Technician Ted

[MtM]

17 hours ago, Spider said:

Costa Capers very difficult 😞 Its almost impossible to figure out what to do (so I thought) never mind doing it 😄

 

One annoyance with TT2 (megamix, 128K only) compared to TT1 is if you go "out of screen"

In TT1 you end up in the Sewerage screen/room from which there's no escape and almost immediate death as the floor and platforms are "fire cells (INK 6 PAPER2) " and its full of fast moving vertical guardians, not that you can stand anywhere anyway! 😄  All four exits link back to the same room.

 

In TT2, the game jumps to the title screen if you jump out. This is actually possible by accident! Falling out of Beaker Store and jumping out of either Sky At Night , Conduit Tubing (iirc, its been a while since i played!) or Satellite control can do this.

 

One thing that did amaze me with TT2 was the fact there was a teleporter routine hack written, and it actually exists in the game by default anyway (but its quite well hidden, see TipShop) , I don't recall it being in any mags until I posted about it either a few months/year ago. I don't think this debug feature exists in TT1, I could not find any signs of it anyway but that's not saying a huge deal.

^ That reminds me of JSW2 with the Cartography Room in some ways actually, it may be there already 😉 Amstrad version (untampered one) at least, there's a detailed topic on this here on this site about that actually.

I think you are right, Spider, if you look at

http://www.jdawiseman.com/papers/games/jsw2/jsw2_updated.html

Derek Rowson himself explains.

 

Never saw that screen in TT2, but I do not play it enough. I build up momentum to think, right, I will play this now

all the way through, but never quite get around to it. One day maybe. I do consider both TTs as classics, technically

better than JSW but lacking the slightly easier and in this instance better gameplay mechanics. However, both TT's

do reward real practice. If you can finish them then you can probably complete anything. Such a pity the authors never

went on to other things. Costa Capers remains a bit of an oddity, part Dynamite Dan, part Wally game, part TT, but

not quite there really. I do think it is brilliant though technically and narratively too, you can see the programmers stretching

their wings both technically and game play wise.

 

Anyway, I hope we are all having a wonderful Christmas ...

[Spider]

Thank you re: Xmas wishes!

Attached please find TT1 and TT2 maps

Note, quite large!

TT1 : 3168 x 1064 , Author Credit: Pavel Plíva

TT2 : 7056 x 4872 , Author Credit: Dinu Cristian Mircea

I'm hoping they don't mind me reposting them here from maps.speccy site. 🙂

 

 

Enjoy ?

 

[MtM]

Thank you for that, very kind - but I try and avoid these maps for when I play the actual game myself

through and map it myself, or at least that is the plan, anyway 😂

 

These maps take me back to the glory days of WoS, when everything was so easy to find and download 😉

 

[Spider]

 I've got some prepatched Ted game files somewhere, they do not "appear" to be patched though, in that they look like the normal untouched loader (Basic and all etc) , along with some other games from time to time.

I tend to call these PPG's , "Pre Patched Games" , as in not damaging the original loading scheme but adding or changing sane things.

You mentioned Kokotoni Wilf, another good game all in all. An interesting twist on a platform variant instead of left/right/jump we've got left/right/fly

If you're feeling brave with K.Wilf, try " POKE 28901 , 201 " , then just let go of the keyboard / joystick 😉

[MtM]

Happy New Year all!

 

Special mention on this thread today. Some of you may have watched the annual New Year's Day concert from Vienna,

and you may know that it always finishes with the Radetzky March by Johann Strauss Sr, which is the in-game music from both the original

Tecnhician Ted on the old 48k beeper, and the ay version on Technician Ted: The Megamix. Just thought I would flag

this up, both the concert itself if you haven't seen it (yet) and the music, one of my absolute favourites, I cannot hear

the Radetzky March without always thinking of Technician Ted, bit like Hall of the Mountain King and Moonlight Sonata / If I Were a Rich

Man with MM & JSW respectively (The comically awful excerpt from The Blue Danube at the opening of MM I don't count, not least

that memory belongs rightly to playing Elite ;-)) The concert is on BBC Four at 7pm this evening if in the UK. The Radetzky March

will be on at around 8.35pm or so. Enjoy!

[jetsetdanny]

Happy New Year all! 🙂

Thanks for the info about the Radetzky March, MtM!

Do you know that it has also become one of the popular in-game tunes in JSW games?

It was coded as a JSW48 in-game tune by Richard Hallas and first used by Philip Bee in his 1998 game "Jet-Set Willy Ivy".

Years later, Richard Hallas's original version was used as one of the four in-game tunes in "Jet Set Willy: The Nightmare Edition" (2016).

That same year (2016) it was used as one of the four in-game tunes in the Special Edition of "Willy's New Mansion".

In 2017, the introduction to the Radetzky March was used as the title screen tune in "Jet Set Mini", while its main part was used as the in-game tune. The in-game tune was re-encoded by Richard Hallas especially for this project, in an extended shape - a standard JSW48 in-game tune comprises 64 notes, but in "Jet Set Mini" this was extended to 256 notes thanks to changes to the game engine introduced by Ian Rushforth. Furthermore, in the 2018 Special Edition of "Jet Set Mini" the introduction to the Radetzky March, used as the title screen tune, was improved by being made more "dynamic".

In 2020 (last year! 😉), Richard's original encoding of the Radetzky March was used as one of the seven in-game tunes in the 48K Edition of "Madam Blavskja's Carnival Macabre".

Due to all of the above, when I hear the Radetzky March, I actually think of JSW games rather than "Technician Ted". But that's probably because I haven't played "TT" - a game I did enjoy a lot in the past - for a long time... 🙂

 

[Spider]

Thanks. I managed to read this actually at about 8.20pm that evening! So I was just about in time to grab a coffee then watch/listen.

[IRF]

The Radetzky March always reminds me of Jet Set Mini.  The fact that we used the (short) intro as the title screen tune, but it didn't sound quite right with a series of notes of the same pitch (with nothing to punctuate them), was what spurred me on to experiment with tweaking the title tune routine to allow for 'dead' [silent] notes - something that came in very useful in subsequent projects. 🙂

On 1/1/2021 at 3:01 PM, MtM said:

The comically awful excerpt from The Blue Danube at the opening of MM

Have you heard the 'comically awful' MM title tune routine applied to the JSW title tune (A Moonlight Sonata)?  If not, then check out the attached test files in this thread (where you can also hear The Blue Danube given the JSW title tune treatment):
 

 

Edited January 2, 2021 by IRF

[MtM]

I have finally gotten around to listening to all those 'glorious' versions of Moonlight Sonata and Blue Danube. Some of the versions

of Sonata are great fun. Having listened to all of them though I think the original Danube in MM is still the worst 😉

I take my hat off for all the time and trouble taken to produce them by IRF etc and of course originally Dr B, commendable, and

finally an explanation is provided as to _why_ it sounds as comically bad as it does, after all these years. The level of expertise

and knowledge on this forum rarely fails to amaze me, it is genuinely humbling.

[Spider]

Not a trick question. Attached is a small 20second mp3 file from Alchemist. I'm not a "musak fan" but I'm sure this is part of a real classical piece of piano perhaps ?

Can anyone ID it please ? , I stopped recording where I did as it loops at that stage.

Alchemist.mp3