Spectrum 4Ever : Moon Cresta
Moon Cresta the classic arcade hit made by Nichibutsu came to the ZX Spectrum in 1985 thanks to the efforts of Incentive Software Ltd. They did a very good port of the arcade that I was blown away by.
This game even gave you a starfield which in most games back then was very rare back then on the machine. They did a really good job and I have always loved this game for what is it ? A mindless shooter you can let yourself go for hours on end.
What was your thoughts on this game ?
Did you buy the game or did you give it a miss ?
This game even gave you a starfield which in most games back then was very rare back then on the machine. They did a really good job and I have always loved this game for what is it ? A mindless shooter you can let yourself go for hours on end.
What was your thoughts on this game ?
Did you buy the game or did you give it a miss ?
Post edited by morcar on
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I used to be a fan of astroblaster and pheenix more I guess.
I found this also , that and the following pages..
http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=Crash/Issue03/Pages/Crash0300061.jpg
I remember getting fireflash from brent cross one day after school on my birthday :)
my fav 8 bit shooter of this ilk would be gaplus on c64 and it was a budget to boot.. pity they didn't make a speccy version.. which could be done from that shootem up 1-2 years ago, mod'd. (the one that looked like tempest).
Pheenix .... game after my own heart love this and there will be a video very soon.
Thinking back, it was one of the few great games that I recieved from 'The Home Computer Club' in their introductory offer. 50p I think it was. Bargain!
I didn't buy it but still I had it ;)
A great game, not very complicated but very playable.
That takes me back with The Home Computer Club .. When I bought my first games i had both Mugsy Games and 2 others which i cant remember. Problem was I found once the first few games were bought the prices were then like in the shop so i didnt bother after.
I also rented the games out too where you had a catalogue and picked your games ... not bad prices either if i can remember right.
But by the time the Amiga and ST came out they were just a pirate forum so, sadly, I and number of coding friends couldn't change that, so we left them to it :(
Ok, I know that sounds like rather a simplification, but it's the experience I had in London at the time.
*But you may be talking about home computer clubs where you buy games via post rather than go along and exchange ideas
Thinking back to the ST and Amiga days I used to buy a lot of PD disks from adverts in the magazines. I found those to be better than some games out full price.
roughly 2:04 as there is a bit of data at the end that sounds like a header.. if it's the crash version hehe .. alternative "classic arcadia" is denied due to other games on tape..
No this was the original tape from the WoS archive.
I used to love this game - the leisure centre near me had a tabletop machine, so my brother and a friend would go down on a Saturday, swim, play some Moon Cresta, then buy some coconut slice from a sweet shop on the way home. Aah, simpler times!
I was always confused by the game logo - was it Moon Rest, Moon Crest? Looking at it now it seems pretty obvious, but the name is odd... I'm sure it made sense to the Japanese authors.
I've never played back in the day. I downloaded from WoS some years ago. I've always loved the docking-ships level.
That would surprise me a lot. I can't remember a single time I've read that those making a conversion was given any sourcecode.
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
Me too, and most of them barely had much access to the original arcade machines too!
Currently looking at buying the tabletop arcade version :razz:
Russ
I looked into this a little.
I agree that developers didn't tend to get source code (thankfully things have changed there!) but it wouldn't be head-explodingly crazy for a 5 year old arcade game's source code to be supplied. I didn't find anything to indicate one way or the other unfortunately.
Ian Andrew, head of Incentive, had a Moon Cresta machine in his office. So it's also possible that they read the ROMS and (if necessary) unencrypted the code. That's what I would have done in their position.
Of course it's also possible that they just studied the game carefully. :)
Whilst there are certainly documented cases of some developers having access to a machine (either for a weekend, or weeks in some cases, Bob Pape of R-Type fame mentions this in his book), many had to work off nothing more than a video tape of the machine.
Getting access to the code would have been highly unlikely. Even if they could, most of it would be useless on a different platform (even one that shared a CPU), especially when the arcade machines had hardware sprites, you'd spend so much time trying to work it all out that you may as well write it from scratch yourself.
As for decrypting the ROMs, that's even more unlikely, reverse engineering dumps isn't easy even these days with emulators you can single step, back then it would have taken months, and months is about the development time for a game as it is.
That's if you had the money and knowledge to rip them in the first place.
It's a nice idea, but in practise, not practical from any realistic sense at the time. :/
I agree. Besides, it's not a terribly complex game, so the easiest way to remake/port it would be to just get on with it and make it as close to the original as possible.
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
Twitter: Sokurah
We are only saying it is highly unlikely anybody would have done it then, we didn't say there weren't possibilities of doing it now.
Have you not seen the very clever port of Pac-man to the +3 which is based on the original ROMs? :)