NEW GAMES NEEDED
If you have a homebrew project you would like to see featured then please contact us at:
retrogamer@futurenet.com
it even includes all four tables from the original game.
Yet it’s merely one of many homebrew titles created for the
8-bit Amstrad range in recent years. According to the CPC Power database, there were 98 titles released in 2019, 103 in 2018, 81 in 2017 and 83 in 2016 – the year when the numbers seemed to jump from a previous average of 40. Not all have set the retro world alight by any means but a good many have, showcasing the great possibilities of Lord Sugar’s 8-bit machines.
Some of that potential became apparent around the time the CPC was deemed to be commercially dead. Issue 95 of Amstrad Action, dated August 1993, for example, devoted two pages to the much-promised
CPC version of Street Fighter II – a game that would never see the light of day – but gave an equal amount of space to Trakers, a graphically-stunning Dizzy-like title involving a tiny droid, self-published by Salford brothers Scott and Gary Kennedy.
At that time there was Elmar Kriegar’s fast and furious Pang clone Zap’t’balls, the polished public domain game Croco Magneto and the game it inspired, Ball Bearing, developed by Rob Buckley who also created the Amstrad Plus-only platformer Fluff. Other notables included Odiesoft’s Bomberman clone Megablasters, and the sci-fi shoot-’em-up Masters Of Space. But it’s the more recent crop of games that have really pushed the boundaries of what the CPC can do.
It’s possible to trace the huge interest today to 2012 when Easter
Egg released a remake of Activision’s R-type. “I’d played the game on the original arcade machine and bought the
CPC version in 1988 but the game was a poor port from the great Spectrum version by Bob Pape,” recalls its developer Richard ‘Toto’ Gatineau who, together with like-minded friends, spent two years on the project.
“We looked at what could have been possible if we had a time machine to fix the past,” he smiles, pointing to the game’s staggering 30MB of code, graphics and audio. Boiled down to 800K of compressed data and auto-unpacked from a custom file system, it was eventually made to fit on a three-inch floppy disk. “It’s something like a genie in its little magic lamp,” Richard says. And the CPC community’s wish was to see more.
Many developments are underpinned by healthy competition and the technical challenge of wanting to go that bit further. There are specialised tools including the development framework Cpctelera launched in 2014 which make it easier to create games in C or assembly languages. Facebook groups and popular forums, such as CPC Wiki, also spur on developers, with fresh ground frequently broken and new tricks emerging that revise the potential of these machines.
Straightforward contests are arguably the main catalyst for the huge interest in the Amstrad homebrew scene, however. Psytronik Software’s tricky, 50fps horizontally scrolling shooter Relentless was entered into the 16KBS ROM Game Development Competition in 2013 and won, for instance. That same year, an annual contest called Cpcretrodev began and it has since attracted dozens of entries from developers attracted by cash
This shooter finished fourth in the Cpcretrodev contest of 2018. Originally created in less than a month by CNGSOFT and updated since, this fast-paced action-packed gangster-blaster has a real retro flavour in terms of its look and feel. » »
Similarities with Rick Dangerous are obvious, yet that is no bad thing. Developer 4Mhz has made the most of the CPC’S chunky Mode 0 to produce a bright and richly coloured platformer spread over 87 stunning screens.
It may be 11 years old but the compelling story of this atmospheric adventure makes for a timeless classic. Set on a seemingly deserted space station, it is superbly presented with 3D graphics, cutscenes, an hour of music and some wonderfully thoughtful minigames thrown in for added depth and challenge. |
| prizes and the opportunity to showcase their game-making skills.
Last year’s Cpcretrodev had 35 entries and it was won by Chupigames’ Miss Input, pipping Osmobit Games’ Ludic Break The Loop. In 2018,
4Mhz’s Operation Alexandra placed first followed by Retrobytes’ Jarlac,
TOD Studios’ Legend Of Steel and the colourful side-scroller The Adventures Of Timothy Gunn. The vast puzzler Baba’s Palace won in 2017 while the Oliver twins judged Retrobytes’ Outlaws to be the winner in 2016.
Javier Garcia Navarro, a team member of 4Mhz, was certainly proud of Operation Alexandra’s victory. Boasting beautiful graphics and named one of the CPC’S best games, the game pulled off some lovely tricks. “I’m most proud of Operation Alexandra’s interrupts handling,” Javier says. “I got to handle all the graphics in the game on the corresponding interrupts to avoid the flickering due to the electron beam.”
He believes such tricks are making it seem like the CPC is being pushed harder and harder. “The storm in Operation Alexandra couldn’t be done with sprites and moving memory zones in just 64 kilobytes,” he says, by way of example. “But using the ink-swapping trick that Azicuetano [Rafael Castillo] came up with, there seems to be dozens of sprites moving around the screen. In the end, squeezing more out of a machine that is already working at 100% is about having great ideas that emulate impressive special effects.”
Games just keep coming. We saw the arcade clone Scramble last year and the run-and-gun platformer Galactic Tomb making its stunning debut at Retromadrid in 2018. The scene has enjoyed The World War Simulator
Part 2, Robbie Strikes Back and Dead On Time. Most are being made in
Spain and France, countries which had a strong following for Alan Sugar’s computer, and they’re excelling not only graphically but sonically, too.
In fact, developers try hard to get the most out of the CPC’S audio, using tools such as soundtracker Starkos on the CPC, as well as Arkos Tracker 2 on PC, Linux and Mac. “To be honest, the CPC’S sound processor is far from being state-of-the-art, especially compared to what the C64 can do,” says Starkos creator Julien Névo. “But I found it very expressive nonetheless, and there are » many tricks one can use to get new and interesting sounds.”
Julien worked on the point-andclick adventure Orion Prime in 2009 and Imperial Mahjong in 2016. As a programmer and musician, he feels the computer offers him a wide range of creative possibilities. “In Orion Prime, we were able to have music along with loading the data on disk,” he says. “It had been done before but it always resulted in very slow loading – but not this time. We also managed to get a unique resolution – 320x200 with 16 colours – in Imperial Mahjong but that was a nightmare to code. Never again.”
More recently, there has been a greater number of homebrew titles made for the Amstrad Plus machines and GX4000 console launched in 1990. Arnaud ‘Norecess’ Storq has been remaking Sonic The Hedgehog for these machines based on visuals adapted from the game’s Green Hill Zone level. It intends to be a new ‘episode’ for fans with fresh levels and a challenging bonus zone.
“The GX4000 was a powerful console but it was never exploited during its commercial life which left many under the impression that it was a poor 8-bit platform while it was at least as good as the Master System if not better,” Arnaud says. “Sonicgx features multidirectional scrolling at full 50fps using a 192x256 resolution and it makes extensive use of the 4,096 colours and hardware sprites while relying on the DMA channels for audio.”
Another promising remake is Ghosts ‘N Goblins, created by Frédéric Poesy, aka Golem13. Frédéric took his CPC out of its box to show his children in » » » »
2016 but felt a burning-hot desire to code again. Obsessed with Ghosts ‘N Goblins as a kid, he says, “I chose to remake the game on an Amstrad 6128 Plus because I didn’t want to restrict myself to the weakest machine.” As such he’s written a fast sprite update engine to animate all of the 16 hardware sprites at the same time.
“I’m particularly proud of my display routines and the RAM/ROM handling,” he adds. “The whole game works with interrupts enabled whatever the memory configuration and the code executed, whatever the Z80 registers used. It makes the game display very clean, stable and flexible.”
The development makes use of homebrew hardware including the M4 Wi-fi expansion card that allows CPC games written on a PC or Mac to be quickly transferred to the original computers. Frédéric also uses the C4CPC cartridge replacement for the Plus computers and GX4000 console, as well as the Playcity CPC expansion which includes six audio channels and raster line interrupt support. He’s deliberately using 128K, too, since he believes the additional 64K was vastly neglected back in the day, except for preloading data.
It means his game won’t run on a CPC 464, 464 Plus or GX4000, but he says, “From the beginning, I looked to actively use all of the capabilities and resources available on a 6128
Plus, not only the 128K but the 512K of ROM offered by the cartridge port. As this memory can be used to save machine time by unrolling generated code – compiled sprites, for example – it » » becomes possible to obtain very good results on arcade games.”
Other games currently seeking to push the boundaries include Alcon 2020, an update of the vertically scrolling shooter that’s also known as Slap Fight. “The conversion was started by Abalore, a talented Spanish coder,” Richard says. “The idea is to show the true potential of the CPC by producing as close to a perfect arcade port as possible – something usually only possible on 16-bit systems.”
Alcon 2020 uses infinite smooth vertical tile map scrolling, sprites and bullets without any speed drawback or size limitations compared to other 8-bit systems. Meanwhile, BG Games’ forthcoming racer, Vespertino, is looking to create a pseudo 3D engine. “The development is still in an initial phase and once we have a smooth road engine, a lot of frames will be needed for the sprite animations to be smooth too otherwise you wouldn’t appreciate the 25fps,” Alejandro says.
The appreciation for the Amstrad CPC continues. “The CPC is like an
8-bit PC,” Richard says. “Its potential is only limited by the designer’s ideas and the coder’s skill with a powerful CPU and CRTC.” But why weren’t many of these tricks used the first time around? “We believe that not documenting the CPC well was one of Amstrad’s biggest mistakes,” Alejandro says. “But it has allowed the machine to become a much richer and surprising story than that of other platforms. It’s also quite possible that Alan Sugar’s own team was unaware of the possibilities of the hardware they had designed.” » »
This unofficial, authentic conversion of Digital Illusions’ commercial Amiga game has proven the CPC can more than pull off smooth vertical scrolling when expertly programmed. The four pinball tables and realistic ball physics represent a true triumph for BG Games and the title has arguably raised the bar for 8-bit gaming.
The original CPC port of R-type was completed in just 21 days and it certainly showed, with developer Keith Goodyer long ruing the lack of time he had. Easter Egg’s 128K version has not only righted a wrong, it has built on the original’s foundations with extra features not included with the arcade version.
Released in 1994 when the commercial CPC scene was dead, few Amstrad users got to experience this 128K-only Super Bomberman clone the first time around. But with 900K of compressed data and spread over four sides of a three-inch floppy disk, it was not only ambitious in scope but, thanks to full overscan, it’s technically impressive, too.
Homebrew first-person grid-based dungeon crawlers are a rarity but this game’s 46,000 lines of assembly code has not gone to waste. Spread over 16 levels and boasting speedy, fluid movement, it provides many hours of intricate gameplay in a game that some would say pushes the CPC towards 16-bit territory.
The winner of the 2018 Cpcretrodev fits into just 64K, yet the memory constraints has done little to hamper the meticulous design of this shooter.
It takes a strategic approach to each screen and uses some amazing visual effects, such as a snow storm that’s achieved through successive palette changes at different speeds. |