DAD.PRG - making BombBloke

Let's talk about how fucking badass lemon&lime sprite editor is. Because I'm fucking proud of it. And it's only just beginning. It exports a fucktonne of formats. - Atari ST — Degas, NeoChrome and DPaint IFF, bundled into a real FAT12 .st. - Amiga — proper OCS/ECS IFF in a hand-rolled AmigaDOS OFS .adf - Amstrad CPC — Mode 0 screen + OCP .WIN + a palette-setting BASIC loader on an AMSDOS .dsk you can RUN. - C64 — Koala multicolour with per-cell colour reduction, on a CBM-DOS .d64 with real track/sector chains. - ZX Spectrum — a true .SCR with attribute handling, wrapped in a .TAP with a hand-tokenised autorun BASIC loader. - Atari 8-bit — four GTIA modes, each as a raw screen, a self-displaying .XEX, and a self-booting .ATR with a custom boot loader and an ANTIC display list hand-assembled in 6502. Palettes and constraints match the real fucking hardware. Spectrum colour clash. C64 colour regions. Atari mode budgets. If a frame breaks the rules you can jump straight to it. This shit is fucking amazing. You can draw your fucking sprite, download a disk image and throw that fucker right into your real machine or your emulator and it will fucking work. Put that in your motherfucking pipe and smoke it.

I’m this old. Any Amstrad users among my motley crew of followers? Thought it might be fun to add my other childhood computer to the mix. Cracking little machine though I’m not sure Amstrad showcased it brilliantly with Oh Mummy and Animal, Mineral or Vegetable.

@exQUIZitely True, but they gave it a damn good try.

@dad_prg MicroProse was the king of manuals though... that's one area where Lucasfilm could not touch them :)

"Splendid shooting. You're an expert gunner!" Battlehawks 1942 (1988) is an early WWII naval air combat flight simulator developed by Lucasfilm Games (designed by Lawrence Holland who later also created X-Wing and TIE Fighter). Set in the Pacific theatre, it lets you fly as either an American or Japanese pilot in four historical operations. You engage in carrier-based dogfights, torpedo and dive-bombing runs, and escort missions using planes like the F4F Wildcat, SBD Dauntless, A6M Zero, and Val. What made Battlehawks 1942 great were its gorgeous (for its time!) graphics, and a strong emphasis on historical accuracy. It was so good that two more sequels followed, in what became a truly legendary WWII air combat trilogy. The sequels were: Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain (1989), now focused on the European theatre with more/better campaigns and RAF/Luftwaffe dogfights. Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991), the final chapter, focusing on the final years of WWII (1943 - 1945) with experimental German jets and a dynamic campaign.

@ChiefAgenteer A wise man. Absolute banger of a game. You may be interested in @randomcodingdud who is making a remake for modern PCs.

@dad_prg PowerMonger for life.

Some people preferred Populous, but I preferred PowerMonger (or Warmonger as Bullfrog wanted to call it but were denied by EA). Did you prefer it to Populous? I love the visuals and clever things like chopping trees down making it more rainy, running out of wood eventually, the villagers going about their daily lives, it's just a really good chill game.

@RaceSimCentral It’s more accurate than you might expect. I’ve driven on a few real F1 tracks over the years and obviously layouts changed but the bits that haven’t match up surprisingly well.

Just how accurate were the tracks in Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix? Here's a side by side comparison between F1GP (Amiga version) and real-life. The real lap has been adjusted to match speed only. #simracing #retrogaming #f1 #senna #monza

Off topic I know but is anyone else finding the recent update to @plex with the new UI painfully slow and crashy?

@dhh Honestly one of my all time favourites. Played the demo on ST Format 25 to death and later played the Amiga version a tonne. Sensible were so so good.

In my mind's eye, this game looked very different. But in my mind's ear, it sounded exactly like this. Funny how 35 year-old memories come back to us. I loved this era of Amiga gaming.

@maraka77i Definitely getting some hints on what to cover here. Seems we need some Paradroid. The Spy Who Loved Me was definitely one I wanted but with a limited budget I didn’t get it, but it looked cool as fuck.

@dad_prg Paradroid 90 aswell. When this was published, I didn't even know the original Paradroid existed. But oh boy, we played tons of this! And Torvak! And The Spy Who Loved Me! I think Lost Soul ended up in, er, being lost, even if a rolling demo was archived some years ago.

This was the peak of the Atari ST. Which was your favourite game out of *deep breath*: Spindizzy Worlds James Pond Shadow Of The Beast Paradroid 90 Gettysburg Voodoo Nightmare Turrican Dragon Breed Spiderman Strider 2 Ranx Flipit & Magnose The Spy Who Loved Me Chuck Yeager's AFT Torvak UN Squadron Pick N Pile Spellbound Atomic Robokid Bat Legend Of Faerghail M1 Tank Platoon The Light Corridor Blitzkrieg Fire & Forget 2 Back To The Gold Age Lost Soul Badlands Pete That is, to use a technical term, a fuckload of games.

@TommiSairo I imagine a few C64 enthusiasts will be nodding their heads in agreement

@dad_prg Out of that lot: Paradroid '90, no question about it

@budgames To this day, just walking in and wandering around the Hall Of Champions is just perfect chill. I'm just in my happy place right there.

@dad_prg I remember the first time I opened the door ... And the giant worm

Enter stranger..

@AtariCrypt You definitely bring the deeper cuts.

Good morning Twitt... erm... X people. Here is a belting shooter for the Atari ST to start your day ataricrypt.blogspot.com/2023/01/sdi-no…

@exQUIZitely While a subtle distinction I’d say Mega Lo Mania was more turn based but with auto advancing turns. Certainly when I’ve experimented with remaking the basic design that’s where it’s typically landed. Fantastic game though and ergonomically it’s tewwific.

"We've advanced a tech level!" Popular belief credits Dune II as the first major RTS, and it certainly launched the genre into the spotlight with near perfect reviews and massive commercial success. However, other RTS games predated it. One was Mega-Lo-Mania, developed by Sensible Software and released in 1991 for the Amiga and Atari ST. You control one of four gods: Scarlet (red), Oberon (yellow), Caesar (green), or Madcap (blue), trying to conquer 28 islands across eras from 9500 BC to 2001 AD, each with new units and structures. You begin with 100 men per island, mine resources, research tech trees to unlock units from primitive cavemen to powerful tanks and lasers. Though smaller in scope than Dune II, it helped pave the way for the genre. The digitized speech and pixelated beauty still holds up if you ask me. Not bad for a 35 year old game.

@johnrheritage @maraka77i @Philsan69 That’s pretty damn fancy.

@maraka77i @dad_prg @Philsan69 The color effect below can be done in Atari 8bit hardware. ST would require software. (Not sure if STe's blitter could even do this?)

New video of Golden Axe work in progress for #Atari8bit computers #atari

@NES_Professor I have absolutely no fucking clue how you hold that thing.

What’s your honest opinion of this controller?

@CPCGAMINGDEMOS Wait there’s an Amstrad version of Sim City? Gonna have to hunt that down…

what's an #amstradcpc? That #8bit #retro #computer doesn't have a big #videogames library not so my #nostalgic #gaming buddies it has a large library that includes the likes of #simcity that turned out to be pretty decent but high on the difficulty scale 🙃🙃🙃🤪😜😝

@SierraOnLineUni I honestly preferred the original. I found the graphics more readable.

🆚 Original VS Remake Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (1987) Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards - VGA Remake (1991) 6 #VS #LeisureSuitLarry #SierraOnLine #SierraGames #AdventureGame #PointAndClick #RetroGaming #PcGaming #Gaming #90s

Conversion from 8-bit formats to the 16-bits should land tonight - the other way is going to be a bit of hard work that needs a bit of thinking about.

Let's talk about how fucking badass lemon&lime sprite editor is. Because I'm fucking proud of it. And it's only just beginning. It exports a fucktonne of formats. - Atari ST — Degas, NeoChrome and DPaint IFF, bundled into a real FAT12 .st. - Amiga — proper OCS/ECS IFF in a hand-rolled AmigaDOS OFS .adf - Amstrad CPC — Mode 0 screen + OCP .WIN + a palette-setting BASIC loader on an AMSDOS .dsk you can RUN. - C64 — Koala multicolour with per-cell colour reduction, on a CBM-DOS .d64 with real track/sector chains. - ZX Spectrum — a true .SCR with attribute handling, wrapped in a .TAP with a hand-tokenised autorun BASIC loader. - Atari 8-bit — four GTIA modes, each as a raw screen, a self-displaying .XEX, and a self-booting .ATR with a custom boot loader and an ANTIC display list hand-assembled in 6502. Palettes and constraints match the real fucking hardware. Spectrum colour clash. C64 colour regions. Atari mode budgets. If a frame breaks the rules you can jump straight to it. This shit is fucking amazing. You can draw your fucking sprite, download a disk image and throw that fucker right into your real machine or your emulator and it will fucking work. Put that in your motherfucking pipe and smoke it.