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Cake day: May 18th, 2024

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  • Thought it was odd to call this a sequel to an “NES classic” considering Shadowgate originated on the Macintosh, but judging by the screenshots in the article it seems the authors indeed decided to implement an interface very similar to the one Kemco developed for their NES port. Interesting choice! Having played the Mac-like Amiga port and the NES port I do prefer the controls of the latter as they better suit the use of a keyboard or gamepad.

    The music in the NES port is very memorable to me as well. If Beyond Shadowgate will feature sound, I would hope that cues are taken from the sound of the NES and the prior composer’s work.





  • I imported this game when it first came out and it’s been one of my favorites. Very interesting to think about how the strengths of the Genesis vs. the PC Engine could be used. So far it looks like it’s aimed at graphical fidelity. The PCE had a wider color palette from which to select and could display more colors simultaneously, but I don’t think Rondo really pushed those capabilities. Konami did some really nice parallax routines in this game for the single background graphics layer on the PCE. Those effects are much more common on the Genesis with its multiple hardware layers. Curious as to how the “extra power” could be used if werton opts to explore that. The FM cover tune sounds great, looking forward to hearing more!

    What blew me away in the video was the costume change. Was that in the original all this time? I know what I’m playing today!






  • Most of Creative’s AWE32 cards do use a real Yamaha OPL3 chip for FM synthesis, which can produce two-or-four operator voices. The latter of those can approach the quality of the voices in their DX7-family line of musical instruments. Even the older OPL2 chip that is limited to two-operator voices can sound great when programmed well (not that I’d call it realistic-sounding).

    The other synth chip on the AWE32 is the Ensoniq EMU8000. That one does sample-based synthesis as you describe above.

    Just wanted to note that Creative misappropriated the term wavetable synthesis when they marketed this and other sample-based synthesis cards of theirs, and the misnomer spread widely to the products of other companies and persists to this day.