For a long time Cinemaware's "Defender of the Crown" set the standard in computer game graphics on the Amiga. (Gryzor and Renegade were the CPC counterparts for that...).

My friends and I were always hoping that somebody would do a conversion of this game to the CPC. But for a long time nobody did. So at some point I came up with the idea that I could mock my friends by copying the title image to the CPC and then showing it to my friends claiming that finally a CPC version of Defender of the Crown had been published.

I used a very crude image editing program to create the picture. I drew the outline of the bricks with simple lines and then wrote a small BASIC program that filled the inside of the bricks with color. Then I painted the text "Defender of the Crown" pixel by pixel and had yet another BASIC program create the diagonal color bars within the Defender font.

When it came to giving the inside of the bricks some texture I lost interest in this idea. I had already spent some hours on drawing the rough outline and the font and I didn't think that this joke was worth much more effort and time. The only thing that I did then was create a short program that loads the image into the screen memory and cycles the colors in the Defender of the Crown font.

Some years later I discovered that the French company Master Designer Software had done a CPC conversion which looked pretty good (no wonder, according to the TACGR nine computer graphics artists did the conversion of all the cool Amiga graphics...). Though there is no color cycle in the title screen and the bricks in the back are pink instead of grey.

Update 25th January 2004

Some days ago Laurent, a former French CPC programmer, emailed me to tell me more about how Defender of the Crown was ported to the CPC. I asked him whether I could add the information from his eMail to my webpage and he approved that. So here it is:

I just want to tell you that I am the "nine computer graphics artists" :) At this time, I worked from the Atari Version. We asked a hacker to extract the images from this game (strangely, we were not authorized to get the originals from the 1st company), then my favourite programmer, Brice, did a savage conversion to CPC and then I started to work. The CPC palette is very weird, that is why the bricks are pink (there is a (enough) cool range of color : bright violet, violet, purple, maroon). I think I can provide you pictures of this version if you want. (The picture can be seen on the TACGR page on Defender of the Crown)

The company I worked in at this time is not "Master Designer Software", but "UBI Soft".

Did I tell you that Brice (the programmer) also wrote a few CPC emulators (for Unix and Mac)? We also made "EXIT", another game for CPC (not a conversion).