Hi,

Wouldn't you agree that Mike Montgomery and the lads were mindbogglingly stupid that they have not yet released any of their old Amiga classics on CD or DVD as ADF files? After all, there is WinUAE, an Amiga emulator that works absolutely lovely! Apart from that, had they been kind enough in that case they would also have been so kind as to add the properly licenced required AMIGA ROM file(s) as well (Amiga 500 1.3 plus - if necessary - Amiga 1200 3.1). I am very sure that these would have sold like the proverbial hot cake! (Gremlin by the way have shown that you can alternatively also provide your old stuff as freeware - by the way, this does apply to all three parts of Lotus on the Amiga and the PC version of Lotus 3!) Incidentally, I happen to have the PC CD version of the Bitmap Brothers Cadaver, Gods, Magic Pockets, Speedball 2, and Xenon 2 compilation - so I know what I am talking about! However, instead we were fobbed off with unfortunately apparently half-baked remakes - both as far as Chaos Engine and Speedball were concerned.

At least I am one of those where the Chaos Engine remake appears to be working reasonably fine... As far as I am concerned once you have ironed out the technical problems you should disable all so-called improvements. Instead of the so-called 360° mode, which actually is a 16 directions mode instead of the original 8 directions mode, you should switch to the original 8 directions mode - otherwise your characters movements on screen look as if they are blind drunk!

Apart from that, if you are playing alone and without any human player to join you and you still have the old DOS floppy version plus the good old trainer (very convenient indeed and unfortunately only works for the floppy version and not the DOS CD version, which I also happen to have...) you might at least like to know that the codewords for that version also work for the remake :-) (so if you're desperate...)). Although I am quite fond of the sound I get from my old floppy version - yes, I bought it at the time and still have it! - the digitised Amiga music in the remake still does sound better than that of my hardware Roland MT-32 for the PC version - although said Roland version still is much better than the in game Adlib/Soundblaster music provided with either the DOS floppy or CD ROM version.

For those of you who thought that the DOS CD version might be a kind of wet dream - good CD music and Soundblaster (Pro/16) sound effects and without any crashes I have to disappoint you. Although you do get CD audio with the CD version that is restricted to the intro and the menu stuff, the in-game music is just like in the floppy version, i.e. either Roland MT-32 / CM-32L or Adlib / Soundblaster !!! However, the codes for the floppy version also appear to be working for the DOS CD version :-).

However, even a trained single player experience is nothing as compared to against two human players in front of the same computer. I am writing this as someone who managed to complete Chaos Engine DOS at the time - however, together with a human co-player and not against the computer.

So stop dreaming about a DOS CD version release on GOG. It would be much more worthwhile if GOG were to release the original floppy version and - if we are allowed to dream - a version that is based on either of the two Amiga versions (ECS or AGA the latter of which happened to be the basis for the remake) in combination with WinUAE plus the according Amiga ROM file (presumably 1.3).

Cheers
Patrick


P.S.: By the way, sorry for posting this twice but there was a problem.