(v2.0) ALPHA WAVES - The world first(?) 3D filled polygon Platform game on home com- puters and PC! Long times ago I bough for my Amiga the meditative 3D platform game "Alpha Waves". The game concept is a square maze of 256 separated,cube shaped rooms(full of platforms) those need to be discovered while time is running out(much like in "Spindizzy").Each newly discovered room adds 1 minute of extra time.Sometimes Keys must be found(touched) to open previously blocked doors to other rooms. The sections of the maze are named after various states of consciousness and the rooms in them have a title related to esoteric topics.Each room is co- loured in a (more or less)colour psychological way to express the mood of its title and section name. The player controls a continuesly bouncing vehicle by the comands left turn, right turn and thrust.On platforms the vihicle gains bouncing height while on the room floor it looses its impact until it reaches a platform again(though missing platforms should be avaoided,because it consumes time to gain height again after falling onto the floor).Most platforms are floating and the camera perspective always bounces with the vehicle,which creates a very 3 dimensional impression.The player can also tweak the camera view angle up and down(from frog's eye to bird's eye) with just keys,which is continuesly neccessary to see the platforms the vehicle shall land on.To ease aiming,a crude,triangular "shadow" is displayed straight under the vehicle.(It looks rather like a solid black object which often partly hangs in the air over the rim of a platform.) The controls only use 4 direction buttons and a thrust button or a standard joystick and theoretically they are very intuitive.(I like this concept.) In spite of this it reacts a little too sensitive and needs a lot of skill to avoid missing platforms,though playing the game is a process of continuesly restarting from saved game states.(The state is automatically saved to a tem- porary memory each time a new room is entered or when the player saves it to disk,though restarting is just a matter of few key presses.) On the game's box and in game magazines it was claimed that this game would have special meditative background musics(with stereo hemi-sync effects?).I opened the box,read the manual and was quite disappointed and a bit angry when I read that this particular musics were only included in the PC version of the game.When I played it I also found out that the German version of the screen text was full of typos,which drove me to write a BASIC program to edit the binary text description file and replace the faulty words. So I wrote in Newsgroups and on my homepage: >Does anybody have the PC version and can e-mail to me a ZIP-file of it's dis- >kette or does anybody know if this game is already flying around on an Inter- >net site? >(I have already payed for this game when I bought the mutilated Amiga ver- >sion,though downloading it for PC won't affect my karma.) Fortunately my wish was fulfille;on the 2000-08-28 a merciful person e-mailed me a link to download the only 304kB small ZIP file. After Installation I had to notice that this 386er game from 1990 ran way too fast and flickered on my AMD K6 300MHz PC.But with the slowdown tool MoSlo I finally got it to work at almost correct speed(verified by the coundown timer of the game).Unfortunately there seems to be no way to tweak the speed in a way that the 3D graphics engine runs perfectly smooth whithout making the game run too fast,though it looks not much smoother than the Amiga version.On my PC the correct MoSo command is: "slo /24 alpha.com".To make its use easier I renamed alpha.com alpha_.com and replaced in the alpha.bat the line "alpha.com" with "slo /24 alpha_.com". When I started to play,a little disappointed I had to notice that in spite of analogue joystick support the player's continuesly bouncing vehicle only re- sponds in a digital way(no proportional control),which makes the colourful platform game rather awkward controlable.(Keyboard controls work better.) Also the so much praised meditative new-age soundtrack of the game,which was once advertised in an almost mind-machine-like way,not only doesn't feature binaural hemi-sync effects,but is not even in stereo.Instead it is a plain, repeating OPL2(?) Adlib FM tune,which only special feature is that it gets continuesly faster or slower with passing time.Stupid is that this speed change is not even an indicator for the remaining play time,because after restarting a saved game state(which typically happens multiple times a minute in this game) the actual music tempo is not adapted to the loaded game time counter value again.The music itself is nothing great(mainly e-bass,flute-like synth solos and rhythm) but ok,although it repeats after it has reached its fastest or slowest tempo;it has nothing to do with mind-machine-like effects or anything similar.The only purpose this soundtrack may be really well suited for is to demonstrate the many different electronic drum and cymbal sounds of the Yamaha OPL3 soundchip,which may be interesting at least for friends of hi- storical synthesizers,because nowadays the OPL3 is not used by modern games anymore and the average Windoze MIDI FM drivers typically sound rather lousy and additionally all soundcards use different sound implementations in them. In spite of its technical flaws,the game "Alpha Waves" is a historically very important milestone of videogame history,because it apparently was the world first filled polygon free perspective 3D platform game for home computers and PCs.Though its abstract vehicle can be regarded as a direct ancester of Lara Croft in nowadays "Tomb Raider".Also the concept of its controls(left and right turn vehicle,up and down steer camera angle,fire = thrust),which makes perfect use of simple 1 button joysticks,is still unique and by its very intu- itive usability a positive exception from the button mess of many modern 3D games.(If anybody knows an even earlier filled polygon 3D platform game for home computers,please e-mail me.) It would be interesting when someone would make an enhanced successor of "Al- pha Waves" using a modern 3D graphics engine and proportional steering.Possi- bly some Q*Bert-like colour change elements would feel good in such a bouncy game with these controls,and it even could make fun(or just vomit??) with a VR helmet. (The first arcade game with filled 3D polygon graphics was the very great and unique game "I,Robot",which also featured platform elements and came out al- ready 1983 by Atari."I,Robot" is emulated e.g. on MAME(very slow);for Windoze 95 etc. you can also find a better emulator written by John Manfreda.) MAY THE SOFTWARE BE WITH YOU! *============================================================================* I CYBERYOGI Christian Oliver(=CO=) Windler I I (teachmaster of LOGOLOGIE - the first cyberage-religion!) I I ! I *=============================ABANDON=THE=BRUTALITY==========================* {http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~windle_c/e_index.html}