Where Time Stood Still - No CPC really ?

[kawickboy]

Does anybody know why this spiritual sequel to the great escape never had a CPC release ?
The game exists on Spectrum & Atari ST but no CPC...



https://youtu.be/dz1Tnm0mlQg



https://youtu.be/y5Wyy-B5k6A

[Shaun M. Neary]

Does anybody know why this spiritual sequel to the great escape never had a CPC release ?
The game exists on Spectrum & Atari ST but no CPC...



https://youtu.be/dz1Tnm0mlQg



https://youtu.be/y5Wyy-B5k6A

I'm open to correction here but I believe the designer, John Heap of Denton Designs tried to downscale it for the 48k Speccy and then port it over to the Amstrad, but ultimately ran out of time before release deadline, so both got scrapped.

That's why it only ended up being a 128k release for the Speccy.

[tjohnson]

I'll have to look this up, it sounds a bit sad but the for some reason I always loved the great escape on CPC.  I remember playing it on my cousins spectrum originally before buying my own copy.  I like the box art too.

[zeropolis79]

Memory is the same reason it never came out on the C64 either.


I would have loved this on the CPC but sadly I never played it until I got a Speccy.. Wonder if anyone could port it to the CPC?

[Gryzor]

If memory serves, it *is* a bit big for 128K, let alone 64K?

[eto]

Looking at the Speccy map I would say it seems bigger than it really is. The tiles are very big. I would estimate the playfield is something around 60x80 and 80x120 tiles. Not too many different tiles, so probably 1 byte per tile is sufficient, so we would end up somewhere between 5 and 10KB just for the map. Which might be hard on 64K, but should be fine for 128K.

[zeropolis79]

https://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=WhereTime&sort=3&part=0&ath=0&voting=1


Map looks bigger than you'd think, but think of how much is shown on screen - for instance, I don't think the whole bridge is seen on screen.


But I can't see any reason why it couldn't be ported to the CPC..

[XeNoMoRPH]

Denton Desings worked at Spectrum and C64, they didn't deal with the CPC; if their games were converted they were from third parties (for example James Software converted "The Great Escape", which has a graphics engine similar to Where time stood still.
Where time stood still, had versions for all 16 bits, but only the one for Spectrum 128 in 8 bits. In fact, it was Denton Designs' last 8-bit game.

[eto]

https://maps.speccy.cz/map.php?id=WhereTime&sort=3&part=0&ath=0&voting=1


Map looks bigger than you'd think, but think of how much is shown on screen - for instance, I don't think the whole bridge is seen on screen.

Yes, the map looks huge. But it is obviously based on tiles. And each tile is huge on screen, so that a relatively small number of tiles creates a huge map. See attachment. I tried to show how big a single tile is. And each tile probably is represented by only 1 byte in memory. 

[dragon]

Does anybody know why this spiritual sequel to the great escape never had a CPC release ?
The game exists on Spectrum & Atari ST but no CPC...



https://youtu.be/dz1Tnm0mlQg



https://youtu.be/y5Wyy-B5k6A

I found this article that claim:

http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/where-time-stood-still/

"Denton Designs' love for memory hungry video games from their Imagine Software days made Where Time Stood Still a whopping 128k and the inability to make it a multi-loader due to the game being one massive map, made it virtually impossible to port to the Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC (which were only 64k each). Denton had suggested to Ocean Software, (WTSS' publisher) to port the game to the Commodore 128 and Amstrad CPC 6128 (which did have 128k of memory) but the ultra limited user base of both computers at the time made Ocean reluctant to port anything to them, so were ultimately cancelled"

[kawickboy]

Having the same behaviour with C128 and 128ko CPC... What a curious way to consider CPC market. In France CPC with 128ko were not so rare.

[remax]

In France CPC with 128ko were not so rare.

It's an euphemism.