PoP for the Atari ST

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David
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PoP for the Atari ST

Post by David »

Atari Mania has two articles about the Atari ST version of PoP:
http://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st ... 20993.html

Curiously, on the second page of the ST Format article, an image caption claims this:
(emphasis mine)
In the course of the game you come across hosts of potions.
Some give you extra time (great) or energy (good), but some others simply kill you off (not so helpful)
We already know that the European Mega Drive version of PoP has extra time potions, and that SNES PoP has a potion which kills the prince instantly.
So I wondered if the Atari ST port somehow got them as well, however improbable it sounds.

Yesterday I started playing through this version to see if there are any such potions.
All potions up to the first potion on level 9 do the same thing as their DOS counterparts.

Unfortunately, I haven't got further than that.
I wanted to reload the saved game to get some time back, but the game crashed on the potions level!
Atari_ST_crash_on_potions_level.png
(For some reason this port sends the prince to the potions level every time I load a saved game, not just the first time.)

The potions level feels somewhat glitched in this version anyway.
For example, there is some garbled text after "Word 01", and there is no letter above bottom left potion on the screenshot.
(The four bombs mean "Illegal Instruction".)

After I reset the emulator, the prince died on the potions level after I pressed Ctrl+L!
Atari_ST_died_after_Ctrl+L.png
Ctrl+L did not do this before the reset.
My guess is that the saved game was not written back to the disk image, because I used a format (STX) which the emulator can't write, and the reset discarded the saved game.
So the game probably tried to load a default all-zero save, with 0 hit points.


During my playthrough I also found two bugs which are familiar from Apple II PoP.

The first bug is where killing a guard on a button will open the wrong gates. (Another post about it)

I killed the first guard of level 8 on the button near him.
Yet the gate triggered by that button did not stay open:
Atari_ST_trigger_bug_guard_on_button.png
At the same time, three other gates are kept open:
Atari_ST_trigger_bug_open_gates.png

The second bug is where the fat guard may have the wrong number of hit points.

I haven't made screenshots of this one.
Amethyst
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Re: PoP for the Atari ST

Post by Amethyst »

David wrote: January 1st, 2023, 2:04 pm We already know that the European Mega Drive version of PoP has extra time potions, and that SNES PoP has a potion which kills the prince instantly.
Would it be possible to implement the Mega Drive's four extra potions in SDLPoP? :)
tacosalad
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Re: PoP for the Atari ST

Post by tacosalad »

During my playthrough I also found two bugs which are familiar from Apple II PoP.

The first bug is where killing a guard on a button will open the wrong gates. (Another post about it)

I killed the first guard of level 8 on the button near him.
Yet the gate triggered by that button did not stay open:

At the same time, three other gates are kept open:
Indeed, that does sound like the same bug (feature?) as the Apple II version.

If it's caused by the same programming error, then you should also be able to collect that potion on Level 4 before the shadow man steals it!
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Norbert
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Re: PoP for the Atari ST

Post by Norbert »

@tacosalad, your video is set to private
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Re: PoP for the Atari ST

Post by tacosalad »

Norbert wrote: January 6th, 2023, 10:39 pm @tacosalad, your video is set to private
No...even weirder. It's set to draft now.

It certainly was public when I copy/pasted the link yesterday, but now the publication time has disappeared and the link is no longer available.
Youtube DRAFT mode.png
I've never seen a DRAFT before -- I wonder what happened? I will try that "EDIT DRAFT" button and see if I can fix it.

(EDIT) Ok, fixed I think. I tried changing it to "unlisted" and YouTube popped up a message that said "Saved as draft" again. Then I tried Public and it popped up the publish window and let me save as Public, with the same URL as before.
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