Shrinking Fireman vs Magic Knight

spider

I want to start this topic by saying I'm not in any way suggesting this is some kind of erm 'Harry S Price' type of thing but it struck me a few days ago how similar I.S.F is to the M.K series in some ways ?

It may be me but the movement of the fireman I first thought matched F.K but it more accurately in its jump/left or right and fall matches the later M.K games.

The sound effects and font are not dissimilar too.

As per my first paragraph I'm not suggesting anything but it does seem to erm 'follow' I suppose certain shall we say 'coding methods'

Any thoughts on this ? :) If you fire up I.S.F and then one of the M.K games you'll see what I mean, maybe. ;))

EDIT... I should probably mention I brought this 'back then' too, I likely still have it as well. A link would maybe help

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0002468

dm_boozefreek

The sound effects for the menus, and using items are the same as well, so much so I remember years ago looking up to see if David jones had anything to do with that game.

spider

I did quickly check the authors of I.S.F but they did not have any other titles listed. Just seems a bit similar that's all. I don't want to 'suggest' anything else really as if I'm wrong its unfair. :)

dm_boozefreek

I always wondered if it would have been a problem with the obviously borrowed code, but both games were published by Mastertronic, so maybe the publishers deemed it as OK?

spider

That's a very good thought actually something I'd not considered in that the publisher was the one and same, well almost in that it was M.A.D vs Mastertronic but yes the same thing. :)

spider

I probably ought to extract them as raw binary files (say 23296 to 65535) via emulation so I have ISF.bin and MK.bin (any of them) and then do some comparison on them to look for matching patterns.

Only problem is the only thing I can think of to try this with is Linux (grep probably? I'm not sure!) and I don't have access to a system to try. Hmm.

As I say mainly curiosity rather than finger pointing.

David Jones

Hi spider & dm_boozefreek,

David Jones here.

Thanks for your concern, but you needn't worry. This was all totally above board. Mastertronic asked me to give TISFM team some help with a sprite routine so I did..I can't remember if I passed them any other routines, but I may have if you see any other similarity.

They did the vast majority of the work on the project, I just gave them a little bit of support.

David

spider

Thank you for the clarification on this David, appreciated. :)

Another little "problem solved"

dm_boozefreek

Yep that's something that's probably been niggling away at the back of my mind for about 30 years cleared up!

Thanks a lot...