Captain Blood

[Bloodwych]

As posted in another thread, I played Captain Blood on the Atari ST. Never had the Amiga version. Can you remember - was it better, or a direct port?

Very unique and quite creepy game that oozed atmosphere. Unlike Harrison, I never had the patience to complete it and for some reason it scared the hell out of me as a child. It created an atmosphere like the Aliens films!

I may go back now and confront my fears...come on Bloodwych, be brave.

[Tiago]

As posted in another thread, I played Captain Blood on the Atari ST. Never had the Amiga version. Can you remember - was it better, or a direct port?

Very unique and quite creepy game that oozed atmosphere. Unlike Harrison, I never had the patience to complete it and for some reason it scared the hell out of me as a child. It created an atmosphere like the Aliens films!

I may go back now and confront my fears...come on Bloodwych, be brave.

some months ago i read somewhere that C.Blood in Atari has better sound but Graphics are similar in atari and amiga

[Harrison]

The game was originally developed on the Atari ST and later ported to the Amiga, along with many other platforms.

Sadly it is true that for once the Atari ST version is the better game!

Why? Some elements were removed from the Amiga version which is mad when you know what they were. The graphics are all but identical, as is the gameplay. But the Amiga version suffers in regard to audio compared to the ST original. Apparently the audio samples are not as clear in the Amiga music tracks and these sound better on the ST. But the worst part is the speech. On planets when talking to aliens, the original Atari ST version actually had audio speech when the aliens spoke using the communication system. On the Amiga version their is no audio speech at all! Why? Who knows.

[Bloodwych]

Thanks for that.

Very strange, especially since the Amiga had more storage space on its DD disks, as opposed to the early ST's that had SD.

This gives me a good idea for a thread.

[Harrison]

Very strange indeed. Also the fact that the Amiga also had much better audio capabilities than the ST. The ST only had 3 channel mono, compared to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo.

[Teho]

At a guess, I'd say they used synthesized speech in the ST version, which would perhaps have to be re-programmed from scratch for the Amiga. They may simply not have had the time for it when doing the conversion?

[Bloodwych]

At a guess, I'd say they used synthesized speech in the ST version, which would perhaps have to be re-programmed from scratch for the Amiga. They may simply not have had the time for it when doing the conversion?

That's very possible.

However, they should have just quickly rigged something up like the "Say" utility from Workbench 1.3! The one that sounds like Stephen Hawking. The Amiga could easily synthesize speech too.

Then they could have typed in some gibberish text for it to "Say" and hey presto - Alien speak.

[Harrison]

The ST version used standard sound samples for its music. At the time I looked at the ST Captain Blood disks and found the music files were stored as plain sound sample files. I could listen to the music in a standard sound sampler wave force editor on both the ST and Archimedes.

Not sure about the speech. Maybe that was synthesized. Don't forget however that the speech wasn't English or a known language but made up for the game and was just gibberish really, although apparently it was a designed audio language for the game.