Omega Ceti  (Preview)
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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1987 Ian Moran
Status: Preview, Findability: 5/5

Coding: Ian Moran
Graphics: Ian Moran
Sound: Matt Gray

Omega Ceti is a title that has been around for some time, possibly first surfacing on Compunet as a preview.

The game is an interesting Uridium clone of sorts – which has a split screen display for two players to fly over a dreadnought and fight together. Quite a unique approach. The game was written by a chap called Ian Moran, who produced another Uridium’esq game that never was called Hyper Galactic Warrior. We believe that Hyper Galactic Warrior may have been born from this original demo, which Ian suggests he developed in 1986.

It’s a well produced game for its time, and has plenty of promise. What stopped Ian from finishing it? Was it real life commitments, or a case of too many Uridium clones on the market?

Well, Ian got in touch and confirmed that the game was never more than a scratch about to upload to compunet.  They were also written in a way using the Expert Cartridge which meant the game was not really expandable.   Ian was basically playing and testing things out.  See Creator Speaks for more details.

This therefore draws a conclusion to this title and solves the mystery.  This is as far as the game ever got, and therefore is case closed!

Contributions: Ian Moran, Codetapper

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Ian Moran talks about his development work on Hyper Galactic Warrior and Omega Ceti:

“I had actually forgotten about Hyper Galactic Warrior, which I still think is a pretty good title. The demo was never more than a scratch about to upload to compunet, which was always a great source of inspiration and community.

I do remember Omega Ceti, which I wanted to use a raster interrupt for split screen scrolling, and I had felt really privileged that Matt Gray had offered up the audio track, which I think is great, but again it was only ever a little demo’ette for fun, I had seen Ceti cracked, even with a trainer, just like an actual ‘proper’ title, rather than games that weren’t.

I’d done a little string of demos that were none interactive, I suppose these were a progression from that, I coded on commodore 64 (actually a C128) for sometime after I had got my Amiga, simply because it was accessible. You’d switch it on, and you could be coding in less time than it takes us to boot a PC today, or an Amiga then.

So why were they games that weren’t?, well, I had a Trilogic Expert cartridge, you know the sort of thing, similar to the more well known ‘Action Replay’, you could freeze, edit and continue code, these would allow you to write machine code a code monitor, writing machine code was as straightforward as writing basic, which was great, but if you wanted to add or change anything significantly you would need to manually relocate blocks of code and change each and every piece of calling code, While there were techniques to mitigate these limitations, doing something more than scratching a demo together would require exponentially more effort.

All my c64 demos were done firstly for play and secondly to take an active part on compunet, part of a community, all of which must have been enough of an incentive to carry on, I moved on to the Amiga, and 25 years later I’m still writing games.

Early Amiga titles were covered by your friends site codetapper…

http://www.codetapper.com/amiga/interviews/ian-moran/

Thanks for asking and for hosting an interesting site”


https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/omega-ceti/
