particular was quite powerful, feeling like the liquify tool in Affinity Photo. The pixels just glide across the screen smoothly, and I could direct them with an almost tactile level of interactivity. Final Thoughts... Going back to index-based colour palettes did have the side benefit of being able to tweak your palette easily at any point, having it affect your artwork immediately. I mean, you can do this in modern programs, but you tend to have to massage bands or groups of colour at the same time to get the same effect. I still have not gone back to my old baby DPaint, which is coming up in another article, and I will then be able to compare the two and see how both can benefit my creation process. Animation tools have not even been touched yet - I am very excited to get down and dirty with some old school 2D pixel animation. And of course, I have completely neglected True Brilliance, the part of the package which was targeted at true 15 and 24-bit colour images. Well... I opened it up, but its HAM mode delights have escaped me for now. I will do an article later in the year just focusing on this aspect of Brilliance, as I want to see how well it works with photos and photo manipulation. For pure pixel-based editing, I felt very comfortable using Brilliance, even after so many years away from such tools. I actually enjoyed it immensely. When they first came out, these graphical programs were cutting edge, but as 24-bit paint programs became the norm, I certainly forgot about tools like these. I don’t think I am alone in that, and it is a shame we did. What we now call 2D pixel art programs allow for the creation of a certain style of artwork easily... dare I say, a lot more easily than modern programs? This is definitely going into my tool chest for day-to-day work.

by Ravi Abbott

formed with Jonathan Ellis. Psyclapse (which had never really advanced much further than a concept in the ﬁrst place) also had a place in the new organisation, becoming a new sub-brand for some early releases, although it would eventually be retired and all games released under the Psygnosis name from then on.

Towards the end of their reign, Imagine had planned a series of six “megagames” as a way to take the company and their content to the next level. They were intended to be bigger and better (and more expensive) than a standard game of the time, even needing additional bundled hardware to run. The most well-known of these were Bandersnatch (recently of TV’s Black Mirror fame) and Psyclapse. After their demise, most of Imagine was bought out by the other big ﬁsh in the UK pond, Ocean, but the rights to these games remained with their respective copyright holders. Ex-Imagine crew Ian Hetherington and David Lawson set up a new company called “Finchspeed”, and used what remained of Bandersnatch to create Brataccas. This became Psygnosis’ ﬁrst release - Finchspeed itself also folded and the new company was

We have talked in previous issues about key developers in the Amiga world that have gone on to huge success on other platforms. But without the support of cornerstone publishers like Psygnosis, they may never have grown to the heights of fame and quality required to stand out from the crowd, both in the past and in the modern day games industry. DMA Design now dominates the world of gaming as Rockstar. Reﬂections (now Ubisoft Reﬂections) have created

The opening screen from the last in the revered series.

Psygnosis intros featured high-end design and breathtaking visuals.

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stunning titles, from Driver to the Watchdogs series. Raising Hell (later Bizarre Creations) were responsible for Geometry Wars and the Project Gotham Racing series. All these developers have one thing in common - they all got their starts under the publishing umbrella that was Psygnosis. Each of these companies could do with their own feature in AA (we already covered DMA in Issue 2), and certainly we will take a look at Reﬂections in the future. Psygnosis was probably most famous as a publisher, but they also had some very talented in-house developers working on ground-breaking technology, as well as games like Bill’s Tomato Game that were built completely by Psygnosis themselves. But their reputation as a “publisher to be associated with” preceded them, and small developers would generally approach them with an idea, often sending in a ﬂoppy disk of their creation, like a band sending in a demo tape, all their hopes riding on their potential hit record being listened to by the big label. Psygnosis’ talent was in spotting the quality in these games, giving them a shine and a polish using their own internal people, presenting them in a sexy package and building up as much hype as possible around the titles. It was the same model they adopted as Imagine years earlier, but this being the time of the 16/32-bit platforms - it all felt cooler and edgier. Some of the most iconic cover art of the era was attached to the Psygnosis brand. Hiring legendary artist Roger Dean to create their box art - responsible for the sleeve art of bands such as Yes and Asia gave their games the feel of a rock album. Dystopian alien worlds and strange creatures adorned the covers,

Drafts of early games assets for Bill's Tomato Game.

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Just suppose that Imagine Software did not collapse. If they were sensible with their money, cut back on the flash sports cars and the excess... they could have dominated the 16-bit platforms. Alas, as we know, that did not happen, and so another huge software house came tumbling down to the sound of bailiffs knocking at the door. Dusting themselves off after the collapse, a group of former staffers got together and pledged to create a brand new company from the ashes of what had gone before. Little did they know at the time, but their new endeavour would become one of the most prolific developers in the country, not only for the Amiga, Atari and PC, but later the astonishingly successful Sony PlayStation. Embracing research and development, and pushing software design and gaming technology into the future with style, the mighty Psygnosis was ready to take flight and earn their wings.

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framed by the company’s signature jet black border and the shining silver Psygnosis logo, which was also Dean’s handiwork. The piercing eyes of the Psygnosis owl staring out at you really caught the buyer’s attention, especially with those stunning intro screens. This owl was cool, and certainly not the BBC Micro Live owl we were used to seeing at the time. This owl would peck him to death and eat all of his food! The owl was picked as a symbol of knowledge, but it was the metallic colour scheme of silver and purple that really caught the eye. I always wondered if the colours are linked to the medical term "cyanosis" the colour of purple and ashen grey that people turn when they lack oxygen, but this has never been conﬁrmed for me. Throughout the company's life, there would be a few variations on the logo, but the owl motif was there in one form or another, always watching.

How did you start work at Psygnosis? I started going to a computer club, and I met a friend there who ended up getting a job at Psygnosis as one of the ﬁrst testers. I'd done the music for Last Ninja 2 and a couple of other games through someone else at the same computer

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The name Psygnosis always meant you were going to be in for an audio visual treat - a step above the average Amiga game on the scene at the time - from the moment you laid your eyes on the cover to the last second of gameplay. Walking into your average 90s video game store, the Psygnosis games acted like a beacon to the Amiga shelves, allowing faithful fans to make a beeline to those cool dark boxes with their evocative box art. Some of the greatest Amiga titles were released under the brand name, games like Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Walker, Benefactor, Hired Guns and Wiz ‘n’ Liz, but they also released on many other formats, such as the Mega Drive, Atari ST and SNES. They really showed Amiga could be a strong development platform, and other systems could beneﬁt from the drip-down. The reason Psygnosis had so much reach on other systems was in their approach to licensing. Initially focussed on Europe and the USA, they soon decided to expand

further with the help of Ian Grieve. Getting a licensing agent and doing deals with companies like Konami and Fujitsu, they reached corners of the world others couldn't. Through these deals, releases like Super Shadow of the Beast on the SNES were possible, which not only boosted the worldwide reputation of the Psygnosis brand, but also made it “the place to be” for developers. Lemmings, of course, ended up being ported to a frankly ridiculous number of systems, and it was through this proliferation of the little dudes with the green hair that Psygnosis got their hands on a lot more systems than just the Amiga. They started developing for the FM Towns from Fujitsu in 1992, and due to the powerful sound capabilities of the system, they soon realised they really needed a sound department. Mike Clarke worked with that new sound department and hated the smelly carpets. We decided to grab him for an exclusive chat.

club, so I was writing a lot of Amiga music at the time. My Psygnosis friend was good enough to suggest me to provide the music for Bill's Tomato Game when it got signed. Bill [Pullan] liked the demo tunes I did for him, so I got that job and got to know some of the other people at Psygnosis. After I'd ﬁnished college, I sent a letter to the producer of Bill's Tomato Game asking for a full-time job. I was taken on as a game evaluator, but my plan was just to have any job, so that I could be right there in the oﬃce ready to do audio for any new games.

expanded a lot very quickly and everything got rather more chaotic.

What were the facilities like at Psygnosis?

Psygnosis didn't have an audio department. There was just Phil Morris, who was audio manager. When I turned up, I took it upon myself to do all of the audio work that needed doing, and I worked in some capacity on almost every game we released during that period. As the company was pretty small, there was always something that needed doing somewhere. I did a lot of audio, but also a load of testing, some programming, design, even a bit of art.

The offices were nice and had a great atmosphere. Ian and Jonathan, the directors, had their own room, and then there were separate rooms or partitions for Marketing, Producers, Development, and Testing. There were probably around 40 people at that point, and everyone knew each other. There were Amigas of all shapes and sizes everywhere, as we were predominantly an Amiga developer. Every artist had one, every producer had one, every tester had one. Over time, the artists also got a Silicon Graphics machine with Softimage for rendering. There weren't actually many programmers - and they were mostly doing R&D rather than specific games. I can't speak for the early days of the company, but by the time I joined, it was in a very good financial position, so if you needed anything in particular, you'd get it. On my first day, I got my own desk, a phone, and a brand new Amiga 600 and monitor. That first year was amazing, but towards the end of the Amiga era, we

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Our warehouse was just over the other side of the car park. It was an impressive sight, seeing all those thousands of Amiga game boxes stacked to the ceiling! We could only take something from there if we needed it for work though, and had to get a signed requisition form. You worked in the audio department. How big was it, and what was the equipment like?

There was no equipment - it was just me, my Amiga 600 and Protracker, although Phil sorted out external contractors for things I couldn't do (like Mega Drive music). Eventually, after nine months or so, I got put onto audio full-time and moved over into the depressing satellite office, initially to work on Microcosm on the FM Towns, but still continuing to do all of the Amiga stuff (and later SNES and Mega-CD). The rooms were terrible. Mine was small and rectangular with a very high ceiling and hard flat walls: the absolute worst

environment for doing audio. That's when things were starting to get squeezed. They wouldn't even get me my own Amiga 1200! I had to take one from the test department and let them know that they wouldn't be getting it back. Even when Tim Wright got hired and we started doing CD audio, they wouldn't buy us any equipment. We had no choice but to bring in our own equipment from home, which all ended up getting stolen when there was a break-in.

Almost every Amiga game that we released was the result of a sole programmer coming to us with their game demo. We didn't really make complete Amiga games in-house as such. We would provide art, audio, design, testing etc. for whichever games we took on where they needed it, which is why we didn't have many programmers working on Amiga stuff. Psygnosis was a very technology-oriented company, and as the Amiga was the best consumer technology available at the time, we mostly did Amiga stuff. Everyone had a lot of love for the Amiga, but our managing director was always looking five years ahead, so there was always a programmer playing with some weird new bit of pre-release hardware. It was that mentality that got us doing CD games so early, and made us such an attractive proposition for Sony. What was your favourite project to work on at Psygnosis and why? I can't really think of anything in particular, because every project was so different. On some, I worked with great people; on others, I would be challenged by having to do something wildly different than anything I'd ever done before. Every one of them has their own unique little thing that stood out. One forced me to learn to program properly. Another had me designing multiplayer levels. One had me on the pitch in a football stadium recording the crowd.

How committed were Psygnosis to the CD32, and how much work was needed to get Microcosm streaming from CD and working well? I'd have to say that by the time the CD32 came around, nobody was really that bothered. It was too little, too late. We'd already been bought by Sony at that point, and had been doing CD games on the FM Towns and Mega-CD for ages. It was just another platform that we had to support. It felt to me like more of a necessity to support it, rather than a choice. Flink was by far the best thing we released, but I don't know how that came to be a CD32 game (Ed. - "See CD32 Corner in Issue 3 to find out!"). I was involved right at the beginning, when the developers were flown over to our office. I went into the office on a Saturday to meet them, and a bunch of us brainstormed design ideas about what their game was going to be. I was honestly blown away when I saw Flink a year or so later. It's a real work of art. What was the Research and Development like at Psygnosis? It was an integral part of the company. The artists were constantly pushing the boundaries, researching animation and rendering techniques that seemingly had nothing to do with games at the time. For example, Jim Bowers once recreated the opening to the Terminator movie in Cinema 4D on the Amiga. The programmers were creating tools, seeing how far we could go, investigating new hardware. The CDTV Planetside demo was the result of a fractal generator written by one such programmer. It was this strong technology mindset that led to proper investment into the likes of Traveller's Tales and DMA Design, who went on to achieve greatness. It also led to things like me immediately being given a Mega Drive and its hardware

Mike in the Psygnosis studio in Liverpool.

reference manual, no questions asked, because I told a producer, "I want to write a music driver for the Mega Drive". It was actually way over my head, because it was way too complicated, and that gave me a whole new appreciation for the brilliant design of the Amiga hardware. The in-house R&D team were called ATG, which stood for Advanced Technology Group - but they were jokingly referred to as "Another Ten Grand", in reference to their perceived salaries. They didn't make games, and rarely created anything that would be seen publicly, so it would be easy to think that they were just a money pit. But without them, there would have been no Sony buyout, no Wipeout, no mainstream PlayStation adoption. I'm pretty sure that there wouldn’t have been any impressive rendered intros, and no diversiﬁcation into other platforms, which would have left us clinging onto the Amiga as its ﬂame burned out. What Psygnosis titles in the Amiga period went unreleased? I'm sure there were loads more on the Amiga than I can think of. A producer would be able to give a better answer as there would have probably been games that I never knew existed. I remember Operation G2, Creepers, Hardcore, Superhero, Indigo, Lemmings 3D, and Magician's Castle. There was something known as Bipper that I found graphics for on some old development disks, but I don't know what the game was.

The disks that Mike Clarke rescued for the Eternal Psygnosis project. This reminds us of the last time we opened Ravi's desk drawer here at AA Towers!

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Was there a speciﬁc dedicated Amiga department or did you guys work on everything?

Others had me meeting childhood legends of the 8-bit era. Some were technically challenging, some were creatively challenging. It was all good.

Having a great audio team with people like Tim Wright and Mike Clarke really helped get titles released at a high standard. Another area which Psygnosis expanded in was its in-house game developers. With so much work done with freelancers and third-party developers, they needed some core stability and the in-house crew provided that. We chatted to Bill Pullan about his time at Psygnosis, and the epic puzzle title Bill’s Tomato Game.

always referred to as “Bill’s Tomato Game”. When marketing told me they wanted to actually release it using that name, I was horriﬁed, and still cringe when anyone mentions it. I always felt it labelled me as egotistical! How common were in-house games at Psygnosis?

How did you start working with Psygnosis?

AMIGA INSIGHT

Back in 1990, I was working at Vektor Grafix in Leeds finishing off Fighter Bomber, when a friend of mine, Mike Chilton (who was working on Barbarian 2 for Psygnosis), suggested I go freelance. He offered to introduce me to Ian Hetherington. I had a few demos I’d been working on at home, so when Ian visited Mike at his home for an update on Barbarian 2, I called in to speak to him. It was quite surreal actually - Mike worked in his bedroom, so the three of us sat on his bed, staring at a small 14” TV, talking about 68000 programming. Ian was a programmer too, so it was good talking to him and explaining how I created my demos. He seemed suitably impressed, and invited me down to Liverpool the following week to talk business. When I went to the Psygnosis offices for the first time, there were probably only a dozen people there - it was quite a small company back then. Ian had been writing a game called Aquaventura on his Mac, but was struggling to find time to finish it, and he suggested I take on the project. I accepted. This was Ian’s baby, so there were problems during development, mainly because my ideas were often different to his. The game’s progress meandered along, and was released a year later to a mediocre reception.

I think they only had one in-house game in development at the time, Microcosm perhaps? I would bump into other freelancers on my monthly visits to the offices (Martyn Chudley, Alaric Binney, Danny Gallagher, Paul Frewin… who I’m actually working with at the moment finishing off Dirt 5). The in-house team was mostly artists (Jeff Bramfitt, Neil Thompson, Jim Bowers, Garvan Corbett). How much support did you get from Psygnosis and what was the team like? They provided an artist - Lee Carus - and he was great, his art style was perfect for the game. I would speak to him on my monthly visits to discuss ideas, and he came up with a lot of the visual ideas.

How did Bill's Tomato Game come about? After Aquaventura, I spent a month playing around with a few game ideas, one of which was a game inspired by Lemmings. Rather than controlling the main character, you would alter its progress using various tools. I created a simple demo, black background, a simple red sphere for the tomato and a few basic tools. But the key thing was the splat animation, which I created myself in Deluxe Paint. I’m no artist, so it was a bit rough! I also sampled myself blowing a raspberry for the sound eﬀect. When I took the demo to the Psygnosis oﬃces, it gathered quite a crowd - they seemed to love the humour of the failed attempts. It was signed on the day and I started development. The game never really had a proper title, it was

Sony taking on Psygnosis employees.

A Psygnosis reunion curry with Mike Clarke, Tim Wright, Peter Batcher, David Pleasance (Commodore UK) and Steve Crietzman.

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The music and sound eﬀects were provided by Mike Clarke who worked at home at the time. It was there that he created that amazing title tune. What was the deal with including a sealed sachet of Heinz Tomato Ketchup? To be perfectly honest with you, I have no idea. My guess is that they had a budget and wanted some cute way to spend it. It was funny at the time. There was a bookmark in the box too. In the intro, the truck passes through the city. Are the people we see that meant to be the developers testing it? I had to re-watch the intro on YouTube to remind me, but I think Lee was just messing around and added three characters to one of the windows above the bakery. I recognise them immediately, even after all these years. It’s Garvan Corbett (artist), Chris Wylie (programmer) and John White (producer).... they were probably playing Microcosm [laughs]. Are there any features you would have loved to add to Bill's Tomato Game? During development, probably not. I was

Assets for the intro sequence animations.

basically given free rein to do whatever I wanted, so most of my ideas were actually implemented. In hindsight though, I would have wanted more tools to play with, which would’ve probably made testing the game much more difficult. I was never happy with the level select mini-game, it was cumbersome and frustrating. If I could change one thing, it would be that… What do you think about The Incredible Machine coming out a year later, and other similar modern puzzle titles like Fantastic Contraption? The Incredible Machine was developed in America, so I doubt Bill’s Tomato Game had any influence on its creator. As for the other similar games: I think they’re great, and I still love that type of game. I can’t claim any credit for them, but it’s nice to know Bill’s Tomato Game was the first of its type. The owl hoots one last time When Psygnosis left the Amiga, it was a tragedy - many of its developers were on the edge of breaking through to the big time. They had always proven themselves to push software and create technology, especially as Research and Development

was such a key aspect to the company. They were always looking for ways to push a system to its limits, and this is why I feel Sony wanted to purchase them so badly. From Shadow of the Beast’s visuals universally dropping jaws, to the early implementation of CD streaming in Microcosm on the CD32, they always pushed the Amiga to the next level. Some of the most promising early developments like the Planetside demo on the Amiga CDTV showed if Commodore had not collapsed, they really could have squeezed lots of extra life out of the system. Through their work on early CD games, streaming video and audio was developed within Psygnosis internally, and this essential work would go on to be implemented in many later games. While others like Sensible Software fell to the wayside when faced with the latest technology, Psygnosis embraced it. With Sony’s buyout of the studio in 1993, PlayStation users got the beneﬁt of the big owl’s knowledge, experience and technology, enjoying many stunning titles like the ground-breaking Wipeout, G-Police and Destruction Derby. Years of talent and skills from Psygnosis stayed at Sony’s Studio Liverpool, but unfortunately, this great studio ended up being closed in August 2012.

LEFT: Jonathan Ellis (Psygnosis Founder) with Martin Edmondson of Reﬂections. RIGHT: Liz Garnell, Ian Hetherington (Psygnosis Founder) and Dawn Hickman (Director of Operations).

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Creating the menu for Bills Tomato Game.

Psygnosis dead...long live Psygnosis!

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Psygnosis' unreleased Star Wars game.

These days, the whole retro scene is about preservation. Before Sony ate up Psygnosis, Mike Clarke grabbed as much as he could: disks from the office, hard drives and machines, and using this content he started an endeavour called the “Eternal Psygnosis” project - aimed at preserving the legacy of Psygnosis and sharing data and material that would never have seen the light of day before. Some of the disks had even fallen behind cupboards - from what he told me, “They were scattered everywhere”. Thank god he had the presence of mind to do this, because now they are proving to be a fantastic resource for the gaming community and fans of the company alike, delivering some hidden gems long forgotten about. Mike and Steve Crietzman (former project lead) have been trawling through this archive using some of the fantastic preservation hardware available. Time is of the essence, of course, as bit rot and other physical degradation of storage media threatens to destroy this resource forever - it's so important that all of these items are captured in their full state. The hardware being used is Kryoflux, a USB-based forensic floppy controller, which is recognised as one of the best methods to access this kind of data, as it performs low level reads on disks to extract what’s still there. They have had some success too. This is very much needed as a lot of disks are not even in Amiga or IBM PC mode, but FM Towns format! Kyroflux requires some modification to read this format, but it’s an essential tool in the world of software preservation. Not only that, but hard drive recovery is an expensive endeavour costing around £500 a time! You may ask, “What's the point in trawling through all these old disks?” Well, some true treasures have been discovered. Mike shared some of the highlights of what's already been found: Unreleased Star Wars Title

ABOVE: Hired Guns was a unique sci-ﬁ RPG. BELOW: Magical mayhem with Wiz 'N' Liz.

A full visual concept demo for a high quality Star Wars title has been found and lovingly put together by Steve: This game was under development at Psygnosis during 1991-92. A concept demo was put together and played on a CDTV for the Winter CES show in 1991. I have been able to deduce this from the fact that one of the disks already imaged is entitled “Winter CES 1991” (or something similar), and contains a number of script files; these script files call the “PlayPsy” program, with arguments that reference CD0: and files which share the same extensions (.PSY) found on the Lemmings CDTV disc, used to play animations on that machine. I have also found an article by Richard Browne online, which very briefly mentions the Star Wars game and the winter CES show (this was the ONLY reference I could find to the game anywhere at all!) The animated sequences were done by Jim Bowers and Neil Thompson (possibly others),

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using Sculpt4D and DPaint on Amigas, before transitioning to Softimage on Silicon Graphics Indigo workstations. DPaint for the Mac! But wait a minute? Psygnosis doing applications?

Richard Browne: "[This was] in-house only ... I can't recall how in-depth it was, but the new Amiga came out with a full palette [AGA] so it was never needed." Neil Thompson: "We wanted a DPaint that we could use with an expanded palette to create texture maps, now that

Simon Moore: "Vaguely, Dave Worrall was really into getting us to make graphics tools on the Mac. Myself and Andy Toone were making a movie editor, then DPaint - neither ended up as usable. Dave himself wrote a 3D modelling tool like Softimage, don't think it ever got used though. [...] This was just one of my ﬁrst jobs at Psygnosis, so the idea would be more from my manager Dave Worrall. I think he was keen to develop a suite of tools on Mac for making a new kind of CD-ROM-based game. So we were trying to make a video editor as well as 2D art tools. Later, he also developed a 3D modelling tool on Mac. I don't think they got much use in games though, perhaps just one was modiﬁed by Andy Toone to help make one of the levels for our game Microcosm."

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It turns out many internal applications were developed at Psygnosis for the inhouse team to use. Deluxe Paint for the Mac was abandoned, but some ﬁles still remain in the archive. This was probably never intended for public release. Eternal Psygnosis asked some old employees about the project:

we'd progressed to the SGI machines and Softimage. Ultimately [because of the introduction of AGA Amigas with a palette of 16.7m], we just stuck with DPaint and early commercial texture discs."

This project is about more than just searching through the old content, but connecting fans with old employees and also meeting up for a drink together and a good chin wag! Many former employees are still working in the industry and creating great new things, but also looking back at their past with fond memories. Mike Clarke is heading up the project and previously was helped by Steve Crietzman, organiser of the Amiga 30th Anniversary event in Peterborough. Any support for the project would be greatly appreciated by Mike and the community at large, and if you want to get involved with archiving the history of this iconic company, check out their community at: www.facebook.com/EternalPsygnosis

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• Publisher: Psygnosis • Amiga platforms: Amiga CD32 • Release year: 1993

- Andrew Siddall considers if this was the future of the Amiga CD32

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Microcosm is an Afterburner-style shoot’em-up, overlaid on background video streamed directly from the CD during play. The end eﬀect is very impressive, although it does give the impression the machine is doing rather more than it actually is! What amazed me more though, was that the music heard during gameplay was generated by the Paula chip. It wasn’t even from a CD - but it was just that good! The FMV intro is stunning (for the time).

“This is the one. This is the one… This is the one we’ve all been waiting for.” These were the excited words of Marcus Dyson in 1994’s Amiga Format Issue 58. He had good reason to be excited. An FMV (full motion video) intro with jaw dropping graphics and a thumping Rick Wakeman soundtrack? This was a superb showcase of what the Amiga CD32 was capable of. A score of 87% was duly awarded, although a later 1995 review in AF Issue 77 would reduce that score (I think a little unfairly) to 40%. Amiga Power awarded it 44% and CU Amiga 86%. Despite the impressive graphics, it was the poor gameplay and diﬃculty that would ultimately let it down. Owning a CD32 was out of reach for me at the time, but I did, however, have an A1200. A few months later - and many shifts down at Tesco - I bought a CD drive for my Amiga 1200, and swiftly ordered a copy of Microcosm.

Sited on the planet Bodor, the storyline of Microcosm revolves around two corporations at war: CyberTech and Axiom. You control a miniaturised submarine-style craft that has been injected into Cybertech’s President Korsby. Your mission is to defeat the numerous Axiom drones that are on their way to take control of his brain. You start said mission in an unspeciﬁed vein leading to a central base. From here, you undertake various missions throughout Korsby’s body. The mechanics of getting an entire miniature base inside a person are never addressed by the plot, but the cut-scene and music thankfully distract you from these burdensome considerations! Each mission is basically the same throughout the game: travel through a part of the body, destroy all the drones and reach the end boss without being destroyed yourself. Complete all these missions (if you can) and you are rewarded with a ﬁnal FMV sequence to end the game.

For the time, the graphics and sound were very impressive. It blew the SNES and the Mega Drive out of the water, and showed just what the Amiga could do with this new CD format. Truly amazing stuﬀ, I loved it.

Entering the central base.

Unfortunately, Microcosm would remain the only game of its type released for the CD32. But that almost wasn’t the case. Also in the pipeline was Mindscape’s MegaRace driving game. This had the same “gameplay overlaid on video” construction. Previewed in CD32 Gamer Issue 4, it unfortunately never made it to the CD32. It was instead released on DOS, SegaCD and 3DO. Sadly, Microcosm wasn’t to be the future of the CD32. But as MegaRace showed on other platforms, it really could have, even should have been. Just sort that gameplay out…

The original review of the game in AF58.

GRAPHICS 90% Visually just stunning.

SOUND 90% Thumping soundtrack, poor eﬀects.

GRAB FACTOR 50% Wow factor wears oﬀ quickly.

PLAYABILITY 50% Average at best. Too diﬃcult.

VERDICT

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

70%

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AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

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• Publisher: Krisalis • Amiga platforms: OCS / ECS • Release year: 1993

by James Walker Those of you who saw the advert last issue, and the one splashed across the centre of this magazine, will know that our next Antstream tournament will feature Arabian Nights, a classic puzzle platforming game I have owned and loved with all my Amiga-shaped heart... ever since getting it on release back in 1993. Having loved the Tales from the Arabian Nights book as a young boy, I couldn’t believe my luck when a game was released under the same name. After a sustained pestering campaign aimed at my parents, an excited James ﬁnally got a copy as a birthday present. Unfortunately, the game bears little resemblance to the book... but it makes amends by being blooming fabulous! The main character, Sinbad Junior (who, incidentally, is rather reminiscent of his Krisalis cousin, Soccer Kid), is clearly not high up the food chain when it comes to palace staﬀ - in fact, he’s a lowly Chief Gardener’s Assistant Helper 2nd Class! You soon realise why he’s not running the show, as he spends a good chunk of his time gazing longingly at Princess Leila, instead of getting on with his work. Not a sign of someone whose career is destined for great things...

her balcony! To add insult to injury, this culminates in our protagonist being arrested - not for being a Peeping Tom, but because he’s suspected of being behind the demon attack and the disappearance of Leila. What a bummer! This introduction is illustrated in a beautifully drawn animation that I watched many times over as a kid (partly because it’s very good... but also because it’s unskippable). The reason for Sinbad Junior’s unfortunate incarceration (as provided in the manual) is that he was found in place of the kidnapped royal, after losing a brief tussle with the escaping monster’s leg on the Princess’ balcony. Sinbad’s hopes of rescuing the object of his (potentially problematic) desire unfortunately came crashing down to earth - literally - when the creature kicked him oﬀ as it got away with Leila. Quite the failure!

As if unrequited love wasn’t enough of a downer for our plucky hero - one day, while he’s hard at work/standing in the garden perving on the princess, a huge demon swoops down and grabs her from

As we take control, we find ourselves locked in the Caliph’s dungeon. This is where I have to criticise the regime's choice of guards. I am assuming they don’t have a particularly rigorous entrance exam... not only do they imprison people on some pretty shaky evidence, but the key to your cell is “hidden” in a chest on the floor next to your bed. You don’t have to be Harry Houdini to escape from this place! That said, the first level is a great fun sequence of areas and rooms, which make for a continual - but fair - challenge to ease you in. There are also loads of hidden areas to find across the various screens, and this really sets the standard for the rest of the game.

The 3 doors are iced over, if only there were some blow torches hidden around this level...

This section is reminiscent of (but thankfully easier than) the snake level in Battletoads.

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

You start the game with four lives by default, with three energy (health) points, but both can be increased to five in the options, to temper the difficulty. I’d say it’s worth doing, at least on your first few goes at the game. During the game, the energy bar can also be extended... if you’re able to find the wellhidden amulets on certain levels. There are also chests to be found, with extra energy to refill a few bars. These are essential, as your health doesn’t replenish on level completion. The control scheme caters for two buttons, which is always great to see; the standard fire button swipes your sword, or enters a door (if combined with down), and the 2nd button is “Select”, which will read tutorial messages and the like, or open the inventory screen (space bar if you’re rocking a one-button wonder!). Arabian Nights features the classic up-tojump, which I am always happy with as a joystick user, but that’s probably going to be a bit disappointing for those gamepad users who aren’t able to reconfigure! Overall, the movement and platforming is great, although the character does suffer from a bit of that excess momentum that so many platformers of the time thought was good game design. Thankfully it’s very mild, you can get used to it quickly and it won’t be much of a frustration. Once you’re out of the dungeons, you have some great levels ahead of you. I personally found the second level (The Forest) one of the slightly weaker ones, but its still got bags of charm and character in its enemies and backgrounds, along with a load more secret areas to find. There are a couple of side-scrolling shooter levels dropped in, breaking up the platforming action. The legendary flying carpet, knitted by the exploding granny (you’ll understand after Level 2!), comes into play. The change of pace is welcome - showing the world at a much smaller scale looks great, especially with a vibrant copper sky in the background. I wasn’t so keen on the bullet sponge enemies however - I would have preferred if everything was a little easier to kill. But the madness of the

The Book of the Game… kind of My fascination with Arabian Nights started before I even had an Amiga, when a wonderfully illustrated 1920s (I believe?) copy of the classic book of the same name was handed down to me by an elderly relative. References from TV shows, movies and other pop culture meant I was aware of some stories going in, such as Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. However, it wasn’t until I read the ancient book that I realised those stories and many others were contained within another grander establishing story.

him a wondrous story each night and promises another tomorrow. Not wanting to miss out on these amazing tales, the sultan stays her execution each time. After 1001 nights and 1001 stories, each as wonderful as the last, he has fallen in love with her and decides he hasn't the heart to kill her after all. So, a happy ending... if you don’t think too hard about the hundreds of young women that were murdered beforehand!

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There is some variation depending on the version of the book, but the rather dark premise of the collection centres around a powerful sultan who has discovered his wife has been indulging in some… ahem... extra-marital enjoyment. The excessive punishment he hands out for this is death. After vowing to never trust another woman again - but not wanting to be alone - he marries a new wife every day... only to have his poor new bride put to death the following morning. After this has gone on for some time, a young lady - the daughter of the Prime Minister/Vizier no less - has a plan to stop this madness, and volunteers to be his next wife. She tells

flying sheep, ballooning archers and other oddball enemies is nothing short of wonderful! After The Forest, you’ll visit a leaky galleon. It has many more doors than one might expect, maybe the pirates operate a cruise line in the off-season? The main objective is to locate the ship’s cook - a giant crab and supply him with five fish. This isn’t made easy... they are robustly defended by grumpy ghostly octopuses and more spikes than a porcupine! It’s a tricky but satisfying level to complete. There is also, of course, the obligatory underwater level. Fortunately, seeing as his dad was a highly accomplished sailor, Sinbad Junior swims very well beneath the waves. And thanks to more lovely continuity, and the last of the five fish discovered in the galleon level, he’s able to stay underwater without having to surface for air at all! So no pesky running-out-of-air mechanics, removing one of my main frustrations of similar levels in other games. The movement through the water is slightly floaty as you fight your own buoyancy, but that’s soon sorted when you discover the diving boots. No weapons on this level - just stay out of the way of the enemies. Perfect simplicity. But just as Sinbad is really starting to chill out on this relaxing sedate level, the boss fight arrives! This was my least favourite of them all. There are a multitude of ways to take damage which, rather bizarrely, includes falling into the water!. This is annoyingly stupid really, when you’ve literally arrived at this point by

swimming through an entire level of the stuff, and comes off like lazy boss design. There are also bubbles floating up from the floor that can pick you up, if you’re not careful, and slam you into the spiked ceiling. It’s fiendishly difficult, but over mercifully quickly, as the boss doesn’t require too many hits. Most of the platforming and level designs are pretty tricky, but generally very fair. There are only a few times where you have to use a little bit of trial and error. Thankfully there is no time limit, so generally, as long as you take things slow, you should get through OK. You can easily end up in a situation where a silly mistake means you take multiple hits from spike pits or similar hazards though. The final level is a dreaded ice level. I’m not usually a fan of the slippery, slidey nature of this style of level, so my heart sank when I first got there. Pleasingly though, it turns out it’s great fun, with some really nice map design, requiring you to search the level to find blow torches to melt three ice-covered cave entrances. It’s a hard level, make no mistake about it, but as a final level, this is as it should be. Fortunately very little of the difficulty comes from fighting the controls like some of its compatriots. Ultimately, if you manage to get past this challenging game, you will rescue the princess and she will fall in love with Sinbad Junior. It’s such a shame the events of this game happened so far in the past - if Sinbad and Leila had seen the film Speed, they’d understand that

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relationships formed under intense circumstances are doomed not to last! It has been absolutely delightful to play Arabian Nights again. It definitely holds up and, like the currency on the first level, it’s a gem (Ed. - "Really?!"). So, fire it up and try and get through it in readiness for the upcoming tournament. Jump onto our Discord to discuss and find out how everyone gets on!

Secret rooms are hidden all over this game.

GRAPHICS 93% The game looks really great and is overﬂowing with charm and humour.

SOUND 90% The sound eﬀects are good, but the fantastic music across the board is real the standout.

GRAB FACTOR 92% It's very easy to get into this game and the challenge ramps up nicely.

PLAYABILITY 91% Good controls without too much momentum, it's a pretty tough game.

91%

VERDICT

AMIGA ADDICT

• Developer: Nivrig Games • Platforms: OCS/AGA (1MB Chip RAM,KS2.04+ required) • Price: £25 boxed, digital version to follow • Released July 31st 2021

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The simple objective of each level, as your character(s) makes their way toward the source of the evil, is to clear all mutated murderous creatures from the vicinity. At that point, at least one exit will appear allowing you to travel to the next. Multiple exits allow a choice of route through the game, meaning each playthrough can be slightly diﬀerent - a welcome variation given the core gameplay loop remains pretty much the same for every level.

by James Walker With the Psygnosis logo emblazoned on the front cover of this issue, if someone had said we were reviewing a tomatobased game this month, you'd probably assume it was going to be Bill's Tomato Game. But there is a new pretender to the "Best Game about Tomatoes" crown. I loaded it up to see if this new kid on the block (or should that be vine?) has what it takes… A darkness is spreading through the garden. The once-peaceful fruit and veg inhabitants are turning into horrific monsters, and even the earth itself is becoming volatile and explosive. Fortunately, fruit-that-shouldbe-a-vegetable brother and sister duo, Turbo and Nitra Tomato, have not been affected by the growing plague. But they must escape the mutating garden, and set off on a quest to discover the source of the corruption and save their plantbased pals. You play as either Turbo or his green (so I presume younger?) sister Nitra. Or if you are lucky enough to have one of those things I’ve heard other people talk about - a friend? - you can both play simultaneously.

Each level has its own nicely drawn map.

AMIGA ADDICT

The game itself is played from a topdown viewpoint. Each area is a few screens in size, scrolling to follow your tomato as they race around picking up bombs... sorry, I mean sprouting explosive pods... and hurling them at the numerous fast-moving veggie villains. To add tension, the pods are all visibly counting down, and explode when they either reach zero, or hit a character. New bombs sprout across the level continuously to replenish the supply. The controls are extremely intuitive and simple; your character picks up a bomb as soon as they touch it, and then a tap of the fire button flings it in the direction you’re facing. That main bomb-lobbing gameplay mechanic, as well as the little enemy introduction screens that appear between levels, will be instantly recognisable if you’ve played the 1987 Japanese arcade game Butasan (literally “Mr Pig”), or its western home micro version - released by US Gold under the name Psycho Pigs UXB. Indeed, that game is named as the original inspiration for Turbo Tomato, when brothers John and Adam Girvin first started work on the game back in 1993. (If those names sound familiar, it might be because John was behind Dodgy Rocks, a game reviewed in Issue 1 of Amiga Addict.)

This is how you could convince me to watch football.

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Although the main gameplay remains the same, the game has evolved beyond the limited ambitions of the original coin-op, with larger stages, more varied power ups and on-screen obstacles and hazards. It has also, of course, gone from meatbased mayhem to something that Paul McCartney would be willing to munch on. The fruit and veg Turbo and Nitra must face aren’t the harmless, chloroplastpacked innocents of the world as we know it. They’ve been mutated into monstrous versions of their former selves, and stranger still - this is a world where even before their transformation, the produce all had arms, legs and faces (and going by the main character’s death animation - a full skeleton!). Other menaces worth avoiding are static, turret-style enemies that can usually be found on the screen edges launching projectiles; radioactive ooze spills; pools of quick sand and traffic lights that stop you in your tracks with a painful laser, should you try to go past on a red (this is clearly a world with a zero tolerance approach to traffic violations!). At the end of each of the four worlds, as is tradition, the customary boss fight takes place, with the bosses being large and challenging, and each quite different from the last, adding some much-needed variety. These fights will test both your aim and your movement as they spew out projectiles, as well as (in most cases) moving erratically around the screen to avoid your attacks. There are some fun names for your adversaries (depending on your pun tolerance, of course), with names such as Banandersnatch (a banana of course), Marrowy Kart (a marrow/vehicle hybrid) and Crusha (who is a mutated grape). There are apparently over 40 enemy

One of the many intro screens for the varied enemies.

types, which is great for visual variety, although you won’t really notice much diﬀerence between one enemy and the next (with a few exceptions), in terms of the way they play.

A successful tactic (if you’re not so worried about the leaderboard) is to play defensively during the matches, and let the other veggies blast each other and themselves into healthy ﬁbre-rich smoothie. But, in the immortal words of one Derek Trotter: "He who dares Rodney, he who dares". So get your pulpy body out from behind that hedge, and start showing these other guys who’s top of the veggie food chain! A nice little point boost will also come your way in terms of a time bonus. A countdown clock can be seen on-screen at all times, but don’t worry - in the unlikely event you do run out of time, you won’t lose anything but points. Those who seek the upper reaches of the rankings will want to try and collect the bonus letters that very occasionally drop too - these will take you to a (guess what?) bonus level, where you can collect quite a score boost against the clock. The quality of title screen, between-world story panels and the world maps are all lovely and wouldn’t be out of place in a commercial release from the 90s although that’s no great surprise given the involvement of Sensi great Stoo Cambridge and Kevin “invent” Saunders. However, I must admit I was a bit underwhelmed by the graphics ingame, where a decrease in quality makes it akin to the PD games of old, rather than the commercial releases. Having

I must admit to some frustration with this game. The main issue is that it’s incredibly easy to bounce bombs back into your own face or into your friend’s. No matter how precise you are, you are constant trying to avoid selfdetonation. You can mitigate this a bit by trying to stick to using more diagonal shots, reducing the risk of bounce-back and preserving your tomatoey mug. But this really isn’t ideal in a frenetic conflict. During two-player sessions, it's also a bit too easy to mistake your partner for an enemy than I would like. You can try your hardest to be a good team player, but it’s difficult to pull off at the best of times. Something else to bear in mind in multiplayer is if Player 2 dies, they are out until the other player also dies - there are no continues for each player, or a shared pool, so your ally just has to sit and watch until you meet the same fate they did. This just adds insult to injury if you were the one who took them out! Not ideal. There were also some issues on a few levels where the collision detection seemed slightly off, with bombs rebounding off scenery they really should have skimmed past. It seems the objects sometimes extend a little further in the game logic than they visually appear to. But that was thankfully very rare. All-in-all, I did have fun with Turbo Tomato, as did my seven-year-old son when we played together. Your mileage will vary depending on how much you think you’ll enjoy the core gameplay loop, as although admirable efforts have been made to vary the bosses and make the path through the game nonlinear, I did personally find it got somewhat repetitive over time. That being said, the

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idea of the online leaderboard is an extremely clever way to give people a reason to keep coming back to the garden! I’m not rolling out the tomato-red carpet for this one, but I had a good time and I’m sure it’ll be right up some people’s alleys.

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Getting through the whole game on a single credit is definitely achievable, and you’ll probably find you get to the final world - or even the final boss - without using a continue on your first playthrough (handy energy refills at the end of each world are a big help). But the final couple of bosses are not to be underestimated: they will definitely test your mettle. Using a continue resets your score which, if you’re of the glory-hunting leaderboard-chasing disposition, you’ll want to avoid (the game features a code system linked to an online high score table). Yes, you can beat your final boss and save the garden - but wave goodbye to being internet famous.

said that, I was pleased with some fun little details, such as the main character panting for breath for different lengths of time depending if it was a short dash or you’ve been running around like a lunatic (which you probably have). And the chunks of exploded foes that rain down after an accurate bomb-hit. Different terrain affecting your movement speed, i.e you go slow through the reeds in the pond, was another welcome addition. And when it comes to the audio, things are all in order with a catchy tune (supplied by Mark “TDK” Knight) and decent effects.

I don't eat tomatoes because of all their bones and teeth.

The boxed retail version in all its glory.

If this veggie video game is your cup of tea, you can pick up the boxed version on release from www.bitmapsoft.co.uk. A digital version of the game will follow at a later date.

GRAPHICS 70% Lots of character and a wide varirty of enemy sprites, although some aspects of the graphics are stronger than others.

SOUND 84% Good sound eﬀects and a nice catchy tune!

GRAB FACTOR 85% Controls well and multiplayer is always a fun and very welcome addition.

PLAYABILITY 70% Extremely easy to pick up and play, but if you aren't interested in scoreboards, you may ﬁnd the gameplay gets repetitive fairly quickly.

77%

VERDICT

AMIGA ADDICT

Graeme Cowie

- Paul qualiﬁes for a place on the grid with Turbo Sprint expensive - he took me to a local computer club where there was 90% piracy going on, and the remaining 10% were doing cracking and intro coding!

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When I first went to the club, the place was nearly all ST users, but at the back of the hall there was a section for Amiga users - just a long line of tables with an Amiga set up on each table. As an ST user at the time, all you would hear in this hall was the constant playback of awesome music coming from the Amiga section, as they copied their disks and passed them down the tables to test each one. I remember hearing and seeing Hybris, and thought that was the nail in the coffin for my ST. How did you become involved with developing games for the Amiga? While I was at the computer club, I was one of the 10% who took an interest in the coding side of things. I got talking to a few of the guys, and they shared some of their source code with Devpac. I'd try my hand at writing little intros and stuff like that on the ST, and some were actually OK! Amiga owners have always been spoilt for choice when it comes to racing games. Fresh on the grid is Turbo Sprint the latest game from Graeme “mcgeezer” Cowie. Back in Issue 2 of Amiga Addict, we took an early look at the game and discussed some of the features included. Now the game is available to buy, it’s time to talk about it again. Here at AA, we are loving how vibrant the Amiga scene is these days, so I wanted to get to know a little more about the man who has contributed so much to the revival of the Amiga coding scene, the man behind this latest release. I put the "pedal to the metal" and sprinted over to chat to mcgeezer... Firstly, a brief introduction from the man himself… Hi, I'm Graeme (mcgeezer) Cowie, and I live in the North East of England. As a hobby, I like to code Amiga games. What are some of your early Amiga memories? Around 1987, a few of my school friends had got Atari STs, so after much pleading to my mam and dad, they got me an STFM for Xmas. When my dad saw the price of the games though, he must have thought things could turn out a bit

AMIGA ADDICT

When I eventually got an Amiga A500 in 1990, I continued coding, and so set oﬀ straight away getting an Action Replay cart, expanding the memory and acquiring a copy of the Hardware Reference Manual. It was at that point I started learning the Amiga hardware, and tried unsuccessfully to make a game. I remember getting an A1200 at some point (around 1993), but my time with it was short-lived - around a year later, all my Amiga stuﬀ went in the attic and I got a job, went on holiday and got an IBM PC. Fast-forward twenty-odd years, and during Halloween 2017, I found the English Amiga Board forum and thought I'd get my Amiga back out of the attic for a night of nostalgia. While going through the source disks, I started to think how much I enjoyed coding on the Amiga, and thought I'd post a message about making a game sprite driver. That started a chain reaction into creating Bomb Jack Beer Edition. Yes, you have a history with enhancing well-known arcade games. New versions of Bomb Jack and Rygar AGA are two of your previous pieces of work. Was there anything in particular that made you work on these titles? My grandparents lived near the seafront,

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at Seaburn in Sunderland, and there were two arcades there - Johnny's and Seldons. In my early teens, I'd stay over with my grandparents every weekend I could, just so that I could go down to the arcades, morning, afternoon and evening. I remember Bomb Jack just being an awesome game to play, with superb looking graphics. I used to love playing it, whacking 10p coins into it until my money ran out. Rygar I remember arriving in the arcade they moved Gorf and stuck Rygar in its place, sandwiched between Hyper Sports and Nemesis. My initial thought when I saw it was that there was no other game in the arcade that looked like it... the beautiful parallax scenes and colourful enemies just made it stand out among everything else. I remember watching a guy completing the game in one credit, and I was astonished at how big the game was - most people never get to see those beautiful-looking levels later on in the game, because it's so damn hard. Why did you decide to start work on Turbo Sprint? As a kid, Super Sprint always stood out to me with its excellent cab. I was actually planning to do a Rolling Thunder-type game with the guys from Double Sided Games, and there was a fair amount of work done on that. But then the whole pandemic disrupted life quite a lot. I have a five-year-old boy, and so had to home-school him, and I was told I would have to work from home as I work in IT. Pretty much everything went up in the air. One of my weak spots is maths, so I decided I would try and learn a little bit. I thought a good way to learn would be understanding some car physics on a topdown racer - a few of the guys at the EAB gave me some pointers, and I set off doing some test code. At that point, I didn't have anything to apply it to, so I started looking around for decent arcade games that I could borrow the graphics from. I just about immediately came to Super Sprint. The only problem was that the game had a large resolution of 512x384, and so wouldn't run on an A500 with a large amount of colours. I looked further at the capabilities of the AGA chipset, and it became apparent that it would not be a problem running it in Hires Interlaced to get the game working. As things progressed, I fired off a few emails to try and get a license for the game, but as I got the usual zero replies, I changed the

title and enhanced the game with extras. With Turbo Sprint being available for A1200, A4000 and CD32, were there any challenges to get the game working as you’d hoped?

There has been a lot of excitement for this release, and you have also put together a fantastic-looking physical edition. Was a boxed version always something you’d hoped for? I'd always planned to do a physical version, because I enjoyed doing the Rygar physical box so much. I like the idea of putting together all of the diﬀerent components for a physical edition... and man, those boxes look so nice. The Amiga scene seems to become stronger each month. With conversions of well-known software such as

What are your favourite Amiga games? Probably the usual ones for most Amiga gamers - Hybris, Battle Squadron, Robocod, Transplant, Apidya, Alien Breed, Turrican 2, Jim Power... probably loads more than I can think of right now.

I think it's fantastic. When I came back to the scene in 2017, I was a little surprised because I thought there was hardly anyone doing games in Assembly, and much of the focus was on making the hardware faster.

Graeme, thanks for your time today, and good luck with your next project!

The games you reference there all run on stock Amigas, and for me that is fantastic because it's almost like we are bringing the baseline back to the good old days, and are in healthy competition with the other scenes who target the stock platforms (ZX/C64/Mega Drive). There've been some amazing games ported and made for the Amiga recently, and this makes me very happy - the bar is getting higher and higher every month.

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Memory turned out to be the biggest challenge due to the display. The screen buﬀers alone come in at around 400KB, and I also load all of the assets into RAM (except the circuits) to keep the game ﬂowing without having to keep loading from disk. There were the usual monthlong bugs that kept me awake at night, but I think that's just normal when making games in Assembly.

h0ﬀman's Metal Gear, several new titles such as Inviyya and Metro Siege, it is a great time to be an Amiga owner. How do you personally see the scene?

If you can share with us, what are your next plans for this fantastic machine? Sure, over the summer I'm going to be focusing on the tutorial series I started and hopefully getting a slot for it in Amiga Addict. On the game porting side, I can tell you that I've managed to obtain the license to bring Hotline Miami to the Amiga.

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Knight Rider 77

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- Ian takes shadowy ﬂight into a dangerous world

• Developer: Luigi Recanatese • Amiga platforms: OCS, 1MB RAM • Price: Free • Release year: April 2021

LEFT: I’m pretty sure KITT didn’t have an exposed chassis... RIGHT: This road looks positively peaceful compared to later stretches of highway.

Do you remember those type-in games for the 8-bit systems? The ones where you were ﬂying a ship down a canyon, or skiing down a mountain, with the sides of the play area represented by ASCII characters that moved about in a sinusoidal fashion? Knight Rider 77 is basically that game... or you might compare it to Speed Race or Spy Hunter, at least visually. You’re driving your car at speed down an endless vertically-scrolling road, dodging other vehicles and the constantly moving sides. Initially, cars are fairly stationary on the road, and it’s just about trying to ﬁnd enough space between them and the road edge to advance, choosing the right moments to slow down to avoid a collision. Later in the game, cars will move around much more, causing you a few more issues... You start with 60 points of damage/ health in the bank - once those are gone, it’s an abrupt GAME OVER for you. Hitting anything can lose you damage points too, so you better be careful - the only way to get them back is by hitting a checkpoint (which also resets the timer

A type-in game called Death Valley on the olde ZX Spectrum.

AMIGA ADDICT

that ominously ticks down in the corner of the screen). Looking at screenshots, you might be surprised at the basic graphical style. This is no mistake - the game is meant to look like one of the early video games from the 70s (it can surely be no coincidence that the game name features the year of release of the Atari 2600). And it works pretty well - it’s a basic and stark look, and frankly, you’ll be concentrating so hard on where you’re going, you won’t have time to assess the quality of the visuals! Then there’s the sound, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is as basic as the graphics. Your car produces a deep bass rumble, rising to a mid-pitched hum at top speed, and making an unpleasant farting noise on collisions. Checkpoints are heralded by that heart-ﬂuttering beep long favoured by driving games. But the pièce de résistance is on arrival of the second stage... that’s when the music starts. True to the game title, an interesting chiptune remix of the theme from the Knight Rider TV show is blasted out of your speakers. And it’s glorious. While Knight Rider 77 is very much a score attack game (although there’s no hi-score, let alone a hi-score table), the music is as much a reward as any arbitrary points tally might deliver. So, this is a pretty fun game for a free one. You’re not going to get a vast amount out of it - if you’re into score attack games, it deﬁnitely has that “one more game” factor, but the gameplay loop, for me at least, was probably about 90 seconds at a time. There’s only so many times you can play before your achievements start to plateau.

July 2021

Repetition is a problem here too - the sequence of cars and the structure of the road is fixed, so you can learn what to do if you have a good enough memory. But that does limit the fun that can be had as opposed to the randomness of something more procedurally generated. A more critical issue is the movement of the road. In those type-in games we mentioned earlier, it was possible to keep an eye on the top of the screen to see what was going to happen to the road next, and attempt to react ahead of time. In Knight Rider 77, the whole visible road edge moves as a single entity, meaning it’s very easy to get caught out if you’re not in the middle of the road when it happens. This kind of takes away some of the skill involved, and ups the difficulty. That difficulty is further increased because it’s very hard to avoid collisions... and while you get bonus damage points on checkpoint, you only get a measly 10, which will be gone in one ill-timed encounter with another vehicle. The timer is also very tight, especially after the first stage. A more gentle difficulty curve would have been appreciated! So Knight Rider 77 then - a lot of fun if you like score attack, but ultimately, you’re going to be pretty much done with it very quickly. Not one KITT would have much trouble with. You can pick this game up on Aminet at www.amiga-addict.com/KnightRider77

VERDICT

73%

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AMIGA ADDICT

Six of the Best - Pedro Loureiro (it's a P/XEL thing)

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Each month, we catch up with a notable figure in the world of Amiga and retro gaming, and ask them to whittle down their list of favourite games to a shortlist of just six. This month, we’re talking to Pedro Loureiro, owner of the popular it's a P/XEL thing YouTube channel. Hi Pedro, can you tell us a bit about your computer history? My passion for home computing started with the rubber-keyed 48K ZX Spectrum, back in 1984. There was something cool and mysterious about microcomputers. I could create my own programs, write my own music (sort of!) and express myself artistically, something that I simply couldn’t do with an Atari 2600 or an NES. True! When did you start on the Amiga? Obviously, consoles would play a huge role in gaming during those years that I spent messing around with Sinclair and Amstrad machines, but to be honest, I would spend more time typing huge listings of code than gaming. In 1989, my parents presented me with an Amiga 500. It was a dream come true that would finally offer me an arcade-like experience in the comfort of my bedroom. Awesome. Okay let’s get onto the list... So, besides amazing home ports of arcade blockbusters, the following titles were my most played on the Amiga, those I still go back to after all these years. Fury of the Furries This platform and puzzle game by Kalisto was so enjoyable and addictive that, when I moved to IBM PCs, I just had to get the DOS version too. And I still remember that annoying disk swapping process that

Amiga users like myself had to endure! Owning a hard drive for your Amiga wasn’t for everyone, you know?

music, composed by Olof Gustafsson, is just brilliant! An amazing game and a must have for all pinball fans!

Fury of the Furries was published by Mindscape for the Amiga in 1993 - we control a furry creature that has the ability to transform itself into four different coloured forms: red, blue, green and yellow. The colours indicate different skills, skills that are needed at certain points during our journey across the eight main locations present in the game: desert, lagoon, forest, pyramids, mountains, factory, village and the castle, each with 10 levels plus bonus levels. Not all forms are available in all the different levels - in those more puzzle-oriented levels, we may come across fields which deactivate certain powers. Besides the amazing gameplay, it also offers awesome music, graphics and even references to other video games and movies.

Myth: History in the Making I grew up enjoying all of Ray Harryhausen’s extraordinary movies - featuring cutting edge stop motion technology - including one of my favourite ﬁlms of all time, Jason and the Argonauts. Ray left us a remarkable legacy of adventure, with action-packed titles that will live on for many years to come. So, where does Myth: History in the Making ﬁt into all of this?

Pinball Fantasies I just love pinball video games, and Pinball Fantasies is still my favourite on the Amiga. It was released in late 1992, only eight months after Pinball Dreams, Digital Illusions’ first pinball title and first commercial game. And, just like its older brother, Pinball Fantasies offers a selection of four amazing pinball tables for us to enjoy, which can be played by up to eight players in a hot-seat type of thing. The tables are larger than the ones present on Pinball Dreams - approximately three screens high as opposed to two. The first table is Party Land, the one that probably most people will recognize, because it was featured in the shareware version. The other three are Speed Devils, Billion Dollar Gameshow and Stones ‘N’ Bones. Ball physics are spot-on, accompanied by truly amazing graphics, with gorgeous pixel art. And the music… wow! The

Swing when you're winning.

AMIGA ADDICT

by Stufm

Back in the 80s and early 90s, video games were highly influenced by the movie industry, so it’s no surprise that this was inspired by Ray Harryhausen’s movies. As opposed to what we saw in the ZX Spectrum and C64 versions, we play as a barbarian character, and each stage consists of three levels containing different styles of strategy and gameplay. Obviously, mythology is what this game is all about, and it covers Greek, Egyptian, Celtic and Norse myths. We’ll travel to those mythological sites, which include the appropriate monsters and beasts for each particular mythology. Our objective is to slay the most evil god to ever walk this Earth, named Dameron. Batman: the Movie As you’ll have already noticed - besides video games, I’m also a huge movie fan, mostly from the 80s and 90s. The first Batman film (by Tim Burton, released back in 1989) is still my favourite based on this DC Comics character. The game closely follows the events from the movie and, graphically, it just has that dark and obscure feeling that the Batman universe inspires. Ocean Software did an amazing job bringing

A load of balls.

July 2021

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No sympathy for this devil.

the Caped Crusader to all home computers in the late 80s, and there’s platforming action, driving, puzzling and even flying! All the different musical pieces created for the game are of extremely high quality, and really fit like a glove into each level they were created for. Batman: The Movie was included in a Commodore bundle known as The Batman Pack. It sold in the thousands (over 186,000 units), proving its importance to the success of the Amiga, and providing well-deserved recognition by the home computer video game business that finally promoted the Amiga as a games machine that could also word process. Turrican 2: The Final Fight With the most amazing soundtrack ever created for an Amiga game, created by Chris Huelsbeck, and a superb design by Manfred Trenz with essential help from Andreas Escher, Turrican 2: The Final Fight is simply the best Amiga platform runand-gun video game ever to see the light of day. At least, for me! Released in 1991, offering plenty of references to the original NES Metroid game from 1986, and the arcade title Psycho-Nics Oscar from 1987, Turrican 2 offers an intense, beautiful and complexly detailed game

This shooter sure doesn't drag-on.

that will certainly be mentioned in all future video game history books.

on the myth of the supposed suicidal behaviour of the lemming race. In-game, we see a bunch of lemmings entering the stage through a trap door and carelessly marching around without any sense for danger. It’s up to us to show them the safest route to the end of each level... even if that means we have to sacriﬁce a few along the way. There are various roles that we can assign to the lemmings to help them continue their migration in one piece, from diggers to ﬂoaters, and from blockers to miners and climbers. The levels were designed by practically everyone who was working on the game, because the level editor was so simple to use that everyone could contribute.

The story is set in the year 3025 and we play the role of Bren McGuire, the only survivor of the Avalon 1 ship after it was attacked by the forces of an evil Emperor, known as The Machine. Just like the first title in the franchise, Turrican 2 is a mix of arcade run-and-gun platforming action combined with exploration of five huge worlds where, if we search carefully, we’ll find precious hidden items, powerups and even extra lives. Exploring thoroughly, though, will also take us directly to other bosses that could have been completely avoided. With an overwhelming and inspiring soundtrack playing in the background, I could be wandering around for an eternity! Lemmings What started off as a simple character animation made in Deluxe Paint by DMA Design employee Mike Dailly, turned into one of the best video games ever made. Published by Psygnosis on Valentine’s Day 1991, this puzzle, strategy and action game sold, on its first day and for the Amiga only - 55,000 copies. That was something unthinkable back then! The designers of Lemmings based their game

He stole my balloons!

But I truly believe that everyone knows what Lemmings is all about. It’s crossed practically all generations of computer systems and consoles, and is known as the most widely ported video game ever made. The two sequels, Lemmings 2: The Tribes and All New World of Lemmings, are also extremely well made, but the ﬁrst one - for its originality alone - is still my favourite. Thanks Pedro! Don’t forget to check out the it's a P/XEL thing channel on YouTube at: www.youtube.com/ItsaPixelTHING

Which level will torture you next?

July June2021 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

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Matthew Smith, producer of Amiga Power: The Album With Attitude, once again holds aloft his lamp of loveliness to shine its light upon the very best Amiga game within a speciﬁc genre. This month: the run-and-gunner that blasts the blithering frig out of its rivals.

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Game Ruﬀ 'n' Tumble

Released 1994

Authors Jason Perkins (programming); Robin Levy (graphics); Jason Page (music); Graeme Boxall (production)

Shoot ’em ups abound on the Amiga, and since they fall into numerous subcategories which operate quite diﬀerently from one another (horizontally-scrolling, verticallyscrolling, single-screen Asteroids variants, etc.), it would be futile to try to pick out a single game as the format’s Greatest Shooter Ever. Instead, therefore, I intend to highlight individual games of exceptional excellence within those subcategories - and on this occasion we’re here to celebrate the Amiga’s ﬁnest run-and-gunner.

mainstream lifetime, Ruﬀ ’n’ Tumble is right up there with Metal Slug (and its equally ace sequel) in terms of sheer bullet-spraying splenditude - and yet the great majority of folk - dedicated retro gamers included - have never heard of it. This, I’d contend, is simply because it was never ported to any other formats - and while it’s kind of cool that the Amiga should have such an exquisite exclusive to its name, it’s also unfortunate that it never reached the widespread audience it most assuredly deserves.

And no, it’s not one of the Turricans. Shock horror vicar probe exclusive! (Ed. "What?")

Ruff ‘n’ Ready The game puts you in control of Ruff Rogers, who, at first glance, appears to be your typical 90s totally tubular radical kid with attitude - precisely the sort of protagonist you’d expect to see in a bogstandard platformer of that era. But Ruff subverts the formula in one crucial aspect. He doesn’t run around, cheekily biffing bad guys off the screen by bouncing on top of their heads with his zany cool sneakers... he runs around BLOWING THE BEJESUS OUT OF EVERYTHING WITH A GIANT MACHINE GUN. Seriously, the thing’s almost as big as he is! And it doesn’t just fire bullets, either - collect the right power-ups, and it can be instantly converted into a laser cannon, a flamethrower or a rocket launcher. Groovy.

Bang-a-Bang Boom Run-and-gun games really came into their own during the 90s, as increasingly powerful hardware allowed for platforming blast-o-thons of ever more pyrotechnical extravagance. The likes of Contra III/Super Probotector on the SNES, Gunstar Heroes on the Mega Drive, and the mighty Metal Slug in the arcades typify everything that’s great about the genre relentlessly fast-paced zapping action, instinctive and responsive controls, oodles of baddies you can’t wait to obliterate, enormous and outlandish boss battles, and diverse level designs that add to the adventurous feel of the proceedings. The uninformed might imagine that the Amiga couldn’t possibly handle games of such grandiose adrenaline-pumping excitement. But they would, of course, be wrong. Released relatively late in the Amiga’s

Eat kaboom, Johnny Badman.

AMIGA ADDICT

Ruﬀ has lost his marbles in the most literal sense. They rolled down a rabbit hole, he went after them, and suddenly he’s in an alternate dimension ruled by a toy-swiping despot called Doctor Destiny and his army of robot minions (Ed. - "Don’t you just hate it when that happens?"). The only thing for it is to steal a ﬁrearm from

Welcome to the Tinhead factory, home of the health and safety at work violation.

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Publisher Renegade

one of the bots, and take back his marbles by force. Exploding Eye Candy Dashing around the worlds of Ruff ’n’ Tumble, you’ll swiftly notice two things. Firstly, it’s superb to control. Ruff is speedily agile and can shoot at things in a gloriously unfettered fashion; whether running, jumping, falling, swimming or clambering up ladders, he can always send a stream of bullets hurtling towards his enemies, and when standing still he can fire in various directions to get the drop on foes in tricky positions. Even in spite of using up-to-jump, you always feel in total control of the little fella. Secondly, it’s astoundingly beautiful. People who’ve not previously encountered Ruff ’n’ Tumble have a habit of assuming it must be an AGA title, what with its graphics being so colourful and finely detailed, and the scrolling being so fast and smooth. But, in reality, it runs on any 1MB Amiga - a fact which stands as a glowing testament to the remarkable talents of its creators. The settings of the first two (of four) worlds - a forest and some caves - might seem generic, but you’ll seldom have seen video game woodlands and caverns as lushly rendered as these. Cunning atmospheric touches are very much in evidence, like the way the light dims when you venture into underground sections of the forest, or the way the whole colour palette shifts subtly in the caves, turning coolly blue as you approach areas of water, or a fiery orange as you descend towards lethal lava pits.

“Surprise!”

Bumper Boss Battle Bonanza Bosses in run-and-gunners can be a pain in the bum. Witness those in the later Metal Slug games: they look spectacular, but they’re a joyless chore to get past, because they take a tedious eternity to destroy with your weedy weaponry and/or they’ll frequently kill you in ways you can’t avoid unless you already know what’s coming. Ruﬀ ’n’ Tumble takes the far friendlier approach of treating its boss encounters as fun action set pieces, occurring in a special mini-level at the end of each world. They’re tough, but logically beatable if you keep an eye on the attack patterns, and they look fab as well. Top marks!

The further you progress into the game, the more imaginative it becomes. World Three sees you inﬁltrating the factory where your robot adversaries - the Tinheads - are manufactured, while World Four takes place in Doctor Destiny’s castle - a deliciously gothic techno-medieval fortress populated with such appropriately anachronistic baddies as sword-wielding cyberknights, sonarspitting mechanical bats and teleporting pointy-hatted robowizards.

Rock ‘n’ Robot Sound too makes a significant contribution to the game’s impressive immersiveness. Rockets roar, electrodes fizz, clangs resound as your bullets hit the Tinheads and suitably weighty booms and crashes accompany the many and varied detonations taking place all over the shop. Commendable use is made of audio cues to alert you to something significant happening, like the little jingle that plays when you collect every type of marble on each level (you have to pick up a certain number of red, green and blue ones before the exit will open) and the buzz that announces a new enemy is about to emerge from an active floor generator. All of this is accompanied by a rockin’ industrial metal soundtrack by Jason Page (no choosing between music or sound effects here, kids), which accentuates the invigoratingly frantic action perfectly. If I Only Had More Hearts By far the most potent shell in Ruff ’n’ Tumble’s bandolier of brilliance is the exacting nature of its design. Every level is painstakingly well-structured in terms of layout and the placement of enemies, obstacles and bonuses, and there are tons of things to do besides the blatting of monsters. Keys must be sought to deactivate laser barriers, plunging detonators must be hit to blow open blocked passageways, destructible walls can be shot to carve your own pathway through the environment, and all manner of nifty secrets are waiting to be uncovered. There are some terrific risk-reward mechanics in play, too. Your default health is three hit points, and your default machine gun overheats quickly if used continuously, dramatically reducing its firing rate. Power-ups that extend your life and boost your firepower can be found hither and yon, and grabbing them all straight away can make your life much easier in the short-term. However... what if you lose a life and find yourself back to having the weediest weaponry and health? Perhaps you’d be better off leaving some goodies for later, just in case? Or... maybe you’d prefer to plunge in all guns blazing and take advantage of the special chaincombo bonus system, where destroying numerous Tinheads in quick succession forces them to drop power-ups of increasing value (instead of the points-giving gold coins they usually leave behind), up to and including an extra life? Whether you’re a cautious, strategic player or a gung-ho trigger happy type, Ruff ’n’ Tumble is vastly entertaining and a fierce-but-fair challenge through and through. It’s that most cherishable of games where meticulous design means you could, with skill, complete the entire thing on your first go - but you won’t, because it’s supremely good at taking you by surprise in all kinds of admirably devious ways. Now, we really ought to see about finding a way to publicise its greatness to the world at large. Something involving fireworks would seem apt.

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AMIGA ADDICT

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These are just a handful of the multitudinous forms taken by the Tinheads throughout the game, and they play a major role in making Ruff ’n’ Tumble as special as it is. They’re a gleefully characterful bunch of metallic menaces, and they each have their own unique abilities to hinder your progress, often requiring quick reflexes and cunning tactics to overcome, so you get a real sense of satisfaction when offing the little bleeders. There are also some smashing endof-world giant Tinhead bosses, as detailed in Bumper Boss Battle Bonanza elsewhere on the page.

32 M ad C sK O ris R te N ns en E R

Simon the Sorcerer

excruciatingly beautiful, fantastic 2D sprite work at its best. The entire world feels alive, and there are so many animations and extra sprites that are not of any use to the story, but are simply there to make the world feel like a real place. Enjoy, for example, while walking through the woods: the sight of hawks hunting, squirrels climbing trees, a deer running past in the distance, and so on. The sprite work, done by Kevin Preston, is excellent, as are the absolutely stunning backgrounds by Paul Drummond.

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This month, we will be looking at a genre of games that most of you will probably consider to be impossible to enjoy on a console: point-and-click adventure games. I grew up a computer gamer: first with the C64, moving on to the Amiga, and finally ending up at the PC in the mid-90s, so point-and-click games naturally have to be played with a mouse in my book. This month though, I set out to discover whether that is really true could I enjoy a point-and-click from the couch, controller in hand and a cold beverage at the ready? To assist me in my quest, I dived into Simon the Sorcerer on the CD32 - a game that I knew and loved from the Amiga and PC versions, but had never experienced on the CD32 before. This game was written and designed by Simon Woodroffe. And no - the game's protagonist is seemingly not named after him, nor is he named after Simon the Sorcerer from the Bible’s New Testament... Simon is your average British teenager who gets sucked into a magical world one day, when he's playing around doing magic tricks in the loft of his home. He's a wisecracking, fun-loving, no-good teenager with an attitude, but he takes on the quest given to him by the wizard Calypso anyway - as any good adventure game protagonist would, of course. An evil bugger called Sordid is up to no good, and it is up to Simon to thwart his evil plans. Doing so involves becoming a wizard, and as with another great adventure game that most of you will have probably played, the very first thing you need to do is go to the bar and talk to the experts within the field: four old wizards. This blatant reference to The Secret of Monkey Island (where you, if you didn't already know, start the game by having to visit the Scumm Bar and talk to the three important looking pirates) comes complete with Simon exclaiming "I

Critical Reception

Amiga CD32 Gamer.......90% CU Amiga........................90% The One..........................89% Amiga Action.................90% Amiga Format....................70% want to be a wizard!", in homage to Guybrush Threepwood's "I want to be a pirate." The game is chock-full of references to other games, books and fairy tales. Within the first hour, the observant player will find references to Tolkien, Monkey Island, C. S. Lewis' Narnia, Jack and the Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Three Billy Goats Gruff, and more. Some of these references are very obvious - like the troll of Three Billy Goats Gruff, who has gone on strike because he just won't stand for being thrown into the river every day without ever getting to eat one of the goats - to more subtle references, like when Simon looks at a stone altar in the woods and drily notes that “this is a stone table used for the sacrificing of shaved lions”. This great British sense of humour is what carries this wonderful adventure throughout. The graphics of Simon the Sorcerer are

Just a bunch of yokels, deﬁnitely not wizards.

AMIGA ADDICT

Year....................................................1994 Publisher...........................Adventuresoft Developer..........................Adventuresoft

July 2021

Being on CD meant that the CD32 version of Simon the Sorcerer could feature a fully voiced cast of characters. The voice acting is generally very good, with Simon being voiced by none other than Chris Barrie of Red Dwarf fame, and he does a very good job of giving Simon that slightly annoying teenage inﬂection. Simon is a loveable character indeed, but he's also the quintessential British teenage boy with all that comes with that, and Barrie captures it to perfection here. I only wish that I had the option to have voice and text at the same time, but that is seemingly not possible on the CD32 version. So turn that volume up to make sure you aren't missing anything! The sound, music and voice of the game overall is really well done, so it won't be grating on you, no matter how long your play session is. The CD32 version of Simon the Sorcerer is deﬁnitely the best Amiga version available, as it sports the full talkie version of the adventure as well as the pretty AGA graphics. "But what about the controls,” I hear you ask? “You are playing a point-and-click game on a console!" Well here's the thing - they actually work really well in practice. Of course, moving the pointer around the screen with a mouse is faster and easier than using a controller, and makes the classic "sweep the entire screen looking

The Drunken Druid! It's even got a fruit machine.

The troll is on strike, you'll need some help to shift him. Poor old Swampy. Nobody came to his birthday party.

Simon the Sorcerer is one of my (many) favourite adventure games from the 90s, so I may very well be biased here, but I do think it is still worth your time today if you are into point-and-click adventure games. If you want to experience this classic game on the Amiga, I highly recommend going with the CD32 version. Whether you play it with the controller or a mouse, I'll leave entirely up to you - I personally ﬁnd both ways very comfortable.

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for hot spots" action easier, but that is doable using the controller too. When performing an action by choosing a verb from the bottom menu, the controller is actually faster than the mouse, because you can keep your pointer focused on the hot spot you want to interact with, while you toggle between the menu options using a shoulder button. There's also a handy button mapped to the overworld map (the postcard in your inventory) that Simon uses to quick travel to places. So, all in all, I ﬁnd that playing Simon the Sorcerer from the couch is indeed possible, but you do need to have a bit of patience with moving the cursor around the screen. You can, of course, also plug a mouse into your CD32 and play it that way, if it strikes your fancy.

Fast travelling with the map will save you some time.

Competition Pro Extra USB by Duncan Styles

- Speedlink Anniversary Edition Take a look at modern joysticks, and you’ll ﬁnd all sorts of ergonomic designs with smooth analogue movement, and more buttons and switches than you’d think you could ﬁnd a use for. Jump back in time to the 80s though, and sticks were only just starting to evolve.

One stick that was much loved in the Amiga’s heyday was the Competition Pro (or Competition Pro 5000 to its friends). It’s not much to look at, with its square black base, red stick and red buttons, but it had a reputation for being built like a tank. The stick has been around in its USB form for a number of years now and has been released in a few versions. I was curious how the design fared after all these years. The original model featured two ﬁre buttons, but they were linked in parallel, and so did the same job. This modern version has four buttons, with each one doing its own thing. While four buttons opens up more potential uses, I cannot see how you could comfortably position your hands to use them all. In fact, it’s not even that easy just using the two main buttons,

The autofire switch on the back might present an issue if you map jump to one of the buttons though - autofire affects all buttons at once. Playing Lumberjack with autofire switched on prevented full height jumps, limiting its usefulness. There is a definite and loud click from the directional and main button microswitches, which helps give the stick its robust feel, but after extended play I found it to be just too noisy. Thin rubber feet on the base do little to prevent noise transmission to the desk. The Competition Pro is more like an arcade controller, and it has a short stick that takes a fair amount of force to move. In fact, it needs so much force that, unless you press down on the top of the stick or hold the base firmly with your other hand, the whole thing will easily rock about. While not compatible with real Amiga hardware (and I did try it with the Rys MkII USB adaptor), this stick could be a decent way to get a true retro feel for your emulated Amiga. Don’t be surprised if you do eventually reach for your gamepad though. The Speedlink Competition Pro Extra is available from www.speedlink.com for €29.99.

July 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

TESTBENCH

Everyone had their favourite and would swear blind that their choice was superior. Personally, I loved the Konix Speedking for its short throw, which made it great for fast reactions. The Quickjoy Topstar was another favourite and was very comfortable to use. I still use them both today.

although it is ﬁne for one-button use.

Brick By Brick - Amiga Scraptop Part 2 - Ravi just can't lego of his goal to create a portable A600

TESTBENCH

At the end of the last part, through the combined eﬀorts of Howard and myself, we had the Amiga 600 scraptop basically working in a small wooden case made from pieces of my old wardrobe. The journey continues...

The LVDS T.V54.03 converter board.

The motherboard itself came from the Netherlands via Marvin Droogsma, and is actually a rare A300 board - the original name for the A600, before Commodore decided to rip up the rule book and make it a bit of a senseless upgrade, rather than the budget version of the A500. But that's a different story for a different article! The board was now powered (which was the hardest part), and Howard also provided a 12V line for the monitor. Initially, we had a small cute monitor that cost around £90, and was great for display. But it was heavy with a plastic surround, and didn’t really suit this project. I gifted this monitor to Howard, who now uses it as a display for his Raspberry Pi Arcade. I already mentioned in the previous article that I went for a LVDS display (a lightweight and very thin type of display that most modern laptops use), which was ripped out of an old non-working Dell laptop that my neighbour had gifted me. Next, I needed to connect it to the motherboard. Searching on eBay, I came across a small board called “T.V53.03” from China, and this tiny board was perfect for the Amiga display. Importantly, it ran off 12V with all the inputs an Amigan can dream of component, VGA, HDMI. The board itself converted and upscaled well to LVDS, even powering the monitor! I decided to use component initially, but I have a path to upgrade in the future, if I decide I want to. The T.V53.03 board has solved a lot of the problems I could have had providing a display for this build - it’s amazing what you can find on eBay these days. It even contains a preamp, allowing me to connect speakers to it and have them powered off the 12V line, working directly off the phono inputs on the Amiga with volume controls. This board

AMIGA ADDICT

got me thinking about what else I could do with it. With a bit of research, I found the board could also function as a media player. So if the Amiga drained the power, and the monitor’s 12V line still has some juice, I could add a USB stick with movies and still put the screen to use. I could even use it to retro-game on, or to run other systems! What a multipurpose device! Some people have questioned me about the heat issue. The Amiga 600 seems fine. The original case never really had much ventilation in the first place, and without a monster CPU in it, I am trusting that things won’t get too hot (unless I start using it in Australia!). The batteries get slightly hot when charging, but that’s not very noticeable, even to the touch. The Chinese board, however, is a different matter - it’s the hottest element of the whole project. To mitigate this, I covered it in heat sinks purchased on eBay, originally designed for the Raspberry Pi. They seemed to do the trick, but I will design the case to ensure the board is separate from the rest of the machine, and has a nice airflow/vents close by. Speaking of the case, I have news there too. While I liked the idea of a wooden case, I’m no carpenter, and it was looking a bit on the rough side. After seeing cases made by channels like Perifractic’s Retro Recipes - with his “Brixty 64” C64 build - it got me thinking. Lego is a great fun way to make a custom case. Many suggested I 3D print a case, or CNC machined it, but sometimes it’s just nice to escape the screens and play with a bit of Lego! The temporary nature of Lego means I can build the case and customise it till I get the ideal design bottomed out, and then glue it together (arrrrgh, Kragle!). Lego itself is an expensive thing to use, especially if you’re looking for white bricks specifically. Back on eBay again then, and I managed to get enough so far to create the base and housing. As you can see from the pictures, it has a great aesthetic - but it’s starting to get pretty heavy. It has that 90s laptop weight that I’m sure we all remember well! Eventually I ran out of funds, and decided to raid my old personal Lego collection to help me find all the odd pieces I needed and complete the base unit. The biggest issue was getting

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distracted and building all my old sets again! The next stage is going to be the toughest part: integrating a USB keyboard using the Sum 600 USB adapter. I am using a thin USB keyboard as my interface device, and getting stickers to replace those awful Windows keys. Then I need to think about hinges and the screen surround. Wish me luck for the ﬁnal part in the series! Fingers crossed I don’t drop the laptop and smash it into a thousand pieces before it’s all glued together...

Layout optimised for airﬂow with T.V54.03 mounted at the rear.

Thin USB keyboard running via Sum 600.

Power switch, PCMCIA slot and volt meters.

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RGBtoHDMI - Possible Pi pixel perfection provision?

Close up of same screen through OSSC.

Getting a good picture out of your venerable Amiga used to be easy: RGB monitor, most likely 14”, and you’re done. Or ﬁnd a suitably SCARTequipped TV, and a good SCART cable. Things have changed a little over the years. Sourcing CRTs (and keeping them going) is getting harder, and SCARTequipped devices are the exception rather than the norm. An option has been to use a cheap HDMI to SCART converter, which typically can be bought for around £30 from Amazon. They’re not ﬂexible, nor particularly high quality, and can insert delay into the output, but they do serve a purpose. Recognising the demand for a high quality scan converter, there’s a fantastic option known as the Open Source Scan Converter (OSSC), with the goal of delivering minimal latency through HDMI at low cost. They are a technical marvel using an FPGA, and the design and software is still actively maintained. However, at around £150, they’re not particularly cheap, but they do represent the best option for taking an analogue signal and converting to HDMI, and not just for your Amiga. Both these solutions rely on a good analogue signal coming from your Amiga. An Amiga with the Original Chip Set (OCS) or Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) can support 16 levels of red, green and blue for 4096 colours. 16 levels are encoded using 4 bits of data, and the Denise chip has 4 pins for the red component, 4 green and 4 blue. These then feed into the Video Hybrid - a digital to analogue converter using just a handful of

The Indivision adapter, from Individual Computers, has been in demand ever since it was first available and they regularly still change hands for £100 or so. This device intercepts that digital signal within the Amiga, and produces a good quality VGA output that supports Graffiti high colour modes, and new screen resolutions via HighGFX. This is another device that uses the power of an FPGA. What if you need HDMI, rather than VGA? Step forward RGBtoHDMI! Originally conceived to get an HDMI signal out of a BBC Micro, it uses the bare metal power of the Raspberry Pi unencumbered by fripperies like an OS, coupled with a CPLD, or Complex Programmable Logic Device, for interfacing. Not quite an FPGA, but close-ish. That CPLD is on a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top), and together they get the right digital signals into the Pi for it to work its magic. It’s completely open source - software, PCB design, and logic for the CPLD. C0pperDragon, aka Reinhart Grafl, created the Amiga-specific things, and the original RGBtoHDMI was designed by Hoglet67, aka David Banks. Anyone can have the boards made, but soldering the surface mount CPLD needs good skills: I sourced mine from Ian Bradbury, who charged £29 including UK postage for the adapter. You also need a Pi Zero (any version, the W isn’t needed), a 2GB or larger micro SD card, and a HDMI cable (the Pi Zero uses Mini HDMI). All in, it’ll cost around £50 plus a little work.

tried, and provided a rock steady HDMI image with absolutely no noise, interference or display artefacts. It supports interlace modes without flicker. There’s even configuration items that allow scanlines (which I prefer to a sharp image), and multiple options to fine tune the display, but out-of-the-box it looks superb! It syncs natively at 50Hz, although holding down the button on startup will force 60Hz mode for troublesome displays. Speaking of that button, there’s a single menu button that can configure most things through a variety of short or long pushes, or you can edit the config file on the SD card. In reality, you probably won’t have to. Compared directly to the OSSC, the lack of any noise whatsoever in the image, which in most of my setups was manifesting as slight shadowing in the background, is a real revelation. The OSSC gives an outstanding picture, however this RGBtoHDMI gives a perfect HDMI image with no conversion from analogue. I haven’t measured lag, however it is claimed that latency is around 4ms, or a quarter of a frame. You shouldn’t notice this. If you need to connect your Amiga with a DIP socketed Denise to an HDMI source, this would be my strong recommendation. Will it work for AGA Amigas? Bandwidth will be a challenge, but there’s very clever people out there...

RGBtoHDMI board ﬁtted with a Pi Zero.

Prepping the Pi is simple: download the latest release and unzip to an empty SD card, set a jumper for OCS or ECS. Then take your brave pills and open your Amiga - you’ll need to remove the Denise chip and plug it into the adapter board, then plug that into the Denise socket. Do check orientation, and that you’ve got every pin seated rather than oﬀset: bad things may happen otherwise! Does it work? Perfectly. It detected the right output resolution for all monitors I

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My attempt at a product pic. Sorry for the shadows!

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TESTBENCH

Close up of screen with scanlines on the RGBtoHDMI.

transistors and resistors to give an analogue RGB signal. From this point onwards, that signal is susceptible to noise, and an old computer is not a particularly friendly place to be an electrical signal, which somewhat explains why your Amiga has a full metal jacket. And then the cable from your Amiga to any device – be it converter or display – is susceptible to further interference.

by Nick Lines

AmigaOS 3.2

TESTBENCH

- A further 3.x update, but is Jonah convinced? Look at all those new features!! Did that get your attention? Well, before you start to get overly excited, just relax for a moment. I admit that the promise of anything new being released for the Amiga would have once had me dashing out in a complete frenzy; foaming at the mouth ready to purchase that latest upgrade. I must have scared the local computer shop owner somewhat silly appearing in front of him at any opportunity like a rabid animal, waving £10 notes in his face as I shouted and spat incomprehensibly. So you'd be forgiven for assuming that any news of an update to the classic 3.x Amiga operating system branch would leave me with a ﬂushed face and some shortness of breath... yet, for once, I felt surprisingly apprehensive when given the task of writing this review. You see... the crux of the matter for me is that AmigaOS 3.1 (or Workbench 3.1) is a legendary operating system. It's part of an Amiga computer's essence; its soul. With a legacy that is so important, it is vital that careful consideration is given to retaining as much authenticity and originality when developing such a classic OS. Is evolution even necessary at all? If something isn't broken, then don't ﬁx it... after all, we can already use Deluxe Paint without any problems, right?

• Price approx. £35-£45 • Available from various retailers • Publisher: Hyperion Entertainment

being relatively cheap to produce - or possibly it was partly down to some clever Amiga CD support trickery which we'll come on to shortly. Whatever the primary reason may be, I can't knock them too much, as my A4000 does have a CD drive, and it is nice to have some sort of physical media on the shelf. A download release is currently unavailable at the time of writing (as AA reported in Issue 6), due to the usual complex legal problems that us Amigans have come to expect from vendors trying to sell various bits of Amiga kit. Updated 3.2 Kickstart ROMs are also provided on the CD for DIY ﬂashing, and are also available from many Amiga retailers. The ROMs are not essential to install OS 3.2, but they do free up a little memory and improve performance. Across The Board Installation To safely test the installation process, I decided to use FS-UAE Amiga emulator. I created a new hard drive image, before booting the emulator from the OS 3.2 CD - this was easy enough, and like previous OS releases, HDToolBox is included for drive partitioning. Popping a CD in a drive and starting an installer may not sound like the most exciting endeavour, but it was at this initial stage that I

started to notice something quite magical unfolding. The CD actually booting into the fancy new-fangled AmigaPE (preinstallation) environment was an impressive start! Drive partitioning supports disks over 4GB from the oﬀset, and the installation CD itself not only holds all 35 ADF disk images (Deputy Ed. - "Remember when Workbench was just a couple of ﬂoppies?!"), but on running the installer I was gobsmacked to witness the disk images automatically mounting themselves whenever a disk swap was required. How very cool! In fact, I'd go as far as to say that installing an operating system has never been so much fun...

RECOM M

Once I felt more conﬁdent, I decided to get a feel for OS 3.2 and the diﬀerent scenarios that I may encounter on real

I am sure lots of readers will have taken a leap of faith, installing or upgrading to OS 3.2 without hesitation - many Amiga users will appreciate that progress is being made! Maybe it was high time I stopped being such a wimp? Unboxing Like It's 95! My initial trepidation started to be alleviated as soon as the box cellophane was removed. The packaging is clean and simple, and a lovely installation guide and quick setup instructions pamphlet is also waiting inside the case. This is elegant, clearly written and understated - a very nice change from having to use a readme file or website help section. Surprisingly, the actual OS files and disk images are supplied on a CD-ROM. Yes, you did read that correctly! It does seem a little strange to distribute software designed for classic Amiga hardware on a medium that most Amigas can't actually access. Worse yet, if you've purchased OS 3.2 for emulation purposes and are using a modern PC or laptop, then you may also find yourself with no CD drive present! Perhaps this choice was made by Hyperion due to cost, with CDs still

AMIGA ADDICT

Everything expected & more

Glow Icons & new data-types

New options such as moving windows oﬀ the screen

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was left with a desktop that still looked very original and in-keeping with classic hardware. In fact, other than the nice new glow icons, the extra features are hidden so cleverly, it is not obvious what an upgrade really accomplishes! It was only after prolonged use that so many of the useful features became apparent. Finding those new features was easy, due to the included in-depth Reference Manual that can be accessed by pressing the Amiga Help key.

hardware. I went all-in, booting my A4000 and A600, ready to test upgrade installations. The included manual helped here, giving system requirements and installation tips to suit my target hardware.

After a quick reboot, all I had to do was remove a few duplicated entries from my User-Startup ﬁle, before ﬁnally being greeted by a successfully upgraded Workbench desktop environment.

Bricking It! The Amiga 4000 upgrade installation worked very well. An upgrade is actually performed in the same manner as a fresh installation, with the installer recognising that the OS is being upgraded and oﬀering a safeguard backup option. It gives peace of mind knowing that system ﬁles can be rolled back if there is a problem.

Just as things were going well, and I was starting to get a bit cocky, my A600 upgrade attempt put me ﬁrmly back in my place. I'm not sure if this was down to my previous 3.1 installation having some incompatible extras installed, or the fact that I have a Vampire V2. The OS 3.2 manual does give advice for Vampire setups, yet despite following those steps, this time I unfortunately ended up with an non-bootable system and a Guru Meditation. Hopefully a ﬁx or rollback should be easy enough when I get more time to look into this.

Rename your own Workbench titlebar!

Easier window resizing

Built-in ADF disk image mounting

After upgrading any system to OS 3.2, an updated Amiga Early Startup Control menu is available when both mouse buttons are held at power-on. The new boot options mean that startup problems are easy to identify, with "Trace Startup-Sequence" stepping through the boot process one command at a time. The new "System Log" and "Failsafe Booting" options are also particularly useful for diagnostics. Are You Experienced? I expected this update to go too far trying to make a classic OS too fancy and bloated - but after upgrading to 3.2, I

The new Find Files tool is particularly powerful, granting easy searching of all mounted volumes in order to find pretty much anything very promptly! However, one of my favourite new features is the ability to mount ADF disk images by simply double-clicking them, without installing any additional third-party software! The Shell now autocompletes with the tab key (just like in Linux), windows can be dragged off the screen edges, and Reaction GUI Toolkit integration brings many new programs and cross-development opportunities (such as ports from OS4). With lots of new data-types now included, browsing modern files gives the correct icons for most types of images, music or video. Final Thoughts When all is said and done, is OS 3.2 really worth it? Well, that is really going to come down to what you use your classic Amiga for. But if you do use Workbench, (or plan to start using it) then I highly recommend this as the definitive version. Hyperion have built further on the recent 3.1.4 stability, while the new enhancements have not overshadowed the legacy or usability of the original OS that many of us truly adore.

THE GOOD This is the best 3.x release so far, including hundreds of small updates and enhancements. It just works!

THE BAD The installer could go further to recognise potential upgrade issues.

96%

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MENDE D

Overall, it is the small things in OS3.2 that matter. Usability optimisations like modern mouse wheel support, more recognised common ﬁle-types and easier resizing of windows, all make your Amiga less frustrating to use. Thankfully, clicking around various settings and through the drawers of the ﬁlesystem is very snappy and responsive despite all the additions.

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

Upgrades Old & New - The Amiga 1200, is it still worthwhile in 2021?

by Andrew Siddall

The Commodore Amiga 1200. The hopes and dreams for the next generation of aﬀordable Amigas rested on this machine.

Commodore were, at this time, on top of things with developers. Keen to avoid the problems with compatibility experienced with the A500+, they held two developer conferences for software houses to test compatibility on the new machines. Enthusiasm was limited however, and with a large installed Amiga 500 user base, only a limited number of AGA speciﬁc games would be released. Compatibility issues were eased with the ability of the new chipset to emulate the older OCS/ ECS systems, but a few problems still arose with some popular old titles, such as Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. Commodore launched the Amiga 1200 in late October 1992 for £399. Myths of the machine being launched as the “A800” that circulated prior to release had echoes of the A300 ﬁasco of the Amiga 600. It wasn’t encouraging! The so-called "pizza box" machine turned out (visually at least) to be an A600 with a numeric keypad. The processor was upgraded to a 14MHz 68EC020, with a 32-bit bus architecture and 2MB

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Rumours of the new machine surfaced in Issue 39 of Amiga Format (October 1992), with reports suggesting it was an A2000 replacement with an 020 processor and more colourful graphics. A letter, supposedly from a developer in Holland, actually suggested two new models - the ﬁrst of which would emerge to be the Amiga 4000, and a second “pizza box”styled machine would turn out to be the wedge-shaped A1200. The letter was rubbished at the time, but it was fairly close to what actually happened.

My mum said I'd get square eyes sitting this close to the screen, but hell, this is Amiga!

memory. The new AGA chipset, and the same IDE/PCMCIA ports as the 600 rounded oﬀ the new package. Shortly after launch, the price dropped to £349. As before, Commodore released the A1200 as part of a pack, this time the Desktop Dynamite pack. Included was assorted software as usual, but in a little bonus, it included a special edition of Amiga Format proclaiming the A1200 as “the future in your hands”. At the time, 14MHz didn’t sound very exciting to me. Yes, there were all the additional colours and a handful of extra screen modes, but with the PCs of the time already rolling along at upwards of 50MHz, 14MHz just sounded a little bit “meh”. Nevertheless, I still wanted one! A full overview of the new Amiga 1200 was covered in Issue 41 of Amiga Format. And they were very excited! The A1200 hardware was “impressive” and the numbers involved were “big”. The actual speed? “We believe, from our testing, it is roughly ﬁve times the processing power of the A600,” said Kelly Sumner, MD of Commodore UK at the time. With the addition of further Fast RAM in the trapdoor, the speed was doubled, with the custom chips no longer throttling the processor access to memory. CU Amiga did a six page spread (Issue 36)

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in February 1993. Amongst a wealth of information about hard drives and accelerators, they also compared the speed of games on the A1200 to previous Amiga. Pickings were slim, but they noted real improvements in 3D games, such as the flight sim Flight of the Intruder and the driving simulator duo of Microprose Formula One Grand Prix and Indianapolis 500. 3D games naturally would benefit from the added grunt. A number of 2D titles also benefited from the 256 colours the A1200 could display on screen at once. For example, Pinball Illusions was an AGA-exclusive game that also allowed users to run tables in high resolution, and the few AGA versions of games that came out were a definite improvement over their Amiga 500/600 counterparts. With Doom taking the PC world by storm, Amiga owners were left behind in the FPS arena, until Team 17 released Alien Breed 3D and Alien Breed 3D II: The Killing Grounds. Sadly, the Amiga lacked the power to run these at a decent resolution and framerate, but with an upgrade to a 68030 and above, it was possible to have a perfectly playable experience. CU Amiga didn’t try to push Amiga owners one way or the other, instead providing a list of pros and cons and leaving it to the fans to decide.

AMIGA ADDICT

TESTBENCH

Law enforcement and pinball, a winning combo!

Unfortunately for Commodore, consumers were not as excited as Amiga Format, or persuaded by the CU Amiga comparison. The A1200/A4000 would be the last of the Amiga desktop computer range. It is estimated that less than a million A1200s were sold worldwide. Why did I want one so badly? To be honest, I don’t really remember. My Amiga 500 was getting a bit long in the tooth - my mates’ PCs were getting more powerful, but I still had a good collection of Amiga games I enjoyed. A PC would have been the more logical choice, but in the end, as Christmas 1993 rolled around, I asked for an A1200 and Alien Breed 2 AGA. After opening it up from under the Christmas tree and sitting impatiently through the rest of the family opening their presents, I raced upstairs and plugged in my new machine. Inserting disk 1 of Alien Breed 2 with trembling fingers: the title screen appeared in flickery high resolution. As the atmospheric title music boomed out the hi-fi speakers, all my doubts faded

Alien Breed 3D II is deﬁnitely a game that beneﬁts from a bit of acceleration.

and I remember a little happy tingle surging through me. Please don’t judge, I was 16 at the time! Over time - and after many checkout shifts at Tesco - I added a 120MB hard drive, a 68040/40 accelerator with 10MB RAM and a Squirrel SCSI CD-ROM drive to my setup. These days, when looking at the prices of the time, I still have no idea how I managed this, even with the extra shifts! What did shift, however, was my 68040 Amiga. Wow, that thing was fast! Looking back at what I spent, I could have bought myself quite a powerful PC. But PCs were boring - Amiga was where it was at! And I could run Microcosm CD32 (see the review on page 28) on my setup too. OK, I know it wasn’t a great game but it was a sign of things that could have come to pass had Commodore survived bankruptcy in 1994. After university, it was clear that my Amiga 1200 had ﬁnally reached the end of its useful life. MP3s and AVIs were all the rage, and my A1200 could play neither. I sold the whole lot for £350 and bought a 386 PC instead. With my

nostalgia hat ﬁrmly perched on my head, I am still kicking myself for this insane decision! Why, why, WHY did I do this?? Fast-forward 20 years, and thanks to a good deal on eBay, I became the proud owner of an Amiga 1200 once again. Phew! The A1200 is very popular these days because it is so easy to modify with new and old expansions. Here is what I’ve done to mine: Individual Computers ACA1221lc This was my ﬁrst accelerator, a 68020based card running at 26MHz with 16MB RAM. It was a nice (comparatively cheap) little device that did the job well enough, but that didn’t stop me hunting for something a little faster. This would arrive a year later in the form of the Blizzard card…up next. Blizzard 1230 MkII This was a bit of a mad impulse purchase from a fellow Amiga Addict Discord user. The MkII is a proper piece of history and deserves its place in my setup. The 030 really gives the machine extra grunt, and everything is so much smoother than the

Trembling ﬁngers are a bad sign when you have the entire alien horde to contend with!

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NITY COMMU LE ARTIC ION SS SUBMI

TESTBENCH

LEFT: There's a lot going on in this A1200, thankfully Commodore left some room in the case. RIGHT: Amiga Kit oﬀer some great PCMCIA memory card adaptors.

previous ACA card. This card came with 50MB memory and an FPU. Buﬀered IDE interface This is needed to allow seamless connection of my Compact Flash hard drive and an external IDE CD-ROM drive. No need for Squirrels any more, this little interface makes things much simpler! The second square board you can see in the photo above clips over the Gayle chip and provides a full memory reset. As Ctrl-

Amiga-Amiga is broken on my 1200 anyway, this is doubly handy! I suspect a new keyboard membrane will be required to ﬁx my wonky keys generally the keys on the left side of the board are more unreliable. And where is my CF card? In a handy 3D printed slot on the back, that’s where! Compact Flash cards are surprisingly expensive these days, so I use a CF to SD card adapter. The “Transcend” model coupled with a SanDisk SD card - is the combination I use and have had no trouble with. Going online! My PCMCIA slot serves a dual purpose. I use a Compact Flash/PCMCIA adapter for data transfer onto the system, but I also use an EasyNet PCMCIA network card for the odd occasion I take my A1200 online. There isn’t much you can do online with it, but it just tickles me that it can!

ABOVE: ACA1221lc. BELOW: Blizzard 1230 MkII.

It works best with built-for-Amiga sites such as Aminet and Amigaworld.net, but take it to any site that requires https (encrypted connection) and you’re in for

a long wait between page loads. But you can forget Facebook and YouTube. Not even Vampire-equipped Amigas can handle those! As my Amiga 1200 lives under a TV and not on a desk, I need some way of accessing the keyboard. This is achieved with a little adapter that clips over the keyboard controller and allows me to use a standard wireless USB keyboard on my machine. Other modders have managed to squeeze a laptop CD drive inside their machine, and thanks to the internal clockport, graphics cards, sound cards, USB ports and many other options. The opportunities are endless! So why buy an A1200? The A1200 has WHDLoad support, numerous expansions and modiﬁcations available. If you are after a reasonably aﬀordable AGA Amiga that you can upgrade easily if you wish, then the A1200 is a serious contender, today as much as it was then.

LEFT: Deﬁnitely easier than taking the case apart to get to your Compact Flash or SD card! RIGHT: Online access on an Amiga is very useful indeed.

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AMIGA ADDICT

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NITY COMMU LE ARTIC ION SS SUBMI

Audio Oddities - vol. 2 by Paulee Alex Bow

- Let's make some waves with an Amiga I had to chuckle at this statement, not only because I'm a firm believer of the mantra “different tools produce different, interesting results”, but because the Amiga is chock FULL of musical potential. Some of that potential is obvious of course: the Amiga makes for a rather spectacular “crusty” sampler (with a maximum sampling rate of 28kHz) for all your Amen Break shenanigans, and a capable MIDI sequencer with an old school workflow that some musicians really gel with. Additionally, as mentioned in Issue 4's article, the Amiga makes for a uniquesounding lo-fi effects unit, full of characterful delays and reverbs; and a software synthesizer, able to respond to MIDI and be played or sequenced as an instrument.

The home of my A500+. Synthia can create great sample fodder for the Roland V-Synth and other instruments.

But there are some less obvious musical uses for a classic (or emulated) Amiga. This is where software like The Other Guys’ Synthia comes into focus. Sound On Sound 's Jan 1989 “Amiga Music!” article (ﬁnd it at www.muzines.co.uk) brieﬂy mentioned the software by stating: “Synthia is a synthesizer package, but it allows some pretty serious activity in the sound editing department. Its ability to treat samples is phenomenal, and it has one of the most easy-to-use front-ends I've seen on any such package.” This single paragraph piqued my interest. As I researched further, I discovered more details about the package. Synthia's own manual gives an accurate account of the development team's vision for the product:

Synthia arrived in quite a striking box, the design alone surely sold a few copies back in the day.

“In early 1987, the technical staﬀ at The Other Guys recognized a need for a computer program that could create IFF instruments for the many music programs that were available on the Amiga.” The team decided that it had to be “friendly” and powerful, able to make use of methods that weren't being used in most synthesizers of the day. Finally, it had to be “capable of imperfection”, of the “glitches and ﬂaws that give each instrument its own personality.”

Inside the box; a spiral-bound manual, ﬂoppy disk and registration card. I wonder who the "other guy" was?

Notice how IFF instruments were mentioned by the development team this is important. Unlike Aegis Sonix, Synthia is not a “real-time” synthesizer. It isn't constantly running oscillators, ﬁlters, and envelopes as live code. Instead, the musician must make their

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changes and then click the “Do Sound” button. Sonix's real-time nature certainly makes for a fun and tweakable synth, but this might bring a number of questions to mind. “Why can Sonix do this and Synthia can't?” Simply put, Sonix is a very simple synthesizer, whereas Synthia is miles deep and full of CPU-heavy synthesis methods and effects. A 68060 might be up to the task now... but this was 1987. The other question would be: “What's the point?” And that’s a very good question indeed... The Point When you click that “Do Sound” button, Synthia creates a “multi-sample”. It calculates what your creation would sound like playing at up to five different octaves, then renders these to an IFF file. Whilst in memory, you can use the keyboard keys (or MIDI) to play your sound or save it to a file. Whilst the team's original intention of making sounds for your mods is still relevant, in the modern studio, there is great potential in the samples that Synthia births, when used as fodder for your other synths and samplers! You will need to split up the file into five separate IFFs in order to do this, but Synthia adds markers to the sample to aid this process. Within the synthesizer world, analogue synths still seem to capture our hearts and souls like nothing else, a little like R2D2's bleeps and bloops. But there has always been a great appreciation within the synthesizer community for “hybrid” instruments. Hybrid synthesizers use (often crusty, 8-bit) digital waveforms and run them through analogue filters. You know - the things that go WEOWWW when you tweak them. Famous examples include the PPG Wave and Prophet VS. The filters tend to interact with jagged imperfections in the waveforms, leading to a very pleasing, unique sound. A great use of Synthia comes from taking her digitally-generated “characterful” waveforms and loading them into a sample playback synthesizer (or sampler) which has analogue filters. Older examples of hybrid sampling instruments include Korg's wonderful sounding (and huge!) DSS-1, which is blessed with just 256kb of memory! Sequential's Prophet 2000 and Emu's Emulator I, II, III and Emax 1 are also sought after, the Emu machines being Depeche Mode's weapon of choice. Newer instruments include

AMIGA ADDICT

AMIGA FOCUS

I recently witnessed something rather obtuse in an Amiga Facebook group. A member, (presumably Amigan?) stated that using classic machines for any “serious” creative work was “insane” apparently it was far more productive to use modern tools.

Synthia Effects AM modulator: The sound's volume is modulated by a user-definable waveform - you can use this to create interesting “tremolo” effects.

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Amplifier: The sound's volume is shaped by a user-definable envelope, making those plucks even pluckier, or conversely, fading a sound in from silence. Reverb: A series of delays are added to the sound to give a feeling of spaciousness or ambience. Because we are often working with short 8-bit samples, the effect is quite crude and not that pronounced. Still, it can be quite useful for smoothing out sudden tonal changes within a sound. Flanger: Flanging was originally achieved by synchronising two tape recorders. An engineer slowed down one of the tape machines by lightly pressing a finger on the “flange” (rim) of the machine's supply reel. Flanging adds a jet engine-like “swoosh” to any sound and, though on the subtle side, Synthia's version can be modulated by a user-definable waveform. Filter: A synthesizer staple, filters hack away at sound to alter its tone. Synthia features low-pass, high-pass, band-pass and band-limit options, giving you a lot of control. Waveshaper: Your sound is distorted via a lookup table. A little of this sprinkled on a dull sound will make it brighter, with more “twang” and bite. A lot of this will lead to very gnarly sounds... perfect for Trent Reznor's next album.

Gotharman's very unique Polyspaze, Elektron's Analog Rytm Drum Machine, and Waldorf's impressive Quantum. By taking Synthia's already unique samples and then ﬁltering them, you can make some wonderful, ear-catching sounds that you won't hear anywhere else. It's not just hybrid synths that can make use of the sounds either. There are a bunch of wholly digital instruments that can take advantage of Synthia's output.

Roland's V-Synth can bend and warp any sound you care to put in, whilst also having a large number of options, like emulated analogue-style filters and ring modulation to further shape your sound. The Elektron Octatrack is known as a “sample mangler” - it lets you loop small parts of samples, move those loops in real time, re-pitch them, cut them up and trigger them in various ways. My personal favourite sample mangler is the Ensoniq EPS16+, a 68000-based instrument that features all sorts of effects, including an amazing reverb. Anything you put into it ends up sounding dark, brooding... and expensive! Let’s not forget that there are also some amazing modern software samplers that can load up your samples, letting you fuse the new with the old, play them with massive polyphony (128 or more notes at once) and add all sorts of effects. A popular example is Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere. If your mind is racing with the possibilities, then perhaps it's time to look at how Synthia operates. How We Operate I had been using Synthia for a couple of weeks when a boxed copy was offered for sale in Canada, complete with the manual and disks. I asked my friend Kelly Emond if he could forward it on to me in Britain and he obliged. Thanks Kelly! (In fact, he proofread this article, so blame him for any spelling mistakes!) When you load up Synthia, be it from floppy or hard disk, you are greeted with a number of icons. It turns out Synthia is in fact five different synthesizers! Let's briefly explore each: Subtractive: The most basic engine. Synthia's other modes actually use this as a base, adding different features on top. Subtractive is the most common type of synthesis - it’s used by nearly all “analogue” synthesizers, and involves starting with a basic waveform, and then subtracting from it using various filters. For example: a saw wave can be turned

into a trumpet sound just by varying the frequency of a filter over time, mimicking the real instrument. In Synthia's subtractive mode, you get to pick or draw your own basic waveform, before filtering it or altering its volume, with or without an envelope (a way of changing the filter frequency over time). Additive: This less-common method was utilised in the (expensive) Synclavier line of instruments, as well as the Kawai K5000. Sound is built up from nothing using sine waves - in this case, 16 of them. It is even possible to set a different envelope for each of the 16, allowing you to create sophisticated moving timbres. Percussion: This engine features three different ways to make percussive drum sounds: filtered white noise, ringed filter (where a tuned filter is fed back on itself), and non-linear (which sticks a waveshaper in the feedback path!). Some great sounds can be created, including standard electronic snare and kick drums, swooshes, timpanis, weird cymbals, and grainy, weird 48K ZX Spectrum death sound effects. I will definitely be making use of this engine to build a library of cool drum samples! String: Making use of a tuned delay line, “Karplus-Strong” synthesis recreates the sounds of plucked instruments. Synthia includes options for nylon or steel, and the engine does a semi-realistic koto or acoustic guitar. By maxing out all of the parameters, you can create some ruder, glitchier sounds. Interpolation: This engine, which utilises the ever-popular “wavetable” synthesis type, allows the user to morph between eight different waveforms over time. It's entirely possible that, with some editing, you could make use of Synthia's exported waves in a hardware wavetable synth. I hope you'll agree that Synthia's five engines offer amazing scope for sonic exploration, and all in that lovely, crusty 8-bit Amiga sound. The fun doesn't stop there, however, because you can further sculpt your sound using a variety of effects (see the box out for more details)! I will be experimenting with Synthia's features over the next few months, making sounds for my samplers. It’s hard to resist, because the program's large buttons and inviting graphs completely encourage experimentation.

Opening the disk presents these synth options. They make me want to jump in and start clicking things.

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On this page you can edit basic waveforms. The synth engines use these as building blocks, combining them in various ways.

July 2021

To finish, I thought I'd share with you a little bonus feature that I discovered: it's perfectly possible to load any IFF 8SVX file into Synthia and add her effects to that file. Try waveshaping a drum loop, it's pretty intense!

What?! Amiga Pie? - We bid Simon a fond farewell as he wraps up the series Here we are on the 8th of July, and in exactly three weeks, I shall reach the grand old age of 64.

The Amiga is a star among stars, a worthy addition to the pantheon of computer legends. I am privileged to have encountered such. And on that note, I bid you all a fond farewell.

Simon Butler

I was never an Amiga addict. I don’t mean that in any derogatory way... I have just never held any of the machines on which I developed my pixels in any great regard. While fully understanding and appreciating the various strengths, weaknesses, advantages and/or failings of the many machines that have passed my way, I always saw them as a tool for graphics creation first and foremost, a games machine second. I was listening to a podcast recently, where Mr Barry Morse of The Retro Shed spoke with great passion about how the Amiga changed his gaming view of the world in a monumental fashion, and how he still holds it in a position of great affection. He is not the first to wave his flag of allegiance for the Amiga, and I’m most sure he shan’t be the last that I encounter in my career. But it is always a curious and endearing moment, when you hear someone speak so passionately about something that means so much to them, even after many decades. I admit to being mildly impressed the first time I encountered the Amiga, but perhaps the eternal cynic in me prevented any true connection to the new 16-bit machines. While I enjoyed the bigger and more colourful titles they brought with them, I never found myself worked into a lather over them like so many gamers, coders and developers of that era. I cannot deny the impact they had on the industry, and how it did feel like we had gone up several gears from the 8-bit era. But for me, it was simply a digital paintbrush (again, no insult intended) and my focus was - and always shall be - maintaining a revenue stream, rather than getting into a tizzy over the next new machine. Those years were filled with a constant stream of ever-changing computers, consoles, handhelds and doodads, and I was always moving on to the next machine to develop on, or the next console to waste inordinate hours whilst playing games for “research”. Sitting here now, at a station somewhere on the final stretch of my game development journey, while the track behind is longer than that ahead, I must admit that the advent of the 16bit era shaped my pixels into what they are today. Yes, there are occasions when I have a vast array of colours and greater resolution than ever before at my fingertips. But happily these occasions are few and far between - bigger means more work/ effort, and my eyes and patience ain’t what they used to be! There’s not a million miles between what people were doing back in those halcyon days, and what happens with games developed by a host of indie teams on a wide variety of platforms today. Whether they know their roots, or even acknowledge the birthplace of the graphics we see in modern titles is academic. The Amiga and its 16-bit companions led us to where we are now. They, in turn, had humble beginnings, but it’s still a long and glorious line of machines, each of which has its stalwart supporters and, of course, its detractors. But without which we would not have the memories of a childhood

July 2021

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Cue for a Beatles song perhaps? I have to be totally honest, and admit that I have no idea at all what I’m going to write about in this, my ﬁnal piece for Amiga Addict. I suppose it’s only ﬁtting that I vacate this slot for someone more deserving, because I have felt like an impostor at the best of times.

spent in strange and fantastical worlds.

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British Pie! A low-budget Amiga? Eben Upton joins AA to take a "byte" into some good ol' Cambridge-baked Raspberry goodness.

Issue 8 - On sale August 2021 PLUS ! 58

• Stoo Cambridge • Amiga Hard Drive Data Recovery • Rob Smith: Amiga Slimline USB Floppy • X-Copy feature • Creative Revolution: Art Department Pro • Six of the Best with Jim Bagley • Gold Standard: Slam Tilt • As well as our regular columns including gaming articles, CD32 Corner, Across The Pond, Back In The Day '92, Amiga News & Keyboard Warriors!

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021

AMIGA ADDICT

July 2021