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Here’s another interesting story that Saberman just sent us and it’s the latest version 2.5 of the cult C64 game “Space Taxi” for the Atari XL/XE. As said in an email we sent back in May for the old version: “Many years ago we talked about releasing a game, I can’t remember which one, ah ah. My Italian friend Andrea Cucchetto, ex-A8 and Atari ST coder, a lot years ago working on the A8 conversion of John Kutcher’s cult 1985 C64 Space Taxi game (I helped a bit with testing and gave some advice.) I’m happy to inform Indie Retro News that the public version of the game has been published along with some interesting documentation on a website in Italian, dedicated to Atari 8-bit computers”
This is what the website says about the game (again from the previous release). “In 2013, he started programming 8-bit Atari computers again and released a disc version of White Circus, a good Winter Games-inspired game that didn’t have much success in 1987 because it was only released on tape (which penalized multi-loading). after that, with little hope of success, he decided to try to remake Space Taxi, John Kutcher’s 1984 game for Commodore 64, which was very popular because of its digitized voices. a large but difficult palette to manage.”
24/08/2023 – BETA 2.5 – FINAL RELEASE – 130K disk version
** This must be the final version before the possible cartridge version **
** It contains several bug fixes, changes and new features and **
** the entire program fits on a standard DD 130k diskette ๐ **
- – Most files have been compressed using a simple custom procedure that fits perfectly into the program
- – The bootloader has been modified to add an unzipping routine that is stored in low memory
- – Optimized font handling at level 25 by limiting character copying to the first 400 bytes of $
- – New voices! All phrases are reselected using TTS engine to get better quality and splitting words to save space
- โ The classical voices have been preserved… I prepared an identical copy, but with the original samples. This could be the perfect “B Side” ๐
- – Improved gate passing handling at level 20 – Fast Break (better taxi speed control)
- – Added “Hey” phrase when a taxi hits a customer
- – Added “Hey taxi” phrase when the taxi lands on a pad other than the one where the customer is
- – Added a new “Game Over” phrase at the end of the game
- – Added the phrase “Pad + nยฐ” if the taxi takes the customer on the wrong Pad. In this case, the trip bonus is also reset
- – Added level name to menu in cheat mode to make selection easier
- – Added music for the record writing screen (using RMT) when a player earns more than $50
- – Added scoreboard music (using RMT)
- – Changed the text for the number of players on the menu screen
- – Changed end text at level 25 – Mysterious screen (clearer hint for cheat mode)
- – Fixed flashing rainbow colors at level 20 – Fast break during jingles
- – Fixed rainbow flashing at level 20 – Fast break during speech synthesis
- – Fixed issues with reading the Fire button on the title and menu screens
- – Reduced intermittent DLI flicker issues at all levels during speech synthesis
- – Reduced screen flickering during level changes
- – Fixed the opening title animation so that it does not lag after the end of the game in some level
- – Fixed erasing of brown side lines during taxi drop in level 25 – Mystery
- – Fixed not handling the bonus when the taxi bounces while landing… it used to happen anyway :/
- – Fixed a major bug that assigned a non-existent destination pad… this happened when at the start of a level a Taxi died before taking 1 passenger to a pad that was picked up at a higher pad from the previous level with more pads than the new one
- – Fixed “bounce down” bug when level 11 had max acceleration – Magnets