Well, according to a search on this site, Keith Burkhill is responsible in part/fully for these Speccy games:
Afterburner by Activision
Back To The Future Part III
Battle Ships by Hit-Pak
Commando by Elite
Exterminator by Audiogenic
Galaxy Force by Activision
Geebee Air Rally by Activision
Ghosts 'N Goblins by Elite
Gilligan's Gold by Ocean
Marauder by Hewson
Missile Defence by Anirog
Space Harrier by Elite
Of course, as usual you're welcome to point out any errors with these assumptions, please do that before I start the proper poll next week!
Keith is one of the programmers I learned to recognize and follow as a kid. He was a freelance working on its own, and he did many of those conversations just by memory or with a VHS of someone playing the game.
I was surprised when I discovered he's not better recognized in the scene, and his conversions of Ghost'n Goblins and Space Harrier labeled as mediocre when as a kid my impression was that they where better than the sequels published later.
About the titles, I think Exterminator is his best conversion, very close to the original, and can be played coop if I remember correctly.
Commando was the first non-educational game my parents bought me back in the day, so that and Keith Burkhill will always be etched in my memory.
I seem to remember G&G getting pretty good reviews BITD, but Space Harrier was always going to be a challenging conversion; without all the physical hardware and audio, it was never going to be the same on the Speccy.
A strong softography that one. Commando and GnG are fantastic conversions but I always felt that Space Harrier was somewhat underrated by Crash (I'd have Smashed it). Considering what it had to convert it's quite incredible really. It retains all the playability of the original and that 78% for Graphics is a joke.
Space harrier was an incredible achievement and even now looking back on it, it’s possibly the second best conversion of a Sega “super scaler” arcade game (after Super Hang On).
There is a 128k enhanced version of Space Harrier, but it’s one of those annoying “enhanced” games which basically consist of a crack intro with completely unrelated AY music at the start. The main game is just the normal 48k one.
Could anyone hack the original Soace Harrier and add this AY tune into the main game? That would be incredible!
I think the issue with the GG conversion is that it is not the full game, and feels kind of unpolished (and let not talk about the loading screen), but the gameplay is quite close to the original, and in fact, that's the signature of the author: all his games are very playable, even conversions of 1986+ arcades far beyond the ZX Spectrum capabilities.
From what I can tell of the way Space Harrier runs, it picks a few (three?) sprites that it's going to use on a level, and pre-scales them in software to different sizes along with making masks, at the start of a level, and again, just before the end-of-level baddie appears. Then the level is made up of only those sprites. Which is why you don't get the same variety in a level as the arcade original; why columns are represented as a stack of three floating rocks, for example. And then of course it's limited in how many original full-size sprites is has loaded that it can source from, so after the first few levels, there are no more original sprites to see.
It'd be neat for a 128K version to included some more source sprites, even if the limit of three (or so) per level still applies. Although if that could be expanded on too (given that the originals need no longer fit in the working 48K), adding more varied enemies on a level, it'd be even better.
On the other hand I dislike his Ghosts'n'Goblins and could never understand why some people like it. It's smooth but that's all. It is difficult, has bad graphics (small, simplistic and limited) and is only about 50% of the original game.
I've already mentioned at these forums that I tried once to analyse Ghosts'n'Goblins code. And it was really crazy stuff, with everything hard-coded and different routines for everything. Each element of screnery (graves, trees, platoforms...) moved by different code, each enemy moved by different code etc.
It is very distinctive stuff. Personally I would very quickly lose my sanity with such code but Keith somehow managed to deal with it.
toot_toot wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 2:57 pm
There is a 128k enhanced version of Space Harrier, but it’s one of those annoying “enhanced” games which basically consist of a crack intro with completely unrelated AY music at the start. The main game is just the normal 48k one.
Could anyone hack the original Soace Harrier and add this AY tune into the main game? That would be incredible!
