The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

A gross error has been corrected! I noticed on Abandonia.com that their Star Control 1 review was less than it could have been. (The review didn't like the Full Game at all, so it basically amounted to "Melee good, go play Star Control 2." So I mentioned it on the boards and when I talked to the moderator of the site to give them the Star Control 1 manual he asked if I wanted to do a better review. Do I?! So I did. You can read the whole thing here:

http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/143/StarControl1.htm (http://www.abandonia.com/games/en/143/StarControl1.htm)

I don't know about you, but I'm pretty stoked about this.

Why are the screenshots scaled...badly?


...also, is the .adf 'PD' yet?

I had nothing to do with the screen shots. They were messed up before I got there.


Please explain what you mean by this?

Amiga Disk File.

I have to say I don't have any idea what you're talking about here.

what a funny thing, I read this thing yesterday without reading your post in the forum.

In fact, your review made me download the game and when I played it, I was completely disappointed.  :(

I enjoyed SC1, for the most part. The only thing that bothered me about
this game was it ran really slow on my machine. (1.3GHz, 256MB RAM).
I might try it out later in a DOSbox to see if I can speed it up a bit.

I may talk to Kosta and insist that the line "Technical note: You must run this game in DOSBox to avoid frustrating slow-down on even the newest machines." to the end of the review.

And ...

What? Why? Whu? How? What for? What was wrong with... ah nevermind. I guess it's just not for everyone. I'm glad I persuaded you to give it a try anyways.

I believe he means: Are the amiga files Public Domain?

Noo! I was talking about flowers!!!1

Yeah, there's an Amiga vesion of the game. I was wondering if it had been released as a free download under some sort of license, and if so, will it be available at that site. I'd rather play games using an emulator (winUAE) than tinkering around with DosBox and .exe files.

Edit: Cnat tyep! Also: Moby games (http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/star-control) has screenshots from many versions. (Abandonia is just concentrating on PC games?)

Edit: Found C64 version on www.c64.com (http://www.c64.com/index2.php) (under S bottom of page '300') It seems very... crippled.

I think it's important with good screenshots. Maybe you could make your own with this DosBox thing you're using? I think that would benefit the review.

SC1 was released for PC/DOS, Commodore Amiga, Sega Genesis, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum. The DOS and Amiga versions can be considered to be the "original" SC1 (the Amiga version has better sound than the PC version; same sound effects as SC2/UQM and the Amiga SC1 title music lives on as the Ur-Quan theme in SC2). The Genesis version is a decent port of the Amiga version except that it is very slow.

The 8-bit versions of SC1, on the other hand, look nothing like the SC1 most of us know, are missing many of the ships and are unplayably slow and badly balanced. As far as I can tell, TFB had nothing to do with these versions.

Abandonia is all about old DOS games. It is also about abandonware, which means that while the program is not public domain, it's in that gray area of "nobody give a care enought to do anything about it." Abandonia is very good about removing games if requested to, even to the point of removing whole slews of games

Although:
I have no idea what to say about that. DOSBox is an emulator. But having never used winUAE it may be that it's easier to use than a DOS environment. (However, I understand DFend is pretty good at making DOSBox dumb.)

And don't play the C64 version. it's almost worse than SC3. TFB has confirmed they had NOTHING to do with them.

Most Amiga games run from boot floppies, so all you have to do to run them is insert the disk and power on the computer; on an emulator, select the disk image and start the emulation. PC games, on the other hand, were almost always MS-DOS executables (some early PC games were also distributed as boot disks, but rebooting your computer from a floppy is kind of silly if you have a hard disk), and running these on MS-DOS involves actually navigating to the right drive/directory and running the right program. I can see how the Amiga version is more user friendly if the MS-DOS command line is unfamiliar.

guesst is entirely correct about DOSBox being an emulator; it emulates most of a PC and most of MS-DOS (this means that DOSBox doesn't require a copy of MS-DOS and the file system implementation can do a lot of tricks to simplify the emulation, speed things up and make use of the file system of the host OS).

Why is it that I'm hearing about Amiga emulation all over now-a-days? I may have to get into it. I hear there's alot of good, high quality games came out for the Amiga.

Then again, I don't have time for the hobbies I already have. Maybe this'll wait for a while.

The emulator is free, but you'll need the kickstarts and those are not free for some reason.
http://www.winuae.net/

There's a package sold with everything you need, it can be found here:
http://www.amigaforever.com/

Back2roots have a lot of games, and they have permission from the copyright holders to put them up too.
http://www.back2roots.org/  <- I'm getting a blank page here now though, and it's been like that for a while. I think there's other sites too but I can't remember them atm.

I think any disk image or rom of sc1 is not public domain or otherwise free since it will have a splash screen with the "Star Control" trademark on it. The best that can probably be done is to hack the dos version to remove/replace the splash screen and have TFB release it as freeware. No point to open-sourcing it since the source code has been lost.

Yeah, it's probaly not PD, but it's defonately abandoned. Well, that is to say it seems abandoned. Nothing is defonately Abandoned. If it were, it'd be released as PD.