The Yak was also well impressed by what he saw of Melbourne's new Kung Fu one at the Commodore show... great graphixx and Oriental music too, and it's also unique in that it sustains soft-speech and animation simultaneously (although you can turn this off 'cos it does eventually sound like the Duel of the Daleks) but if you're into the martial-arts sims currently in the arkies then this is really good.

Yak Hackin'... I now have one of the Nemesis Machines, the Atari 520ST... me WELL blown ayway by that one, like Totally Amaaaazing... Still, Commodore ain't doing too badly either, their C128 looks like being the finest 8bitter on the market and an obvious upgrade-path for all us C64 junkies. At first I must admit the ST overawed me and I didn't see much in the Commodore's offering, but the more I look the better it gets.

Atari 520 ST
Atari 520 ST
Look, in C128 mode you get the best Basic this side of Alpha Centauri with lots of zarjaz stuff like commands for Sid and a sprite-ed built in, plus the clock (and therefore your progs) run twice as fast as on the C64. Plus you get C64 mode so you can still play whatever turns you on, then if you want to be mega-serious you get CP/M and the Z80 mode.

At around £300 that's pretty good in the Yakbooks, the only real problem you'll have is whether to go to C128 (stayin' 8bit but retaining the C64 compatibility and also not having to learn that much new stuff to start exploiting your extra power) or to go 16bit with the 240ST (Atari's midrange ST; not much software at first, but if you're prepared to wait I guarantee it'll blow your brains out)...

It'll be interesting to see what Commodore make of the new Amiga, too - scheduled for launch in America this summer, I rather wonder whether Commodore will introduce it into the UK until they can get the price sub £1K.

High price apart, this machine sounds mega, 3 custom graphix chips I hear, 4096 colours someone mentioned (16 per scan line they said, and if they are talkin' in scan-lines it means raster interrupts all round again, yippee!!).

Even if the Amiga itself turns out really mega-expensive, there's still the possibility of Uncle Commie using similar chips in a lower-end micro...

Whilst on the subject of Amiga I must relate a weird encounter I had at the Commie show... a guy, Commodore employee, comes up to me and asks me if i'll be doing any icon-driven graphic adventures (a la Shadowfire).
Commodore Amiga 1000
Commodore Amiga 1000

Why, asks a puzzled Yak? "Well" says he "we're looking for really original software for the Amiga." So he want original stuff so why he want the Yak to copy Shadowfire huh?? Perhaps he was worried about the icons... but it goes without saying we're gonna use 'em on a mouse driven sys like the Amiga, so why not Colourspace or Mama or something, why only graphadvents?? There sure is some weird thinkin' goin' on somewhere...

Jeff Minter - Bike
Jeff 'Biker' Minter

Anyway I finish now, I got subgame 2 to do, if any of you Commiefiends get Netwize do give me a MBX (id is LLAMA) or go on that Chatline, I'm the one with the bags under the eyes and not typing straight from too many latenites...


Article reproduced from Commodore Horizons magazine September 1985 edition.
Although all text appears unchanged, some photographs or images have been removed, added or modified for aesthetic purposes.

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Thank you to the following websites which were used for sourcing some images that appear in this article:
The Great Game Database, Kitchener Classifieds, Wikipedia.