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#1
@andycadley - Were only one producer.
#2
C
Games / Re: The Key, a A "full" point ...
Last post by cwpab - Today at 20:49
I just watched part of a live interview to the PAKET team on the Juanje Juega Youtube channel.

The guys are very intelligent: the mansion is admitedly copied from Luigi's Mansion, they will be releasing parts 2 and 3, they don't want people to buy the game to never play it... And they plan to include a TDK casette with the physical edition, a reproduction of a real cassette the programmer found on a drawer with a CPC Basic game programmed by his 10yo brother in the 80s.

I'm a fan of "escape the room" Flash games, so I will play it at some point. I'm lately not a fan of 3rd person graphic adventures (you end up watching your character walk 90% of the time). I believe, just like Mario 64 destroyed video games with the forced analog stick and camera controls, what IBM did with King's Quest (forcing them to add "cool animations") in a way not destroyed, but it certainly complicated a genre that was having lots of problems before that.

So instead of fixing the "moon logic" stuff, graphic adventures (not the ones who made the first 2 Monkey Islands and Indiana Jones, or Space Quest 1, 4 and 5, and I also like Coktel Vision's 1st person games except for a couple of crazy puzzles) went full "animations" mode with the 3rd person view. And only in a few years, voice acting and FMV actually destroyed the genre by increasing the budgets exponentially.

The logical, my friends, progression of text adventures was something like Myst (but not so confusing), not King's Quest. And 3rd person action games are usually better in 3D because of Miyamoto (who admitted they had to make jumps much easier in Mario 64 due to the control problems... seriously, what's the fun of going in any direction/speed if you can't really control it and you lose all the digital precision?).

Back to The Key, I guess it will win the Best of 2024 award or the Sugars or whatever... There are still 8 more months, but I don't think any worthy rival will appear. 
#3
Quote from: eto on Today at 19:54
Quote from: andycadley on Today at 18:55There were some jumpers for the manufacturer and I guess there was some change for keyboard layouts?
In the Plus there are no jumpers.

Depending on the cartridge ROM, the Plus behaves as a French, Spanish or English version.



Yes. 
In fact, that's just how it is. The cartridge contains the language version of the operating system and also the keyboard mapping. I have three cartridges (collected over the years) in English, French and Spanish. To differentiate themselves they have labels of different colors.
#4
D
GFX + Tunes / Re: Amstrad music
Last post by dal - Today at 20:12
#5
Quote from: andycadley on Today at 18:55There were some jumpers for the manufacturer and I guess there was some change for keyboard layouts?
In the Plus there are no jumpers. 

Depending on the cartridge ROM, the Plus behaves as a French, Spanish or English version. 


#7
avatar_Jean-Marie
Programming / Re: Identifying firmware versi...
Last post by Jean-Marie - Today at 19:24
The game Jungle Jane (1985) used this snippet of code to identify the firmware version :
jungle jane © bug-byte (1985) (cpc-power.com)
 Comments are in french, but you can translate in spanish from CPC-power website I guess.

CD 00 B9 ... CALL &B900 .... (sélectionner la ROM supérieur)
3A 02 C0 ... LD A,(&C002) .. A = l'octet en &C002 (CPC 464 = 0 ; CPC 664 = 1 ; CPC 6128 = 2 ; CPC 6128+ = 4)
F5 ......... PUSH AF ....... Sauver les registres A et F
CD 03 B9 ... CALL &B903 .... Coupe la ROM supérieure pour resélectionner la RAM
F1 ......... POP AF ........ Restaurer les registres A et F
32 00 02 ... LD (&0200),A .. Ecrire en &0200 la valeur du registre A
C9 ......... RET
#9
I'm not sure the firmware was ever really translated. There were some jumpers for the manufacturer and I guess there was some change for keyboard layouts?

There isn't really much "language" support there though, really. You wouldn't want the actual BASIC commands changed, because it would break software.
#10
About the firmware, I have a curiosity.
But I'll give a little background, my first computer was a ZX-Spectrum followed by an Amstrad CPC 464.
Then I switched to PC with an Amstrad PC 1640, but my passion for 8 bits led me to be persuaded by my trusted salesman to buy a CPC 6128Plus in 1990.
Although in Italy my CPC 6128 Plus had the cartridge with the firmware in English, my curiosity is...did a firmware in Italian ever exist?

P.S.
The same salesman convinced me in 1992 to buy, at a bargain price, a Sam Coupe  ;D
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