don't feel bad I didn't know ZX spectrum even existed till my middle school years when I ended up being friends with a exchange student from the UK. But yeah as I said the easiest way to tell a game was a port from the old speccy is the limited colour palette for whatever reason when speccy games got ported to the C64 they kept the four colour graphics despite the fact the c64 could produce much more. Ah well really shouldn't matter much still two great games.

Yeah, it only supports punch-in perforated cards for playing :D

Bought. Not quite on a par with Lords of Midnight IMO (the semi-generated landscape of the sequel always seemed to me to make the map a bit too "busy" - not enough large plains & sweeping vistas) and the multitude of lords all doing their own thing makes the gameplay a bit scrappier and less focused than LoM. Still brilliant though.

Nice to see a remake not at 9.99, and for something I assume was never released for DOS.

But those colors, those highly-saturated colors - I'd have a hard time viewing everything fullscreen.

Both games were ported to DOS between 1998 and 2004 or so and are freely available (including source code and bonus material) at icemark.com by current dev, chris wild, aka icemarkuk. DOS versions obviously do not have any enchanments these new versions have.

There colors are probably inherited from original ZX spectrum version.

Oh okay.

Great to see this here, one step closer to having the whole series in GOG's enhanced version, plus another classic I never got to play (no spectrum or commodore in my household and the one friend with a C64 only had 2 games so didn't get really familiar with them). Looking forward to playing this off my backlog at some point!

yeah the ZX spectrum lacked any kind of a dedicated graphics chip like other home computers had at the time such as the c64 which had the VICII, as such could only produce a total of 15 colours from a variation of a 4 bit RGBI pallet with each colour having a 3 bit palette consisting of basic and bright variants with exception to black of course and could display up to 8 colours at a time in a 256x192 resolution but colour bleeding was a common issue so often devs would limit how many colours were used since the spectrum could only produce 2 colours in 8x8 blocks as opposed to the c64 which could do 4 colours in 4x4 blocks which was why c64 games looked more blockier but more colourful(devs found ways around this through various tricks such as mixing different graphic modes on objects between different resolutions to name one trick, later in the c64 lifespan )

Still as limited in colours as the Speccy was it did have some great games, most often opted to be released in simple single colour monochrome to avoid the colour bleeding issue the system had but great games none the less usually isometric games such as The Great Escape and Head over Heels and tricky platformers(think something like VVVVV) such as Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy, and the Monty Mole games though the c64 version of Monty on the run had the best damn music track which as done by the legendary Rob Hubbard which can be heard here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAyDCti2XAc oh and puzzle platformers such as the Dizzy series(i.e. a game that involved platforming and solving various puzzles usually item based) and Herbert's Dummy Run.

sorry for the long technobabble post man, I can get a bit nerdy about old school things, mainly because these were things from my youth.

It's perfectly fine, although I didn't read all of the text. ;) Hey, um, G-Doc, can we get an Enigmatic hint in text format? ;)

Chilli Hugger - That's just me. :) There is no big development team. Just me and my day job ( contractor ), and developing games in my spare time.

As for Midwinter.
http://themidwinterreport.com/
http://blog.themidwinterreport.com/

Instabought!
Man, I really like the incoming flow of new (old) games.

Keep 'em coming, GOG.

Mike and I were working on what was going to be the original re-release of The Lords of Midnight back before he died. Mike rewrote the landscaping code so that it ran in realtime rather than precalculated as the original did. This allows for the moving and panning. He also wrote other graphic routines that were going to be used for updated visuals. However, after his death I decided that this particular path to remake was more fitting as a tribute, I really didn't want to attempt to make the game that we were working on and thinking of.

Sweet! its looking amazing!

Well done

Great release! Like Lords of Midnight, it's a kind of games that I don't call oldschool games, but more a part of History. Even though I never had a ZX, I like narrative strategic games, and when I look at some games like King of Dragon Pass or The Banner Saga, it is great to see how began the story of games of that kind.
Bought too!