Pete Holland wrote:
>I would gladly do without sound effects for the
>charming tunes. This was probably the biggest
>disappointment with the 2600 version of Amidar. I
>liked that carnival music. By the way, did you do a
>"full instrument" soundtrack to what you wrote above,
>and where can I get one?
Yes, Amidar appeared in our arcade as the same time as Turtles (the machines
actually stood next to each other and not only had similar sound tracks, but
also a similar case design). By the way, did you know that Turtles is
probably the arcade game that was the most closely adapted to the Odyssey^2
of all arcade games they did for this console? (Well, judging for the
abilities of this system of course...) They even tried to re-create the
sound (music was just not possible with the one sound generator the Odyssey
has), and the player having multiple lives (in almost all Odyssey games, you
only have 1 life...), as well as the game-start and mid-level sequences...
It's also the only game released by Philips (Magnavox) retaining the
original arcade name... well, I think that's probably because they couldn't
copyright the name "Turtles", being a word for... well, turtles. There also
appeared an Entex hand-held game by that name, where their other games were
called "Galaxian 2", "Pac-Man 2" and so on... and it was the only handheld
game to have background music! (but only one-voice...)
Well, as for my own version, I didn't release that song, which by the way
was recorded in at least 4 different versions. Bear in mind that at that
time, I was roughly 11 years old, and did that song using very unusual
hardware (two cassette recorders, one cheap Casio keyboard and a microphone
that basically came with a tape recorder), so the sound quality is very low,
and you can hear me singing with my child's voice (multiple voices,
though... I already managed to do this, also multi-plexed the Casio's only
voice by doing that), and it's in German. Back then, I also didn't think
someone ever could be interested in hearing songs I did. This came about two
years later when I included one of my songs on an English tape I copied for
a classmate...
So... what do you mean with a "full instrument" soundtrack?
And Dennis wrote:
>This may show up twice because I sent the original from my work address
>(sorry Glenn). Anyway go to
>http://www.cyberroach.com/cyromag/six/cge991.htm. Cyberroach has pictures
>of the ebivision version of pacman. They also have a mpeg of the game in
>action. Rumor was that Eric did a pacman game with no flicker. It seemed
>impossible and it is. He did something very similar to mspacman but it
>still is a great looking game. Sure wish I had it in my collection or to
>play on an emulator :)
Well... I looked at this picture, and it's not quite "as close as it could
get". OK, it's actually near perfect, and even the "holes" in the maze
aren't really disturbing, for the original maze also has got holes...
However, I think the layout of the maze is SLIGHTLY wrong. What do I mean by
this? Well, it's a bit hard to explain...
Basically, the maze can nearly be divided in a grid of 10x10, where the grid
lines are either on or off. In the arcade, the distance from one grid field
to another is 3 dots (to eat), which is basically 3 characters (by 8
pixels). In Ebivision's version, it's 2 dots.
Now, in the arcade, they didn't have 30 characters of resolution to fit this
in, but only 28, so they had to cut away 2 characters.
So, which ones did they cut? Well, if you look at the lower left power pill
and go right from there, in the arcade you only go 2 dots instead of three.
That's where they cut it (and on the opposite side too, of course).
Now Ebivision, in my opinion, did this cut wrong. If you go right here from
the lower left power pill, it's the normal 2 dots, which is standard here.
Instead, if you look at the center of the screen, you'll find that from the
dot column next to the center, there's only one dot to go to the next one,
where in the arcade there's the normal distance of 3 here. (I hope you see
what I mean). In my opinion they should have done the normal distance of 2
here and instead put the distance of 1 next to the power pills, where the
reduced distance was in the arcade.
But otherwise, it's looking great (I can't judge sound, not having a
soundcard here). And this glitch, in my opinion, should be rather easy to
fix...
With love from Austria (and many soundtracks to create)
Kurt Woloch
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