Fate of Atlantis: The Action Game - ZX Spectrum

[rich75]

Hiya!

This is a kind of two-in-one thread. It's one part informative and one part plugging something!

I did ask mods about this at the start of the week but didn't get a specific reply so I'm sorry if the answer is "no" but here I go...

Firstly, a correction for one of the pages:
http://www.theraider.net/information...tis_action.php

I'm assuming the majority of people here aren't from the UK (and possibly aren't even old enough to remember stuff like this even if they are) but the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (no "e" in Sinclair) was an iconic British 8-bit computer that a lot of current British games designers first cut their teeth on when they were kids. Like the Commodore 64 it mainly used cassette tapes instead of cartridges or disks and since it was a "proper"(!?) computer with a keyboard and not just a joystick port a whole load of people from kids in their bedrooms to large companies were able to produce software for it. It's pretty much got one of the largest software libraries ever and there's still quite a dedicated fanbase for the rubber-keyed machine today.

Anyway, that's the history bit (with spelling correction) and apologies to anyone who knew all that anyway. Just thought I'd mention a bit of history as I know a lot of retro gaming sites are biased in favour of cartridge-based systems like the Atari and NES and skip over the whole "loading from tape" era. Kids nowadays don't know how good they've got it when a game loads up in under 5 minutes and doesn't crash just before it's due to start. And don't get me started on multi-load games where you had to rewind the tape to a specific point and reload a section if you failed a level. Happy days

[fenris]

I'm not from the UK... In fact, I'm very far away... But, I do remember the Sinclair. We used to have one. I found it stashed away together with an old coleco pong-type console. Never got the darned thing to work.

[rich75]

Last edited by Finn : Today at 03:53 PM. Reason: thanks for the history lesson, appreciate it

OK, no worries

Originally Posted by fenris

I'm not from the UK... In fact, I'm very far away... But, I do remember the Sinclair. We used to have one. I found it stashed away together with an old coleco pong-type console. Never got the darned thing to work.

They can be a bit temperamental but the later models such as the 128k +2 or +3 were probably more stable, especially with the built-in tape deck or disk drive.

To be honest, it's a lot easier to emulate the Spec nowadays and you can do a load more that you wouldn't be able to do on a real machine such as load games virtually instantly, save whenever you want, cheat and a whole load of other things.

There's some more info about the Spec version here with a couple of screenshots if anyone's interested: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infos...cgi?id=0002472

Obviously there were also a couple of other Indy games on the Spectrum such as Temple of Doom (which was a conversion of the arcade machine) and Last Crusade which wasn't a bad game at all, even if Indy did have a slight limp for some reason!