kiwilove007

I don't play videogames anymore - though I had computer systems and consoles - such as Atari 800, 800XL, 130XE, C-64, PCs, Sega MegaDrive, SNES, PlayStation - and played a friend's Lynx, N64, NeoGeo, Saturn, Dreamcast, Wii, PS2. I did turn into a collector of emulators and the ROMs for them - enjoying playing arcade games via Mame. The coin-op I ended up playing a lot was Shanghai because of the variations it has available (reset the machine and it'll run a new variant). Anyway - I played less and less videogames until I stopped altogether. I couldn't be bothered trying out the latest PC games - just cannot be bothered to, even though I know about so-called illegal downloads and cracks, etc. I'm certainly not interested in the first person shooter styled videogame (although I did play Doom, and others back in the day). Anyway about 2 years ago - I had the opportunity to return to designing graphics for the Atari 400/800 etc series home computers - for a project named GTIABlast! - now renamed to AtariBLAST! (back in the day I did work for Laser Hawk and Hawkquest). This current project has about another year to go on it? Videos (and downloadable/runnable test demos) have been released on Youtube - I work with a programmer (since I'm not into programming) - and this is more of an enthusiast/hobbyist kind of project, but is up to professional standard. We could have opted to work on the SNES hardware (since we did work on Rockfall and Astrohawk together - previously - these were homebrew projects as such, back in the 90s) - but had a more passionate interest in the A8 hardware. Anyway this current project - did change to include the Atari 5200 console too - as about 3 versions of the game is catered for - it changed from disk based for Atari 400/800 etc with a minimum of 48k, to that of the Atari 5200 console - and any Atari 400/800/etc with a minimum of 16k - through going to a flashcart - since diskettes are hard to source these days, and also to support those who upgraded their Atari 800 etc to maximum of 1088k of memory. It's not an easy feat to support 3 versions of the game as such. A lot more work has been done since the last video release - in which it does look like an awesome shooter game (vertical and horizontal scrolling styled shooter). Anyway - amazing progress has been made. While this game does work on an unmodified console/computer - we do concede that this exact project was not possible back in the day - because it uses current cartridge technology as such. Also tools running on the PC are extensively used (to save on time and effort etc) - but some kind of watered down version of it - could have been made back then. You need only to see the current video(s) to see how this is something special and shows how advanced the hardware actually was.... Those who were amazed by the amazing graphics that featured in the best Atari demos (eg. Robot and Spaceship demo, Lucasfilm's intro to Rescue From Fractalus) - can now see those graphics used within a gaming environment - as I have reused those graphics and tweaked them a little or a lot? Harvey