People have e-mailed saying they are having trouble getting the demo to work on machines with 3rd party memory upgrades. Thanks to Mathy van Nisselroy and Andreas Magenheimer for finding this out, and pointing me to information regarding the multitude of different memory upgrades available. I will try and make the game work with as many as possible, although if they work too differently from a standard 130XE this may not be possible.

AtariAge Discussion Thread

Firstly, thanks especially to people who have already tried the demo version with real Atari 130XE’s – that was one of the main reasons for releasing the preview. I now know the game actually works on real hardware, and also that flickering the screen for more colours may be unacceptable with PAL systems. (People have already been kind enough to suggest other ideas for having more colours, although there are drawbacks with all the methods I’m aware of.)

Thank you also for the overwhelmingly generous and positive feedback. Whilst it has all been very encouraging, I want to put some perspective on it (someone needs to deflate my ego, and I’d rather it was me!). If Atari had managed to sell more 128K machines like the 130XE (the most popular machines had 48K or 64K), you would have seen much more stuff at least as good as this – the extra memory really makes a lot of difference with what you can try to do. If you like what I have done, you should see some of the amazing things that demo coders and teams have produced (especially from Poland, where Atari 8-bit has survived longest). One of my favourites is “Drunk Chessboard”, which would have been good for even an ST or Amiga demo. The guy who wrote that is even trying to do a Doom/Duke Nukem style game for Atari 8-bit, which will be even more technically challenging than Space Harrier.

AtariAge Discussion Thread