![]() ![]() When Princess Daphne was kidnapped by the dragon, Singe, and taken to his castle, Dirk set out to rescue her. We were copying 24 hours a day and it took us three months to finally clear the backorders."Ī semi-sequel called Escape from Singe's Castle quickly appeared, featuring additional scenes from the arcade version and in 1990 the original Amiga version was ported to the PC, Mac and Atari ST.Dirk the Daring was a heroic, if clumsy knight. Because of the proprietary disk format we could only copy the disks on certain drives. I think we sold over 1000 units at that show alone. We released it at the World of Commodore in December 1988 in Toronto and we literally could not make them fast enough. Fortunately today's video codecs and storage media handle all of the tough tasks that we had to code for the Amiga. And clearly there were compromises in video quality and frame rate, but we were dealing with an underpowered system, at least relative to what we wanted to achieve, with limited memory and a slow, small external storage device. We ended up with about 15 per cent of the arcade game in the release version and this was on six disks when disks cost $1,25 each. The image decoding programming was optimised by the cycle times each instruction took. Finally, the code was very tight assembly language. We also came up with a proprietary disk format that packed more Information onto each track. ![]() All disk access was handled directly and we determined how much data needed to be pre-buffered and continued to load from disk as the animation was playing. ![]() In fact on the Amiga 1000 we even reused the special memory where the system would normally load into. We didn't use the Amiga operating system at all. The foreground image was then compressed. We touched up the foregrounds, reduced the colour palette to 16 colours, then compared movement between the foreground of the current and subsequent frames and reduced any Information that didn't change. We began by carefully selecting scenes without background movement, then spent a great deal of time separating the foreground elements from the backgrounds. "The key challenges were minimising the size of the data, maximising disk space and access times, and optimising processor usage. Suddenly you get thrown in the game as the protagonist Dirk the Daring attempting to rescue Princess Daphne & fighting the Dragon.ĭavid Foster, who worked with Randy Linden on the conversion on 16-bit machine, in Retro Gamer 38 (Conversion Capers) shared some information about development process. You get to see how the evil & scary Dragon Singe captures Princess Daphne and locks her in Mordroc Castle with a mean wizard. Thanks to Cinematronics laserdisc technology. Used to play them in London Oxford Circle. If anyone knows where to locate them, please let me know. I also miss the Arcade games that were based on Star Wars & Galactica movies. The PC and home computer versions were rather slow & the graphics were not so nice. The Arcade game was rather expensive and one only had three tries I think. If you can get your hands on the Arcade Game (we had some at G4 / E! Entertainment). Shrek always reminded me a bit of this great game. We did enjoy the 2 D Graphics especially the Prince, Princess and Dragon are nicely animated. The DOS version of Dragon's Lair was rather slow compared to the Arcade Game, which seemed to be the fastest out there. We would stand in line and bum money to give to the random best player we found on the street just to see where this great game brings us & what new adventures and castles await. ![]()
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