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Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 7:39 am
by russellnash
Any interest in RPGs? i just completed Amberstar after approximately 3 months of playing. It is by far the best game of this genre I have ever played. It is a bit sad that it is all over.




I played this version

http://www.atari.8bitchip.info/ASTGA/A/ambrstar.php



It is a big game and the first thing you should do is get a world map that you can find easily using the wonder known as the internet. Get yourself a horse early on because you will be travelling a lot.
There is a sequel called Ambermoon that is now available on GNU Linux. I might play it some time, it looks great, but it's not on the ST!

https://pyrdacor.itch.io/ambermoon

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 10:33 am
by alexh
Nice. Thanks for sharing.

Amberstar was my favourite game as a kid. I went to work for Argonaut in 1997 and met one of the Ex-Thalion people there (David "Spaz" Moss of TLB) and while he didn't work on Amberstar he inspired me to make a website all about Thalion and their games.

http://thalion.atari.org

I collected every bit of info and data on them I could and started making the website (in a text editor on an Amiga).

Thalion released a sequel to Amberstar called "Ambermoon" published in 1993 only on Amiga in German. Other versions were planned but Thalion went bankrupt in 1994 before the English Amiga version was completed. Not being able to read German I never played it. But when emailing Thalion employees rumours emerged that it was completed and in 1998 Erik Simon the founder and lead artist sent me the only existing set of disks of the Beta of Ambermoon in English. Which I went on to publish on my website.

Eventually I met the entire Thalion team in real life in 2006 in Guetersloh at what had once been their office for a Reunion. Almost everyone came. It was an honour that I never imagined I'd get to do. Karsten Koeper (the designer of Amberstar), Jurie Horneman lead coder, Jochen Mad-Max Hippel who composed the music.

In 2018 I was contacted by someone who wanted to try to remake Ambermoon for Windows. Pyrdacor has done amazing work fixing bugs not only in the 1994 English beta but also in the 1993 German published version. You can play Ambermoon.net on Windows/Linux/MacOS today if you want?

It continues from where Amberstar left off.

https://github.com/Pyrdacor/Ambermoon.net

I know it's not on an Atari but it feels like it. Hopefully in a short time we will integrate the Atari versions of the music which was converted by Big Alec. but never used as the AtariST version was canned early on. This should give the game the authentic Atari ST feel. But that should not put you off starting..


Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 10:48 am
by alexh
It is a bit late now but only the other day I found out that a solution to Amberstar was published in UK disk magazine SynTax (issues 24-30).

https://www.syntax2000.co.uk/issues/

I had this solution for many years (at least 1996) and I published it on my website but I never knew where it came from until last week.

I got to talk to the solution author, Brian Burke who I always wondered what he might be like.

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 11:52 am
by russellnash
Interesting information, thanks. There are a number of games which I have played in the German language because of the lack of an English version. Going to try Spirit of Adventure at some point.

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 1:40 pm
by Steve
Thanks for posting it's good to know about good games like this. I watched a lot of 'top 10s' and such on YouTube but hadn't seen this before cheers.

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Feb 09, 2022 3:49 pm
by Darklord
Great story Alex - thanks for sharing! :)

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:12 am
by mwaawm
Love your Thalion tribute site AlexH and great to hear of you managing to meet these coding heroes in real life.

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2022 8:35 am
by alexh
alexh wrote: Wed Feb 09, 2022 10:33 am https://github.com/Pyrdacor/Ambermoon.net

Hopefully in a short time we will integrate the Atari versions of the music which was converted by Big Alec. but never used as the AtariST version was canned early on. This should give the game the authentic Atari ST feel.
Ambermoon.net can now replace the Amiga music with the Atari music. (albeit in MP3 format). So you can play Ambermoon with an more Atari ST feel. Unfortunately Big Alec didn't finish every track before the ST version was canned but there are quite a lot replaced.

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2022 6:22 pm
by calimero
Yes, AmberStar is easy the best game on ST.

AmberMoon by Pyrdacor IS GREAT! A must play!

Re: Amberstar

Posted: Tue Dec 20, 2022 8:34 am
by russellnash
Having ST music is a great touch. Here is a tune from Amberstar that I love