Say you have a multicartridge for CPC+ with 8 ROMs

[Bryce]

No sure about Pang, but the diagnostics Cartridge was only available as a cartridge.

Bryce.

[ralferoo]

The guy who wrote pang sits next to me at work.  He only remembers developing it for the console...

[mr_lou]

The guy who wrote pang sits next to me at work.  He only remembers developing it for the console...

Well ask him what the hold up is for the disk version then. 

[MacDeath]

Those Cartridge games were all supposed to be cartridge exclusivity...


But some of them are ports from the Disk/tape version... and to play them on Disk offer quite the exact same playability...
the only add-on are the graphics I guess.


Games that were released only on Cartridge :
=Robocop 2
=Navy Seal
=Pang (yet it have a Disk "clone", zapt n ball ?)
=Plotting

=Copter271
=Burnin' rubber (yet Wec le Mans can be considered its Disk version)

=Epyx World of sport : yet many Epyx sport games are available on disk and offer the same sort of mini games.

=skeetshot and the enforcer (need a light gun/light pen)

for the rest, in many case the Disk version is not as good looking :
=Op.thunderbolt
=both Tennis games
=Crazy Car2
=Fire and forget2

=Panza : the cart version use bigger screen, yet a disk version with PLUS features also exist (best of the best)

=Switchblade : play the same on both, just less colourfull on disk.

=Tintin is perhaps slightly better looking, don't know.

=Magic pinball : the disk version is in mode1 instead of Mode0+sprites.

=No exit : sadly this game is almost unplayable, but looks very good on PLUS.

=Wild street...

=dick tracy.

for a few other this is exactly the same game.
=Mystical
=Batman (the movie)
=Barbarian2
=Klax

Seriously what was wrong with Titus ?
they shat a lot of awfull games on the poor GX4000 it is even a crime...

they actually edited a lot of games, perhaps the editor who produced the biggest number of games appart from OCEAN...

And none of them were actually good.

=wildstreet is terribad.
=Crazy Car was a good CPC game, but already old when released on Cartridge and the gameplay didn't really aged well, as there is almost no road traffic  or something.
=Dick Tracy : it even almost look better on CPC.

=Fire and forget2 : used to be a good game on CPC. but the console version could have used some better playability...

I wished Titus did release Cartridge/PLUS version of games such as prehistorik1, Blues brother and Titus the fox instead.

On the other hand, Loriciels managed to produce 3 very good games...
well, Copter271 wasn't really finished actually but hey...

Magic Pinball, Panza and TennisCup2 were great and exploited well the machine.


but it is a shame Loriciel didn't produced some cartridge/PLUS with  Skweek and Disc (of tron) too.

[Carnivius]

=Switchblade : play the same on both, just less colourfull on disk.

Stop saying that.  It's plenty colorful in different ways as I already explained.  The disk version, is in my opinion, superior in it's color usage.

[MacDeath]

you can't deny the Cartridge Switchblade displays more colour on screen...

Despite some of the sprite "tiles" seem to be coloured at random.

[Carnivius]

Not many more.  I've explained there are times where the disk version technically even has more colours in use than most Mode 0 games.  And yeah I don't much care for the seemingly random (and strangely coloured) tile variations of the cartridge version.  And that red gradient sky?  Nice for the first few screens but then you never see it again.  Stryker in the Crypts of Trogan makes far better use of sky gradients (smoother too) and you see them much more often.  I like that the score and status on the disk version of SwitchBlade are coloured better than the cart version and you see those all the time so yeah the disk version is definitely more consistently coloured.  Is there any way the cartridge version could have at least used hardware sprites on Hiro himself to give him a bit more colour and look more accurate to the box art?  That would have looked a lot better than the oddly coloured tiles.

[arnoldemu]

both versions use colour well. on the cpc I really like the coloured sword, much better than the plus version.
I am sure for the plus they used raster interrupts which make colour changes so much easier, so technically the cpc version is better because of it's clever use of colour and things.

Yes, Hiro could have been a h/w sprite, perhaps 2 positioned vertically. Why they didn't do that? Don't know, perhaps they didn't have time or the space to store the images. Having sprites would probably take more cartridge ROM space.

I'm guessing the cart wasn't larger was because the cost of ROM was expensive, or expensive enough not to justify it.

So for switchblade all versions are nice.


As for other cartridge games, if the system had sold well, then we may have had much more games with plus features, and much better carts.
I guess initially, converting an existing game to cart was cheap. So that is why they did it. Making it just for cart was probably a bit more expensive. I am glad Ocean bothered to do that.

[MiguelSky]

for a few other this is exactly the same game.
=Batman (the movie)

Batman Cartridge version uses a softer palette than Batman disc, as you can see at http://amstradcpc.mforos.com/305097/2532928/

[MacDeath]

Batman Cartridge version uses a softer palette than Batman disc

Ouch, those jpg picture don't help, and my spanish is no good, which picture is which version ?

Anyway, this can come a bit from the fact the PLUS doesn't emulate the CPC colours that much very well...
And... while at it, they really could have done a fare better recolour job.

just give me the tiles and sprites, an amiga500+ deluxe paint and 2 days and I can do it in 1989.

I like that the score and status on the disk version of SwitchBlade are coloured better than the cart version

You are right... the rasters for the status bar are badly used on the cart version... quite a waste of rasters actually.

Disk version was actually released after the cart.
So some improvements were perhaps done.

concenring the Harsprites used for tiles instead of sprite...
the PLUS "sprites" are not particulary easy to use as "sprites"... IMO they are more some sort of movable extra overlay masked tiles than sprites.

And I think switchblade use them a nice way... simply as extra coloured tiles.
Sadly their palette swaps are somewhat loosy..
And yep, Hiro could have used those sprites.

Crypt of Trogan is a further improvement from the Switchblade engine, sadly the PLUS doesn't really use Hardsprites because... those are heavy (8bpp... ouch) and being CPC/PLUS, the game use the RAM to store a lot of stuff.

But also the raster are well used on both CPC and PLUS for this one ("buggers at the crypt of trogan"...)

[dragon]

Pang use very good the hardware sprites.If I remember correctly,All the balls and the player are made with the hardware sprites.And they move very good.

[arnoldemu]

concenring the Harsprites used for tiles instead of sprite...
the PLUS "sprites" are not particulary easy to use as "sprites"... IMO they are more some sort of movable extra overlay masked tiles than sprites.

I have a game that is in development that uses the plus sprites as sprites. (animating character moving about) and they work well.

Yes there is a limited number of them, and yes it takes a bit of time to fill the ram with data.. but they are ok.

I wish that amstrad had not locked each sprite to a specific location in the sprite ram. if they had allowed me to say "sprite 0 uses cell 1" that would really make them much better, but they didn't. they locked sprite 0 to cell 0, and sprite 1 to cell 1 etc.

[Gryzor]

The guy who wrote pang sits next to me at work.  He only remembers developing it for the console...

Ohhh please do give him a warm handshake, will you?

[MacDeath]

Yes there is a limited number of them, and yes it takes a bit of time to fill the ram with data.. but they are ok.

of course they can be used as sprite, but to "refresh" their content takes time so you can't expect to use them like they are used on other consoles or C64 (yet those PLUS sprites are 16 colour while MSX1 or C64 have poor coloured sprites)

I wish that amstrad had not locked each sprite to a specific location in the sprite ram. if they had allowed me to say "sprite 0 uses cell 1" that would really make them much better, but they didn't. they locked sprite 0 to cell 0, and sprite 1 to cell 1 etc.

the ideal would/could have been to have something like a complete 16K VRAM chip for this purpose (inside the Asic or even aside...).

Sadly the ASIC is full of stuff and the ideal PLUS computer/console would actually need 2 ASICs instead of one (like, one for the video, one for the rest).

Pang use very good the hardware sprites.If I remember correctly,All the balls and the player are made with the hardware sprites.And they move very good.

the players sprites are somewhat not that greatly "animated" but nicely moved.

those PLUS sprites are easy to move, but the trickier part is to change the content (animation frames) in graphic Data, not to get them "moved on the screen".


But yea... being a slow process doens't mean it is impossible task.

The guy who wrote pang sits next to me at work.

hey, it would be cool that we give him an interview you know ?

Like how it was at OCEAN, of were games developped on GX4000, all the Amstrad screweries, the tools he used and so on.

[ralferoo]

hey, it would be cool that we give him an interview you know ?
...
Like how it was at OCEAN, of were games developped on GX4000, all the Amstrad screweries, the tools he used and so on.

Well, I can ask him if he's up for an interview (he's gone home for the day now), but from speaking to him a while back, I'm not sure he remembers most of the specifics as it was 22 years ago! From what he's told me the other day, he actually worked for Arc, so I guess the game was just published by Ocean.

Tools wise, he said by then he was using a PC with a Z80 cross assembler and downloaded the code to the target computer from there. He remembers they used a retail console with a cartridge they could download code on to, but he didn't know who made that. I guess probably Amstrad because it'd need an ACID chip, but it could have been proprietry to Ocean. He mentioned that he was still in contact with some of the guys he worked with around that time, so I asked if he could see if they had any photos or documentation from what they used for the GX4000, but he's not mentioned it since so I guess he hasn't spoken to them yet. I suspect though that a lot of that stuff will be lost by now though anyway.

One funny thing he said though is that they were 2 weeks late sending the game to Ocean because every time they changed anything, they'd play the game for another hour or so because they enjoyed playing it so much...

[MacDeath]

it would need the help of the usual interviewer we have in the CPC comunity.

We should gather a set of questions so I guess I would have to ask at CPCrulez and P&P or Phenixinformatique to have good questions.

Perhaps you should gather questions here too.

Average set of question would be like :

=first computer and how he came to programing
=where he worked/studies

=other games he did (if so)...

=teammates on this games, method of work as a team.


We should ask for sources codes he may still have (or some of his previous co-workers) or some tricks or methods he used (so we could understand the game betterly)

and so on and so on.

also what's his favourite beer...

One funny thing he said though is that they were 2 weeks late sending the game to Ocean because every time they changed anything, they'd play the game for another hour or so because they enjoyed playing it so much...

completely awesome.

[dragon]

the ideal would/could have been to have something like a complete 16K VRAM chip for this purpose (inside the Asic or even aside...). Sadly the ASIC is full of stuff and the ideal PLUS computer/console would actually need 2 ASICs instead of one (like, one for the video, one for the rest).

I think their problem in plus machines is the time of designing.The asic in the plus is bugged.Probably,because they no have time to test it.Or because they know the problems,but they no have time to repair it.The sdc separator is out of the asic because time scale preasures.


Alan sugar probably can't acept a second asic.He search a cheap computer.The example is the sinclair Ql.Big expensive  machine.To expensive to Alan sugar->out.


The onboard asic ram 2kb is  used for sprites?.

The ideal in any case.Is we need a amstrad gate array ula book :  D.To made a clone with a superplus asic .

.

One funny thing he said though is that they were 2 weeks late sending the game to Ocean because every time they changed anything, they'd play the game for another hour or so because they enjoyed playing it so much...

Two weeks more.And the pang became a legend with the chase h.Q 2.  . Probably he made the best cartridge in the history of cpc+

[arnoldemu]

Probably he made the best cartridge in the history of cpc+

Yes he did.

[ivarf]

find out what they are paying him now and how much we need to donate to get him coding on the plus/gx4000 again

[Gryzor]

@ralferoo: it's not required for him to remember everything, your post is good enough as part of an interview! Just start talking to him and compile a few of those? Pretty please?


@Ivarf: +1!

[Badstarr]

I'm not too sure that they didn't include the data separator etc in the ASIC because of time restraints. I think it was probably more likely that they didn't want to have two soldering processes for the main board of the 6128 and the 464. If the data separator and FDC had been included in the ASIC it would have been fairly trivial to solder a few wires and have a 6128 with only the need for a FDD and a pin header/ribbon cable.This wouldn't have necessarily been something your average joe with a soldering iron may have done back then, but if a fairly skilled electronics buisiness made the modification and undercut Amstrad by selling disk ready machines it would have been potentially bad for Amstrad. Not that the plus series really gained much traction in the market place in the end anyway. Having to source a fair few components for an albeit, still relatively simple mod would have a good barrier to this sort of thing.

[Bryce]

The ASIC used in the Plus doesn't have the capacity or the pin count to support FDC and Data Separator functionality, they would have had to choose a completely different ASIC. I doubt the ever considered integrating them.

Bryce.

[TFM]

Arnold 5 tells about it IIRC.

[Badstarr]

If they had emulated the FDC etc (maybe in a more capacious ASIC) maybe they would have had to pay a royalty too so this would have bumped up the cost even more. I suppose when you think about it there are many reasons to keep the FDC out of the ASIC.

[Bryce]

As well as that, the µPD765 was being sold by the tonne at the time, it was used in absolutely everything and probably only cost pennies.

Bryce.