Mirax Force

Chris Paul Murray speaks...

"I only started programming because an older friend said he was going to try to write a game and I wanted to do it first. We both had Atari 400's and had been renting games for quite a long time from some guy in Sunderland and playing loads of titles. It wouldn't have occurred to me to write one until he wanted to (he was doing a clone of Jump Bug). I bought Programming the 6502 and MAC/65 cartridge and that was it. It's also his (Pete's) fault I ended up on Atari / C64's... I was ready to buy a Spectrum.

It took me 11 days to code Mirax Force. I had been playing Uridium on the C64 and also had just got hold of a Replay sound cartridge and was dying to code something with speech. It started as an experiment to see how far I could take display list interrupts to make the one sprite look like many.

Yes that is my voice in Mirax Force. I know it's crap, I spent ages re-recording it and running a program to filter the Replay samples so they compressed better (I felt a bit dumb when I learned about filtering and run-length encoding many years later, after trying to figure things out myself). I just wanted to bring speech to Atari - the only other game I recall was Dung Beetles: "We gotcha!". And at the time, I sort of looked like the piccy on the TV in one of the screens on Henry's House - well sort of... (Speccy git LOL).

I'm glad someone finally saw the references to Metallica etc. (did you see PARP?). I thought someone might have a look one day with an editor but didn't think it would be 20 years."