Heart of China in Amiga

[Rakeesh]

Once, I saw two instances of Heart of China running in WinUAE, the Amiga emulator.

Both versions have only 32 colors and look very "Amigish". However I noticed that they differ in sound. One of the two versions had great music that sounded much like the PC-midi version with a soundcard.

The other however (which I think was pirated) was poorer. Not many sounds or instruments or "channels" were heard. Also, some minor screens (eg. like when visiting Lomax or selecting destination) had no music.

It's possible that the poor version is a result of hacking, but I am not sure. I wondered if the game was released for Amiga in more than one version. However there was no option in the two games to see the version number, and there was no readme file in any of the disks themselves

I didn't notice any other differences in the graphics or the gameplay

If any of you happens to know about Amiga and whether there were more than one version(s) of that (or any) game, please enlighten me

[Tawmis]

HoC for Amiga?? Hrm. I honestly don't think it ever was released for Amiga... it may have been emulated to play on an Amiga (sort like how you can get your Wii to run DOSBox and actually play Sierra games through your Wii...)

I am pretty sure by the time HoC came out, Sierra wasn't releasing games for the Amiga anymore...

But someone else may know for certain.

(As I am usually wrong...)

[dotkel50]

It was released for Amiga according to Mobygames......yes, there's 2 for sale on Ebay for the Amiga.

[DeadPoolX]

HoC was definitely released on the Amiga (at the same time the DOS version was available, if I recall correctly). Back in 1991 it wasn't too unusual to see games made for the Amiga, although that machine's lifespan was coming to an end.

[Tawmis]

See? Told you I am usually ALWAYS wrong.

[Rakeesh]

and now for the second part of our Quest:

were there two Amiga versions, or the "poor" of the two versions was hacked?

[Rakeesh]

Ok I solved the mystery of the variable soundtrack

You get the "poor" soundtrack when you play the game from the disks themselves (like most Amiga games were supposed to play with). Lucky Amiga users with a hard drive would install the game there, enjoy no disk swapping and also a richer soundtrack

The reason why fewer sounds play from the disks is, I guess, that the sound data could not all be loaded in the memory on the fly (only 1 MB RAM), so some of it had to be omitted.

In the HD gameplay however, all of the soundtrack was stored on the HD and the Amiga could load from it while the game runs

I find it an interesting discover, since I never had a HD while I was an Amiga user