| 31-Mar-08 |

Atari XL/XE Space Harrier Conversion Project

| Home | Diary | Movies | Download | FAQ |

31st March 2008

If you can't view the Flash based Movies or just want to see them in higher quality, these are downloadable MP4 versions:

The game tries to create the illusion of more than the 4 colour per screen line limit at this resolution by dithering colours every TV frame (50 times per second for PAL, 60 for NTSC). Since the movies run at a slower frame rate than this, the frames had to be blurred together to see the extra colours on the movies. The net result of this is that the movies don't flicker like the actual game does, and they look blurrier.

Stage 1 (8.9MB)
Stage 2 (9.3MB)
Stage 3 (12.9MB)
Stage 4 (5.3MB)
Stage 5 (4.9MB)

31st March 2007

Here is some music from the game, including the complete soundtrack for the game in SAP format by Sal Esquivel. There is a Windows SAP player included in the ZIP file. Players for many other platforms are available from ASMA. (Also check out the hundreds of great tunes there, if you're into chip music):

Space Harrier Theme Arcade - MP3 (1.2MB)
Space Harrier Theme Atari - MP3 (1.2MB)
Space Harrier Soundtrack Atari - Zipped SAP (74KB)

9th April 2002

This is a rough demo of stage 1, suitable for most Atari emulators in 130XE Mode (Xformer is a notable exception):

SHDEMO.ATR (130KB)

Notes

  1. I know some people can’t stand this device, but I've decided to make the screen flicker to give the appearance of more colours. To minimize the flicker don’t have the brightness set high on your TV or monitor. With an emulator you will suffer badly unless you synchronize your monitor refresh speed (under Windows Display Properties) to the TV refresh speed of the Atari you’re emulating (NTSC is 60Hz, PAL 50Hz - 100Hz will also work if you’re lucky). Make sure the vertical sync option on your emulator is used too (which doesn’t seem to work properly on Atari800Win2.6c). I would recommend using NTSC as most monitors support 60Hz, and it flickers quicker than PAL so you notice it a bit less. I've found Atari800WinPLus to be a very good emulator.

  2. In the unlikely event anyone tries this - the demo won’t work on an Atari with a processor upgrade as I’m using some 6502c only instructions (well, only “LAX”. Has anyone else found much use for the others?)

  3. The demo won’t work with some 3rd party memory upgrades. Compy and Rambo seem OK, but those over 256Kb are likely to be a problem.

Top