I had a bit of a bolt out of the blue a few months ago when my friend Jason (Kenz) Mackenzie of Psytronik Software mentions that Paul Kooistra (of Dead on Time fame) was having a go at converting Sub Hunter from the Commodore 64 to the Amstrad CPC. Attached was an early proof of concept, which was very impressive!
Cue a few months down the line, and Paul has finished and converted the entire game over … and it is running superb! In a lot of ways, it plays a lot better than the original C64 version and the stronger colours help to make the swimmer a bit more visible.
The game uses my existing graphics, just ported across to the CPC with some colour tweaks by Paul and a few bits of resizing. However, I was given the opportunity to improve some of the graphics and the end of game Shark looks and animates a whole lot better now.
Paul now just faces the challenge of finding someone to complete the music for the game in 4.5k, which is all the space left at present after some major compression to get it all into 64k on the CPC and avoid a multi-load. Hopefully someone soon will step up to the challenge!
Frank Gasking 