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ATARI ST Fan from Austria


simoncam

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I'm not really new here, but I never introduced myself.

 

I am Thomas. I am from Austria/Europe.

 

And I am the creator of the brand new ATARI ST(e) games LASERBALL 2015 and ANARCHO Ride. (I wanted to add – awsome – great – brilliant – uncomparable… but… hmmmm… ;) )

And As I like others to find my game I try to find as much ATARI/Retro communities as possible.

 

So here comes my history:

The ATARI ST was my first computer back in the day, and when my parents bought it, they wanted me to have a serious computer, not a “stupid gaming machine”. So as mostly in the German speaking territories, I got mine with a monochrome high-res screen. And guess what: Without anyone else having and ST and a Monochrome Screen not really great for gaming, I started to program my own stuff on that damn thing.

Ok, later I got myself a colour monitor. And I continued coding… But time passed by and I switched to the PC World. I lost my interest in coding and lived on my live.

 

Until 1014.

 

I was playing around with emulators and started to read out my old floppies. And there it was: My 1991 game “Laserball”. Full of bugs. Full of copyrighted graphics. No Music. Only a few levels. And a hard to understand gameplay. No Fun.

But it was enough to get back my attention. And I carried on, where I left off almost 25 years ago. I made it bigger and better. I kicked out the copyrighted graphics and added Music. I made it a brain-cracking Puzzle game. Lots of fun!

And in 2015 I boxed it for other ATARI Fans to have even more fun.

(Graphics and Artwork by Melanie Schober / Music by xFalcon)

 

Just at the moment when I thought “that’s it!” I stumbled over another code fragment from 1990. It was not even a game. It was a mathematical experiment. It was a moving street. Nothing else. But again I could not stop myself.

I realized very early, that I can never make my “moving street” into a game that could keep up with the classics of the genre. So I decided to go a different path: I made it the opposite of a racing game. It is – as written in the review of MAGGIE 25th - “a racing game to end all sensible racing games.“

Pure fun. No reason.

(Graphics by Alan Garrison Tomkins / Artwork by Melanie Schober / Music by xFalcon)

 

In other words: I made too games that could hardly be any more different form each other.

When I list the technical specs of the games – Level management, Expansion Packs, own script language, graphical level editor, dynamic file linking… some have a hard time to believe that all of it was only done in GFA Basic. The only language that I ever mastered on the only system that I ever mastered.

 

So have fun playing my games.

They are for free.

http://www.hd-videofilm.com/laserball

http://www.hd-videofilm.com/anarcho

 

Btw: I enjoy every question, game review, (YouTube) video or game comment ;)

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Welcome Simon! We'll meet up in the chat room again soon!

Brian Matherne - owner/curator of "The MOST comprehensive list of Atari VCS/2600 homebrews ever compiled." http://tiny.cc/Atari2600Homebrew

author of "The Atari 2600 Homebrew Companion" book series available on Amazon! www.amazon.com/author/brianmatherne

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Thanks so much for all the kind welcome words here.

I hope my text was tempting enough for the one or the other to start an ATARI ST or an Emulator and have a look at my games.

 

If anyone here sees mistyping or grammar mistakes in my text, just let me know. I try my best, but English is not my native language. After all it is my introduction text. ;)

The same goes for all the texts on the game homepages and in games displays: any hint on mistyping from native speakers is more than welcome!

 

As I got that question: Yes, both games run fine on ATARI ST Emulators! No need for real Hardware. And both games will happily utilise more MHZ power or RAM that an emulated system may offer. Anarcho Ride features also a Harddisc installer while Laserball can simply be copied to a folder on the Harddrive. The Homepage offers all sorts of download options: from Floppy .st images to ZIPed Folders.

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Greetings! :) Glad to see you're here and now I can put a game to a screenname! Anything else up your sleeves for the ST?

Good question!

The answer is kind of yes and no. I think I can share two stories on that.

Story 1:

When I rediscovered my old ATARI ST floppies in 2014 I realized that I was extremely productive as a teenager. I found tons of GFA Basic codes. The problem is: most of them are just fragments of game ideas, usually based in popular games of the time. Nothing original. Beside Laserball I finished only two more games and they are not worth to publish. Simply boring.

1991´s Laserball was boring as well, but I felt that the idea had potential. So with lots of enhancements in 2014/15 it is an enjoyable game today.

On the other hand, “Anarcho Ride” was born out of one of the code fragments: “moving street”. It was the only one code-fragment found that was appealing enough to give it a go – after all it is loads of work. To give a comparison: the moving street code fragment from 1990 had somewhat around 350 lines of code. ANARCHO Ride today has over 6000 Lines. If I do something I do it right! ;)

However, here are some screenshots of other game(framgments) and applications made back in the day:

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Story 2:

I am the prod owner of a MIST FPGA Computer. This Polish made “thing” has become fairly popular among retro-computer enthusiasts here in Europe. It is a small FPGA device that can reconfigure within seconds to a whole bunch of old computers and consoles. It is my fist time that I was actually able to play the Atari 2600 VCS, NES, Sega Master System... But it can also become a Commodore 64, AMIGA, Apple II, VIC20, Macintosh… This list can go on for some time.

 

And of course it can be configured to become an ATARI STe!

 

The interesting story: when I published the first Version of ANARCHO Ride in Nov. 2015 it quickly became obvious that on the MIST FPGA there was a bug in the Core-construction of the ATARI STe sound processing.

Within just some days a fix was provided! So now ANARCHO Ride has it on MIST FPGA Core fix:

“core_151122.rbf [ATARI ST] STE/YM audio mixer adjusted. Fixes Anarcho Ride.” https://github.com/mist-devel/mist-binaries/tree/master/cores/mist

 

Same goes for GFA Basic: Lonny, a great guy who hold the entire original sources for GFA Basic, fixed a bug from the GFA Compiler Library to help me to get the best frame rate possible for ANARCHO Ride on the ATARI!

 

Fact: I would never had that kind of service back in the day! Nor do I have it now with modern computer systems. That’s the magic of retro computing!

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Hi Thomas,

 

Welcome finally to Atari IO, it's a great forum with very friendly people , just like the staff at Atari where back I. The 1980's, loved your antidotes for your previously work and ST times, so amazing stuff there and highly creative, you weren't lying about that! , as usual I'm dying to see what you come up with next.

 

All the best

 

Darren.

Unofficial Atari: a Visual History

WWW.GREYFOXBOOK.COM

 

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