I've bought myself yet another C2N from eBay that looked in pretty decent shape and was confirmed working by the seller. Reason? I've been rummaging around some very old C64 tapes in the hope of finding some of my real old C64 bitmap work and I've managed to 'rescue' some loading screens!
The screens in question were originally drawn in CRL's 'The Image System', which I used before I got my hands on OCP's 'Advanced Art Studio'.
Here are some almost 30 year old bitmaps, pixelled sometime in 1986...
The bitmaps were pixelled with 'Mastertronic' logos on them because they were sent to said company in an effort to tout for work! I seem to remember receiving a cheque for the space loading screens - I didn't have my own bank account at the time and had to pay it into my parents account!
The reason the loading screens have 'GAME NAME' on them was because I figured that they could be put on the front of any space type game that Mastertronic were going to publish and the game name could be inserted quite easily.
Although I was 'paid', I don't believe they were ever used; I've gone through every Mastertronic game from just about every archive over the years and have never seen them. I'm guessing someone at Mastertronic kept them for possible future use, but they never saw the light of day.
They are quite basic in nature, but I'm quite proud of them considering I was around 12 years old at the time. My sole aim was to produce something half decent since many Mastertronic titles around the time had very colourful, but often quite poorly pixelled loading screens, with no anti-aliasing or shading.
I've converted the Image System files to the more commonly used Koala format. In the download are the bitmaps in Koala format, the bitmaps in C64 executable format and the screen dumps which are pictured above. To download, click here...
There are more loading screens on the tapes and I'll post about those once I've had time to convert everything.
