Never Ported respectively released for ST

[dlfrsilver]

I fully understood why the game wasn't going to appear..games were being developed on far more powerful hardware for the PC and the American market. ..

It's just the way it was handled.

It was obvious to STFM owners like myself that developers had switched to producing games on the Amiga 1st, with ST versions following month or months behind..If at all..

And that the PC was becoming a major force in the USA..where the ST was a long dead format, so it wouldn't of offended me for them to be brutally honest and just say the hardware can't handle it and there simply isn't a viable commercial market to have someone convert it to the ST.

Lucasarts had deals in publishing with publishers locally, us gold for UK, Ubisoft for France, Softgold for germany, etc.

Have you seen how the SCUMM engine is, i mean how the datas are in the files ?

The file structure is exactly the same on Amiga as it is on PC. And i guess that their tool was batching all the graphics from 256 to 32 colors.

I'm sure they have done some tests to port Indy 4 on Atari ST. and the results were bad, hence the sentence you read.

Indy 4 is just a huge game, with tons of graphics, so that's impossible to have someone rework all of them in 16 colors.

the problem for releasing indy 4 on ST was technical, and not a market problem. Because they knew they would have sold lots of them on the ST, considering the huge license it is still to this day.

[ijor]

Indy 4 is just a huge game, with tons of graphics, so that's impossible to have someone rework all of them in 16 colors.
...
the problem for releasing indy 4 on ST was technical, and not a market problem. Because they knew they would have sold lots of them on the ST, considering the huge license it is still to this day.

It is always a matter of marketing. Lots of games were ported to the PC with CGA and they look, honestly, pretty ugly. For the huge PC market it usually was worth, in that case they didn't care about technical limitations.

[lostdragon]

I'm no doubting anything on technical side of Indy 4, but by time it was annouced, KEY UK publishers/software houses etc were reporting the rapid decline in ST copies of their games compared to the Amiga.

People:like:Audiogenic, Virgin, Bitmap Bros, David Braben, Reflections etc etc.

The ST market was just dissapearing like snow before the sun.

[lostdragon]

You think they might have it in a backup?

I'm interested but not trawling through millions of pages to find something which may or may not exist.

Especially as there was an unreleased overhead tank game which used rotating playfields called Rotator by Rainbow Arts written by reLINE

http://hol.abime.net/4429

http://amr.abime.net/issue_72_pages (page 11)

From personal experience, i sadly doubt it.

I've lost a lot of material from interviews done on behalf of sites/publications like:

Grumpy Old Gamers/RVG/Classic Console Magazine...which closed or removed content but whilst my stuff was taken down, they had no back-up files.

It was such an obscure reference i didn't bother keeping copy of magazine scan itself.

So many claims in UK Press have lead to utter wild goose chases, just had a reply back in from a coder this afternoon that pours scorn on yet another UK magazine claiming a game started out as something else to what we now know it as.

So much speculation printed as fact, false quotes given etc by UK press over the years.

[lostdragon]

Not Rotator.. That was previewed in Feb 91 issue of The One.

[christos]

If you think the uk press was bad.. a greek magazine did a full page review of disposable hero on the st. They even commented on the quality of the samples and said the amiga version was very similar. So i add disposable hero on the list and i am looking for any copy.

[Hazzardus]

Indy 4 (the SCUMM adventure) on the Amiga wasn't even downgraded from 256 to 32 colours, pretty sure it had only a 24 colour pallete throughout.

And at least we did (sort of) get Indy 4 on ST

[dlfrsilver]

Indy 4 FOA on Amiga use indeed 32 colors. You can check it with a SCUMM editor.

[Hazzardus]

Indy 4 FOA on Amiga use indeed 32 colors. You can check it with a SCUMM editor.

You are right, sorry I was thinking of another game...

[lostdragon]

If you think the uk press was bad.. a greek magazine did a full page review of disposable hero on the st. They even commented on the quality of the samples and said the amiga version was very similar. So i add disposable hero on the list and i am looking for any copy.

Wowza..

Looks like UK Press was sadly in very good company.

I can never take the role of games jurnolist seriously anymore after reading so many false claims have been made.

Many months ago, GTW were looking into C64 Charlie Chaplin (US Gold) and question of the ST version came up, as screens shown in various magazines etc.

C+VG claimed the ST (and CPC) versions were 'Equally as bad' as the ZX Spectrum version they had reviewed..we have yet to see any proof work on the ST version ever progressed beyond a couple of potentially mocked-up screens, so how on earth they claim to of had a playable version is beyond me.

[lostdragon]

Another i wasn't aware of:


Ocean Software having Paid Imagitec Design to write Renegade III for the ST/Amiga...

Supposedly 50+ done by time one of the coders left..no A.I, place holder graphics etc.

I had the C64 version, looked lovely, but played like an utter dog.

Still, another for the list.

[lostdragon]

Grand Prix...supposed to join likes of 9 Lives, Defender II, Photon Storm etc on the ARC label

[tresas]

Turrican 3...

[lostdragon]

Remember seeing a claim that suggested Interceptor (E.A) never made it to ST as coder found it rather ironic that the very people who'd bought the ST as it was cheaper than the Amiga, had killed it by pirating it's software...

[lostdragon]

Another update:

Super Thief was started by Palace and by all accounts was pretty well advanced
(and good) when it was shelved.
I am not sure of the programmer (Possibly Sean Griffith from Magic Pockets/
Rise of the Robots fame, but don't quote me on that) but the graphics were
done by Dan Malone (Who did the 'Antidiad' graphics and Comic with the game)
as well as, more recently, graphics on SPEEDBALL II, CADAVER and CHAOS ENGINE.
I am not too sure why it was scrapped
STEVE KELLY

[leech]

Remember seeing a claim that suggested Interceptor (E.A) never made it to ST as coder found it rather ironic that the very people who'd bought the ST as it was cheaper than the Amiga, had killed it by pirating it's software...

There was just as much, if not more piracy for the Amiga and PC though. The main difference being that you actually could purchase software for the PC in the USA. There were so few shops that sold ST/Amiga games here, especially after about 1991 or so.

[dlfrsilver]

Remember seeing a claim that suggested Interceptor (E.A) never made it to ST as coder found it rather ironic that the very people who'd bought the ST as it was cheaper than the Amiga, had killed it by pirating it's software...

There was just as much, if not more piracy for the Amiga and PC though. The main difference being that you actually could purchase software for the PC in the USA. There were so few shops that sold ST/Amiga games here, especially after about 1991 or so.

From what i picked here and there, the ST had much more piracy than the Amiga. Amiga users, independantly from piracy were buying way more original games than the ST users.

Just a game like Mortal Kombat II sold on A500 in 1994 120.000 copies (source : programmer).

[leech]

Remember seeing a claim that suggested Interceptor (E.A) never made it to ST as coder found it rather ironic that the very people who'd bought the ST as it was cheaper than the Amiga, had killed it by pirating it's software...

There was just as much, if not more piracy for the Amiga and PC though. The main difference being that you actually could purchase software for the PC in the USA. There were so few shops that sold ST/Amiga games here, especially after about 1991 or so.

From what i picked here and there, the ST had much more piracy than the Amiga. Amiga users, independantly from piracy were buying way more original games than the ST users.

Just a game like Mortal Kombat II sold on A500 in 1994 120.000 copies (source : programmer).

I will admit my experience might be a little skewed, since I got my Mega STe in about 92, some friends had STs, some had Amigas and I couldn't find a good source, commercial or otherwise, of ST software anywhere. A good chunk of the disks I have are because some guy sold me a ton of stuff. But there were plenty of Amiga pirate boards around.

[lostdragon]

http://www.zee-3.com/pickfordbros/softo ... hp?game=31

New one to myself.

[lostdragon]

Another new one...

Apparently Sean Baggaley had written a fantasy style RTS for the ST for D+H games.

It reached Beta but the MD of D+H was arrested on various charges of alleged fraud...

[lostdragon]

Cybex:

http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives ... alver.html

Many thanks to Scott Stilphen for giving an old interview of mine a new home.

[lostdragon]

The lost 16 bit remake of A8 Classic Rescue On Fractalus, if the Amiga couldn't do it..

From Julian Eggebrecht

The Amiga version of Ballblazer ("Master Blazer") had a rendition of
the Rescue on Fractalus graphics engine, but it was never completed
into a full game.
The Amiga was not powerful enough to get away with the same tricks as the
8-bit Atari. People expected real 3D and not only 2D planes of fractal
mountains. The Amiga could do more planes of mountains at higher
resolutions, but that wasn't enough - at least we thought so.

[lostdragon]

CES 1985...

Datasoft annouced they had an ST development system and we should expect ST versions of Bruce Lee and The Goonies by the end of the year.


Can anyone confirm the above?

[leech]

CES 1985...

Datasoft annouced they had an ST development system and we should expect ST versions of Bruce Lee and The Goonies by the end of the year.


Can anyone confirm the above?

Damn, would have loved that! Someone recently did a remake of Bruce Lee for the Amiga/Linux/Mac/Windows: https://rgcddev.itch.io/tiger-claw Would have loved to have seen both The Goonies and Bruce Lee on the ST.
Edit: I guess Tiger Claw that I linked is more like a spiritual sequel than a remake. But still looks cool, wonder if they would do an ST port.

[lostdragon]

I finally established contact with Sarah Jane Avory and got to ask about UK Magazine claims there was a second Jaguar XJ220 game for the ST and Amiga being worked on, built around the polygon engine used in Thunderhawk.

Sarah:

Actually Jaguar XJ220 started life as a 3D polygon game, but we dropped the idea and instead opted for a sprite-based game inspired by games like Outrun and Lotus Turbo Challenge..


My thanks to Sarah for taking time to clear this up.