Just like we still have Friday Afternoon activities here at Philips, to boost innovative ideas that we can think of, sometimes magical thigs come out of it that will turn into full projects and eventually, full games like what happened with Atlantis: The Last Resort. As CD-i developer Paul Clarke explains, the 15 MHz limit of CD-i was the real struggle to develop gaming experiences. But if there was one team who did their best, it was the developing team of Philips Research Labs in Redhill, UK. Paul explains: "I worked at Philips Research Labs for 7 years and before that during 4 holidays while at uni. Philips sponsored me while I got my computer science degree. I wrote RamRaid and Atlantis games at Philips Research Labs and developed the Non Intrusive Real-time Debugger (NIRD) there that helped me make these games possible as well as helped launching other games."
Atlantis is a technical marvel on the limited CD-i hardware. Atlantis is a CD-i game that should not be able to run on the platform at all, yet it does. The secret? Every bus cycle on Atlantis was optimised using the Non-Intrusive Real-time Debugger (NIRD) that I developed, and the Atlantis game engine started as a lunchtime coding, according to Paul Clarke.
[Thanks, Paul Clarke, Thiago Oliveira]
