
A man in Bratislava had a dream.
A MC68060 dream.
An Atari dream, too.
But dreams don't come true just by wishing.
So that man got to work.
And after a lot of work he finally did it:

Woooo, this takes me back about 8 years. That's when I got my first PC and those
2 games are some of the first I tried. Actually Quake was my first
disappointment with it. My first reaction when I saw the frame rate was: "What
did they give us? A 486?". Happy days :)

Now, I suppose I don't have to write a lot for these 2 games, because they are
well known in the gaming community and they already wrote history, but a few
senteneces for each can't hurt I suppose.

Quake supposedly brought many new things to the gaming scene: Clever use of the mouse and keyboard for playing (although I won't even go into the trouble of listing all the games that did it before), scripted logic (again I won't go into the trouble), multiplayer (idem). Also it was one of the first games to support 3D accelerators (most notably the 3DFX Voodoo). So... it was, erm, like, old ideas written to take advantage of new hardware. Yeah, that's about it. Finally, it brought a phenomenon not common in the gaming industry back then: the game engine and mod tools. Code written in a more generic way as to be more flexible and customisable. Companies were thrilled, as it cut down game production times and, because more flexible code executes slower, urges people to keep ugrading. From one viewpoint, Quake was one of the major selling points of Pentium processors and 3D accelerators. It started a craze that never ceased: people upgrading their PCs every 2 months to catch up with the latest technology and play new games. Gfx cards, sound cards, memory, CPU, more disk space, CD/DVDs.... the list is endless. I won't continue with this line of thought here, as it should be covered in an article of its own and it's not of much use in an Atari Diskzine ;) Just keep one sentence in mind: "more flexible code executes slower", because we are now about to get to the Atari part of the article. Quake was ported to the Amiga quite some years back, as they had 060 accelerators eariler than Atarians, so what MiKRO actually did is take the source code from iD, and slap on the rendering code from the Amiga and adapt it to the Falcon hardware. Don't think for an instance that this is an easy thing to do, otherwise it'd have been done years ago too :) So, copy the files from the orinigal Quake to the Falcon partition, unpack MiKRO's archive there, double-click on QUAKE.TTP and away we go :) Oh, I must stress out that my specs are a Falcon 030 with CT63 @90Mhz. Which means no bus boosting (although I'm going to get A PhantomS at some point). What we get is quake exactly how we remembered it so many years back. Running a time demo on my machine gave about 12-14fps (for those that don't know it, a time demo is a feature of Quake which replays a prerecorded demo of the game, so it tests the rendering speed, as no logic is applied. In short, consider this as a benchmark). Which translates to "ok, but just don't move the mouse too fast or you'll get a headache" :) I'll reserve conclusions for the end of this article.

"Let's rock!" In many ways Duke Nukem was the opposite of Quake: it's not fully 3D like Quake (it uses a fixed point camera, so the texture mapping routines are easier and faster than pure 3D), it had more variations in its levels, more explosions, and it had Duke! He gave the game more character, as he would jump in and comment stuff you did ("your ass is grass and I'm the lawnmower"!) or saying plot stuff. Actually, Duke 3D was a game and Quake was a game engine, a showcase of what can be built with it. Installation for this game is much like AtariQuake: just copy the files from your original (or backup or whatever :) CD and then unpack the archive in that directory. Some extra fiddling is required because you need to find a suitable config file, but just choosing one of the defaults will do the trick (although This port feels quicker than the other one on my machine (because of the reasons I described above), and it gives you less stress on the eyes. The bottom line Well, this is a bit hard to write. But I'll be honest here. On one hand I am happy of these ports, so I can have a taste of the power that my CT63 (and in an extent, my Falcon) packs. Also they serve as a good demo for people that aren't familiar with these machines. But that's about it I'm afraid. I played these games a long time ago, finished them, and like 95% of PC games, never looked back. Also, CPU power has become really cheap these days. So, by today's standards, both these games are obsolete, so many people won't be too impressed by a Falcon running them. Lots of features are planned for both of these 2 games, but I'm not sure if they'll ever get implemented because MiKRO seems fed up with these 2 ports (no, I haven't talked to him about it, I just deduced that from the READMEs in both ports ;) GGN for Alive 21/12/06