Magic Carpet (Bullfrog/EA) - Unreleased Amiga CD32/AGA pics found for HOL!!!

I don't think an untextured version of Magic Carpet was ever started, it's possible that Mike looked into it as he did have some 3D tech on Amiga that was never used but Magic Carpet would have been hard to do, all the characters were scaled sprites which would have been almost as hard to do as texture mapping on A1200.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by GlennCorpes

Sorry to revive such a long dead thread but someone just posted a link to it on Facebook.

Those pics are from a very early PC version of Magic Carpet, probably from at least a year before release. I'd recently switched from Amiga to PC and was having a lot of fun playing around with the byte per pixel mode. That version didn't even use polygon rendering, it was a sort of strange slightly voxelish vertical scanning thing. I ended up completely rewriting the graphic engine before Sean Cooper (who had just finished Syndicate) turned it into the game that was finally released.

Back then we were still talking to Amiga magazines about Syndicate and Theme Park. I suspect what happened is that a journalist visited the office and someone (possibly even me) implied that it might be possible on CD32 as it had a byte per pixel mode or a chunky to planer converter or something didn't it? I hate to admit it but I stopped keeping up with the Amiga's capabilites by then, my only knowledge coming from occasionally talking to Mike Diskette who handled those last two Amiga conversions before going on to create Syndicate Wars (google 'Satellite Reign' to see what he is up to now).

Anyway, it's great to see those screenshots again, that old version had a few advantages over the final release, not least that you could actually see a bit further. It's also nice to see Andy Sandham's bloke standing on a rug graphic, he was animated and everything...

thanks for your post,
could you please tell us why the amiga version was canceled ?

Originally Posted by turrican3

thanks for your post,
could you please tell us why the amiga version was canceled ?

I thought I'd explained this above but I'll spell it out again.

I suspect that what happened was something like this, though I'm filling in gaps in a vague 20+year old memory here:

We had some guys from CU Amiga visiting. The Amiga mags had always been very good to Bullfrog back when we were an 'Amiga first' company. We were just switching over to being a 'PC first' company and all of the core dev people were working on PC stuff. The entire Amiga team consisted of one or two programmers porting Syndicate and Theme Park.

We didn't want to appear to be not focused on being great Amiga developers so when the journalist(s) were shown around the office to see what we were working on, they'd have seen that early version of Magic Carpet running on a PC and asked if it would also make it to Amiga.

Someone fed them some bullshit. I'm not even accusing Peter of this, as I said above it's very likely that I said it could probably be done because the rumours about CD32 (which maybe didn't even exist yet) were that it had a byte-per-pixel mode or a hardware chunky to planer convertor or something.

The reason it never happened is that it was never going to happen. Presumably by the time Magic Carpet was in full development IF we had considered an Amiga version we'd have quickly judged the market of capable Amigas (if there even were any) to be too small to bother with. Sorry to disappoint.

[turrican3]

Originally Posted by GlennCorpes

I thought I'd explained this above but I'll spell it out again.

I suspect that what happened was something like this, though I'm filling in gaps in a vague 20+year old memory here:

We had some guys from CU Amiga visiting. The Amiga mags had always been very good to Bullfrog back when we were an 'Amiga first' company. We were just switching over to being a 'PC first' company and all of the core dev people were working on PC stuff. The entire Amiga team consisted of one or two programmers porting Syndicate and Theme Park.

We didn't want to appear to be not focused on being great Amiga developers so when the journalist(s) were shown around the office to see what we were working on, they'd have seen that early version of Magic Carpet running on a PC and asked if it would also make it to Amiga.

Someone fed them some bullshit. I'm not even accusing Peter of this, as I said above it's very likely that I said it could probably be done because the rumours about CD32 (which maybe didn't even exist yet) were that it had a byte-per-pixel mode or a hardware chunky to planer convertor or something.

The reason it never happened is that it was never going to happen. Presumably by the time Magic Carpet was in full development IF we had considered an Amiga version we'd have quickly judged the market of capable Amigas (if there even were any) to be too small to bother with. Sorry to disappoint.

that's too bad, but that was real, the amiga market was at this time too little.

[Anemos]

Only Atari ST can be playing that game ..

[Akira]

Sorry to necrobump, I just read Glenn Corpes story, great insight!

With that in mind, wouldn't it be correct to strike this entry form HOL altogether? As he says, the screenshots are from PC, and this was NEVER mean to be an Amiga game, not even planned.

The entry is still up here:
http://hol.abime.net/4423

Or is HOL also gonna keep track of all fake entries magazines lied about at the final days of Amiga?

(I see also Megarace is there, is there any ACTUAL PROOF that it was at any point planned and development started for it to the CD32? Because taking a magazine's word for it is not good as proved many times. They were outright making shit up by 1995)

[kikems]

I remember an article in a spanish magazine, Micromania, where the team have an interview and he confirm that their start developing Megarace and Lost Eden for Amiga CD32. I need find this article and i'll post photo here to check.
I need talk with one of my friends, Frondiesete, for help me to find this article, he is a human encyclopedia of unreleased amiga games.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Akira

Or is HOL also gonna keep track of all fake entries magazines lied about at the final days of Amiga?

(I see also Megarace is there, is there any ACTUAL PROOF that it was at any point planned and development started for it to the CD32? Because taking a magazine's word for it is not good as proved many times. They were outright making shit up by 1995)

I hardly say 1993 was the ‘final days of Amiga’, btw lots of mags made shit up by reviewing early versions as the complete version or the disk version instead of the CD one, doesn’t mean every article should be viewed in the same light.

Megarace has been shown, the screenshots in some mags, i cant remember which are CD32 shots, i did compare to mega cd and pc cd and they are different, one of the devs say it was near complete too so its not just mag talk there so its very different to the Magic Carpet situation.