PLUS/4 Longplay - Alpharay (Normal)
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- Опубликовано: 21 окт 2024
- Full run on Alpharay (Normal) on Plus4Emu (Emulator), my final score was 169152 points.
Commercial release at:
www.psytronik.n...
Freeware release at:
plus4world.poww...
Soundtrack at:
5tarbuck.bandc...
Played by: Mad
Alpharay is a homebrew horizontal shmup released in 2019 for the Plus/4 home computer series and the expanded C16. At the time of release, some new techniques were introduced that were discovered by the programmers of the game, resulting in a colorful game with 50 hz scrolling. The Plus/4 home computer was a child of the 80s and was perceived as an almost failed marketing stunt by Commodore International's business unit. Some enthusiasts remained and still produce games for the Plus/4 today. Starting from a game called "Adentures in Time", the Plus/4 received commercial game releases again on big retro labels. On plus4world you will find the people who do this, a forum dedicated entirely to these long-time, almost forgotten Commodore machines.
Recorded with Plus4Emu by IstvanV
Good use of the TED chip showing just what it can do with 64kb. This game would have sold a lot of Plus4's and C16 64k expansion carts back then.
Revenge of the MADman! ;) Stefan, you and your crew literally made my childhood dreams come true with this gem of a game and of course all the others. So please do continue making Plus/4 stuff!
This looks so cool for the plus 4, always liked the look and colours of this 8-bit too 👍🏻
plus4 was an underrated machine, crippled by its compatibility with the inferior C16; felt like over 95% of the games available on the plus4 were actually C16 games. Unleashed, it could surpass the C64 in speed and colours, but the average plus4 owner wouldn't know that in the '80s.
THE BEST SHOOTER ON THE C16 , PLUS/4 !!! LOVE IT!
This is simply fantastic!!!
This game is just incredible for such a simple machine ! Wow!
Really Amazing! Certainly the best graphics of a shooter on an 8 Bit homecomputer system I've ever seen. I doubt this would be possible on an C64, CPC, Atari, MSX or Apple II, let alone on a Speccy. The gameplay is on par with the great shooter titles of the 1980ies. The music is nicely composed but of course the sound suffers from the TED-limitations. But anyway - well done!!! No SID-module-cheat. Respect!
It's such a pitty, that Commodore was unfit/unable to develop a true succesor for the C64 in time. So the 264-series and the C128 were somehow obscure failures. Imagine Commodore would have concentrated it's efford to develop a system with the combined graphic capabilities of tie 264s (colours) and the C128 (resolution), the anmiation and sound capabilities of the C64/128 (maybe a SID with 6 channels) and the faster CPU of the C128... Great games like this would have been standard by the mid 80ies...
That would have been the Commodore 65 (aka C64DX), which wasn't released in the end. Commodore managed to fail once more with that one, as they started to develop it at a time when the Amiga with somewhat similar specs already was well spread on the market. Five or six years earlier though this would have been the machine of any C64 owner's dreams.
Had similar discussions with Amiga fans. Like it or Commodore unfortunately dropped the ball. Underestimated the powerful consoles which were around the corner. The rest they say is history. Wish Commodore was still going don't get me wrong.
It is a VERY impressive game for the Plus4, however there are numerous games on both the C64 and MSX 2 that are more graphically impressive. Definitely nothing on the Speccy, Apple II though. R-Type remake on the CPC is pretty much equal though.
Thunderforce IV 🙂. Love the inspiration for the main sprite behind this. A port onto the humble Amstrad would be welcome
Stunning. The good old Plus/4 can do some really, really impressive stuff. It's a shame most programmers in the 80's couldn't make the machine do this kind of stuff!
I have played this last weekend on the doreco party- thanks to plus4_fan i was very impressed ! fantastic game on this little machine !
really cool graphics...and great sound...
Remember, this machine has only 2 voices!
Interesting, if not rather obvious, use of Gradius (primarily Gradius Gaiden) Core Warship graphics as a basis for elements of the final stage's design.
incredible
Damn, I`d never of thought, well I guess its a tad like the C64 when it first come out us speccy owners would laugh at it, but then the various bedroom programmers learned how it ticked and damn what a machine that turned out to be, but yeah awesome and that soundtrack!
Speccy owners laughed at the C64?!? I think you will find it was the other way around. ;)
Awesome stuff. Can you imagine if programmers realised the plus/4's potential back in the day (and commodore had kitted it out with a sid chip)? It would have been a different story altogether.
Simply wow
Pretty cool for this Machin
This makes we want a plus/4 now, this is fantastic, obviously inspired by the Thunder Force series, with a hint of Pulstar Thrown in😀
This is Amiga level graphics. I very much doubt Plus 4 could pull this.
Wow para una maquina que no fue hecha para juegos es bastante impresionante lo que se logro
What an accomplishment! This really is a cool game for a system that didn’t get much in the way of games back in the day. Not to diminish your feat in any way, but can this be ported over to the C64 and if so would it be better or worse in any way? I know that the Plus4 was a newer system but due to its hardware architecture, it was essentially considered my most (including myself) as not capable of what you clearly pulled off well here. Also, was the sound chip different on this machine?
Hi! Thanks a lot! On C64 the game would look graphically worse but would be more fluid and maybe we would have more enemies on screen (including flicker artifacts because formations could not be freely positioned). Mostly the colorrestrictions would be a problem, many shooter games on C64 just use 3 colors for the background graphics (except Katakis, Enforcer etc..). There is a bitmap mode scroll hack for C64 too, but it crashes on some machines. If you do such a game for the C64 you clearly would make the game fit to the "hardware restrictions" there. But of course the sound would be awesome on C64. 5tarbuck our musician does a top job on the normal Ted restrictions of the game aswell that we do have 3 voices instead the normal 2, one virtual voice so to say.. All in all I think this game would be worse on C64, but maybe there may be a lot of a better game possible if someone would use the C64 restrictions well. Personally I would opt for a totally new game on C64 and make this as good as it is possible with this awesome machine. (There is an enforcer 2 demo out there but this game never got finished whyever.. Soul Force is also nice.)
Still waiting for the C64 port of this :D
this is a work of coding art
Incredible
Amazing, puts the C64 to shame.
Imagine VIC2 with 128 colors and a 4mhz 6510 in a C64.
Very impressive.
Imagine, if this machine had hardware sprites, scrolling and a decent sound chip...
Hardware scrolling is actually implemented and even better than e.g. on C64. The Plus/4 does have a native bitmap scrolling whereas e.g. on C64 you do need some hacking to do that. Of course, as you say, sprites and more advanced sound chip would have been nice, though.. :) Thanks for the comment.
I want to play!
Aweeeeesooome
❤
Amazing!
I thought the PLus 4 didnt have sprites.....are these sprites in software?
Yes, it's bitmap mode with software sprites!
@@strictions its brilliant !!!! so you can use all 128 colours in this mode?
@@ssdravidian Yes.. But with bitmap mode restrictions.. So only 2 free colors and foreground (white) + background (black) in an 8x8 block.. So yeah, all 128 colors are usable in this mode.. :)
Wenn Psytronik diese Spiele schon in den 80ern gebracht hätte wäre der C64 nicht die Nr. 1 geworden.
Like the plus/4 C64 and Atari 400 both sport 16 luma intensities (on black and white monitors). I totally do not get why commodore on the C64 just ignores 4 attribute bits in bitmap mode instead of using it for luma. And they crippled extended color mode. Is it really so difficult to offer 8 bits for a tiny 12 color palette?
No, the TED chip in C 16 is faster. It needs only more ram.@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt
@@xxTeamFearLessxx1 VIC-II runs at 2 MHz. TED runs at 1.8 MHz and got square pixels, yeah! VIC-II accesses SRAM and DRAM. 12 bits of data in total. The TED only accesses DRAM (8 bit). TED reads 1 kB color attributes from RAM. Yes you are right, it needs 1 kB more of DRAM, or netto 500 bytes.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt The TED reduced the number of components in the computer. Save up place and price.
Looks like an Amiga game