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General discussionRelease: Defender of the Crown(363 posts)(363 posts)
(363 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted September 09, 2014
To arms, my noble Saxon knights!

Defender of the Crown, a 1986 turn-based strategy classic, originally launched on the Commodore Amiga, is available in all it's pixelated glory on GOG.com, for $5.99!

We are happy to announce a new partnership with Cinemaware that will bring plenty of mouth-watering classics in their best available incarnations. Starting with Defender of the Crown, more classic titles from Cinemaware will release on GOG.com with both PC and emulated Commodore Amiga versions. Yes, the graphically superior, awesome, beautiful and shiny Amiga versions!

Today's release is a wonderful gem straight from the 80s. Back in the day, Defender of the Crown set a new standard for graphical presentation and innovative, fresh gameplay. As the leader of an initially sparse pack of Saxon knights, building up your army and influence as you proceed, you'll have to stick it to the Normans in an effort to gain control of the war-torn medieval England. Your strategic prowess as well as your sword fighting skills will be severely tested. This turn-based strategy classic will have you saving damsels in distress with your blade, jousting with fearsome knights, and besieging Norman castles - all the while reveling in the Amiga quality sound and beautiful graphics.

Defeat those pesky Normans and unite England in Defender of the Crown, for $5.99 on GOG.com.
Post edited September 09, 2014 by JudasIscariot
Posted September 11, 2014
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mangamuscle: a free kickstart rom (the aros kickstart) is being developed and could be used in the near future to play games. In the present there is already a quite polished open source rom for the atari st (EmuTOS) so it beats me why they haven't give it a try.
Sounds promising. A similar thing happened with pcsxr. I don't think it needs ROMs (some older PlayStation emulators needed them if I'm not mistaken).

I strongly doubt though that Cinemaware can just take winuae and ship it this way. GPL would require them to publish the source code, and they are risking a copyright violation lawsuit doing such a thing. It should be rather trivial to find function signatures in the code if it's indeed based on winuae. So my first guess would be that they indeed wrote their own emulator. If not, GOG is risking selling such a thing here.

And the link I showed above explicitly says that they are using Amiga ROMs, so they aren't hiding that fact. Obviously they think they licensed it from someone.
Post edited September 11, 2014 by shmerl
Posted September 11, 2014
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yyahoo: Will any of the Amiga only Cinemaware games that never had a DOS version made be released on GOG? Biggest example: Antheads: ICFTD 2. Possibly included with ICFTD 1, since it was an expansion pack?
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Cinemaware: YES!
...and Wings (this classic one) ?
Posted September 11, 2014
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shmerl: And the link I showed above explicitly says that they are using Amiga ROMs, so they aren't hiding that fact. Obviously they think they licensed it from someone.
Think a little about what you just said. You did some googling and found the deal with Hyperion, but was their name mentioned or even implied that they are using the original kickstart© roms somewhere when the game was released on gog? Would not make more sense to make an installer that included the lobster emulator, the kickstart rom and the game adf/hdf (something similar happens when they install a game using dosbox). Maybe they are going to end saying "We would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids and your stupid dog!" <-- look at my avatar :3

p.s. Winuae is not the only amiga emulator, winfellow should be capable enough to run most ocs amiga games and there is also mess, so finding the signatures you talk about might not be as straightforward.
Post edited September 11, 2014 by mangamuscle
Posted September 11, 2014
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mangamuscle: Would not make more sense to make an installer that included the lobster emulator, the kickstart rom and the game adf/hdf (something similar happens when they install a game using dosbox).
Of course I'm guessing, but I suspect it worked like this (please correct me if I'm wrong on the facts). Cinemaware own the games. They made some deal with Hyperion who allowed them to use Amiga ROMs (I'm not familiar with them, so not sure what version). I guess that deal implies that from each game sold by Cinemaware Hyperion gets a cut for example. Now, that deal only works for Hyperion if those ROMs are used. Hyperion could easily require to make such "bundle" in order to make it harder to use those games without their ROMs. Kind of DRM in indirect way. So the resulting bundled executable is sold by Cinemaware to whichever distributor (like GOG) will want to ship it. I don't think they hide the above though, since that info was made public before. May be someone will be able to extract the original game from the executable by the way.

I agree that this whole approach is seriously flawed and I wouldn't buy such games.
Post edited September 11, 2014 by shmerl
Posted September 11, 2014
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yyahoo: Will any of the Amiga only Cinemaware games that never had a DOS version made be released on GOG? Biggest example: Antheads: ICFTD 2. Possibly included with ICFTD 1, since it was an expansion pack?
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Cinemaware: YES!
Awesome!
Posted September 11, 2014
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shmerl: [...]
They made some deal with Hyperion who allowed them to use Amiga ROMs (I'm not familiar with them, so not sure what version).
[...]
DoftC came out on A500, so it is most likely 1.3 (the most common kickstart version for A500). In many ways, it makes sense to embed the kickstart file within the exe to get around the licensing with Hyperion, as making the 'stand-alone' means that every person buying the game also get a rom file. Sad, though, I would have nice to have one of the established (and working...) emulators so there would not be a need to start from scratch. Even just having the disk image would have helped...

Point of interest, though, if they do add the CDTV version, it is fine as it also use 1.3, but if they are adding CD32 they need to embed 3.1 also (used by A1200 and CD32)

see here for an overview: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart_(Amiga)#Version_summary]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kickstart_(Amiga)#Version_summary[/url]
Post edited September 11, 2014 by amok
Posted September 11, 2014
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htown1980: There is no comparison between colour and black and white photos and 1986 CGA graphics and later VGA, SCGA, modern graphics. Its not just an issue of number of colours, its pixel size, processing power, the tools that the programmers had at the time, the skills of the people making games at the time. You would know that there weren't a lot of musicians involved in the making of game music in the 1986 CGA era of pc gaming.

I'm not talking about photorealism, I'm talking about the difference between 4 colours and giant pixels and 256+ colours and smaller pixels. There is a reason why modern retro indie games don't emulate CGA graphics or pc speaker sound.

I don't play many modern games, My favourite era of games is the early to mid 90s. No matter how artistic you are, there is only so much you can do with a pc speaker and 4 colours, particularly with programming technology at 1986. (contrast for example to the wonderful work that was done with the pc speaker in the late 80s, early 90s with "real sound")

I didn't say games from the 80s had bad game music. I said I personally wouldn't want to listen to the soundtrack of a game from 1986. There is a subtle difference.

I would love for you to show me a pc game from 1986 that you believe had wonderful game music.
I'm coming to think that we don't understand each other, or rather that I misinterpreted your original point, since you keep coming back to the sole year of 1986 and bringing up the CGA/CPU speaker combo while I originally read something about "video game music from 1986 is not that good", and hence wasn't thinking of the IBM PC (which was in the gutter on pretty much all front).
That, and I read "from 1986" as shorthand for "80's" or somesuch and not 1986 in particular due to the phrasing. My apologies then.

Admittedly I'm seeing red when people seem to equate technological progress or year of creation with actual quality.
Met too many of those in real life already.
Post edited September 11, 2014 by Erich_Zann
Posted September 11, 2014
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Erich_Zann: Admittedly I'm seeing red when people seem to equate technological progress or year of creation with actual quality.
Met too many of those in real life already.
Agreed.That is a very silly and idiotic notion.
Posted September 11, 2014
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htown1980: I would love for you to show me a pc game from 1986 that you believe had wonderful game music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-m5BbXVbo
Enough said. (Ok so 1987 but close enough and arcade came out 1986)
Posted September 11, 2014
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htown1980: modern retro indie games don't emulate CGA graphics or pc speaker sound.
http://www.kongregate.com/games/rete/dont-shit-your-pants
Posted September 11, 2014
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htown1980: I would love for you to show me a pc game from 1986 that you believe had wonderful game music.
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serpantino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-m5BbXVbo
Enough said. (Ok so 1987 but close enough and arcade came out 1986)
That's pretty good, but that sounds like adlib to me. When I played bubble bobble it sounded like this - which I loved at the time, but wouldn't want a sound track for now :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izjfOqWsP6o
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htown1980: modern retro indie games don't emulate CGA graphics or pc speaker sound.
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Darling_Jimmy: http://www.kongregate.com/games/rete/dont-shit-your-pants
hahahaha. that's way better than CGA graphics though!!
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htown1980: There is no comparison between colour and black and white photos and 1986 CGA graphics and later VGA, SCGA, modern graphics. Its not just an issue of number of colours, its pixel size, processing power, the tools that the programmers had at the time, the skills of the people making games at the time. You would know that there weren't a lot of musicians involved in the making of game music in the 1986 CGA era of pc gaming.

I'm not talking about photorealism, I'm talking about the difference between 4 colours and giant pixels and 256+ colours and smaller pixels. There is a reason why modern retro indie games don't emulate CGA graphics or pc speaker sound.

I don't play many modern games, My favourite era of games is the early to mid 90s. No matter how artistic you are, there is only so much you can do with a pc speaker and 4 colours, particularly with programming technology at 1986. (contrast for example to the wonderful work that was done with the pc speaker in the late 80s, early 90s with "real sound")

I didn't say games from the 80s had bad game music. I said I personally wouldn't want to listen to the soundtrack of a game from 1986. There is a subtle difference.

I would love for you to show me a pc game from 1986 that you believe had wonderful game music.
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Erich_Zann: I'm coming to think that we don't understand each other, or rather that I misinterpreted your original point, since you keep coming back to the sole year of 1986 and bringing up the CGA/CPU speaker combo while I originally read something about "video game music from 1986 is not that good", and hence wasn't thinking of the IBM PC (which was in the gutter on pretty much all front).
That, and I read "from 1986" as shorthand for "80's" or somesuch and not 1986 in particular due to the phrasing. My apologies then.

Admittedly I'm seeing red when people seem to equate technological progress or year of creation with actual quality.
Met too many of those in real life already.
It's cool. I was just saying that I personally don't care for soundtracks for pc game music from the pre adlib era (even some early adlib stuff is no good in my opinion) At the time I loved it - alley cat, digger, defender of the crown, etc, but not so much anymore (outside of nostalgia). I wouldn't listen to the music outside of the game. Just my personal preference.
Post edited September 11, 2014 by htown1980
Posted September 11, 2014
This is one of my favourite pc speaker pieces of music (although admittedly from 1990), I prefer it to the soundblaster/adlib music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGKyNsyQhf0

And then you have this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Yo1N-jsi0

But I don't think this kind of work could be done in the mid 80s.
Posted September 11, 2014
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htown1980: It's cool. I was just saying that I personally don't care for soundtracks for pc game music from the pre adlib era (even some early adlib stuff is no good in my opinion) At the time I loved it - alley cat, digger, defender of the crown, etc, but not so much anymore (outside of nostalgia). I wouldn't listen to the music outside of the game. Just my personal preference.
I think my misunderstanding stemmed from the fact that for me "soundtrack" means the music in the game, as I don't listen to game music outside of gaming, I have far too many records already...
Posted September 11, 2014
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serpantino: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5-m5BbXVbo
Enough said. (Ok so 1987 but close enough and arcade came out 1986)
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htown1980: That's pretty good, but that sounds like adlib to me. When I played bubble bobble it sounded like this - which I loved at the time, but wouldn't want a sound track for now :)
Ouch. That is pretty painful! I never owned a pc back then but I had the game on Master System so that music is very familiar to me. Bust a Move 2 (Puzzle Bobble 2) had an absolutely stellar soundtrack too.
Posted September 11, 2014
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shmerl: I guess that deal implies that from each game sold by Cinemaware Hyperion gets a cut for example. Now, that deal only works for Hyperion if those ROMs are used. Hyperion could easily require to make such "bundle"
Whether it is inside an executable or as an stand alone file, gog would need to include the kickstart rom in every digital copy of DotC, so either way hyperion would get whatever percentage of the sale they agreed with cinemaware, you would not get a discount if plead "I already have my own copy of 1.3". That is the reason I say that there must be another reason to hide the kickstart inside the executable.
I don't think they hide the above though, since that info was made public before.
The simple truth is that as far as google can see, there is not a single mention of hyperion in the cinemaware website (there is a mention in their facebook page about how you can play cinemaware games on amiga os4), which is quite odd if you think about it. If gog ever got the rights to distribute/sell the amiga roms, the macintosh roms and/or mac os 7/9 you can bet there would be a full announcement that even after leaving the front page, it would continue to be accessible by the public.
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionRelease: Defender of the Crown(363 posts)(363 posts)
(363 posts)