Command & Conquer – Westwood’s hit strategy game is coming to the Atari ST, and it’s impressive! [VIDEO UPDATE]

Well this is incredible news ( As if we’ve not had enough already :p ), as indyjo is bringing the classic real-time strategy game Command & Conquer to the Atari ST home computer. This ambitious project is currently a work-in-progress port of Westwood Studios’ legendary 1995 title, adapting the complex strategic gameplay to a 16bit machine that first debuted in the 1980’s. The true marvel of this port lies in its technical adaptation. While the original MS-DOS version relied on 256-colour VGA displays, the Atari ST hardware restricts the visuals to just 16 colours. To bridge this gap, the developer has heavily focused on precision colour reduction, translating the detailed military units and terrains into a vibrant, limited-palette art style. For retro enthusiasts and fans of 16-colour pixel aesthetics, this port promises a unique way to experience a PC gaming masterpiece.

The upcoming release retains all the core gameplay elements that defined the RTS genre. Players will still build fortified bases, harvest valuable Tiberium resources, and engage in intense tactical combat to wipe out enemy strongholds. Both iconic factions are included, allowing players to launch campaigns as either the UN-backed Global Defense Initiative (GDI) or the shadowy Brotherhood of NOD.

AI was not used to generate any artwork, but it was used to port the software itself and to create tools for dealing with the game’s assets.This is a port of the DOS version of Command & Conquer and inherits hardware requirements that exceed what a typical 1990 Atari STe would provide. So currently, you need either somewhat exotic hardware (an Atari STe with an acceleration card or an Atari Falcon) or an emulator like Hatari. In future versions, these requirements will be reduced to make gameplay possible on, say, an Atari Mega STe with 4MB of RAM. However, we’re not there yet. Getting RAM requirements down is the hardest part.A new format for iconsets, ST16, contains terrain tiles in the ST’s native 16 color encoding.A new format for shapes, SHPX, separates meta-information of images from actual pixel data. Only the former stays in RAM while pixel data can be read from disk as needed, freeing almost 2MB RAM.Contribution to reduced memory consumption:A 256kB interpolation table was removed.The cache for terrain tiles was removed (thanks to ST16 iconsets).A new C library, libcmini, reduces overhead.

UPDATE : A new build has been released into the wild and here is what the developer had to say “This major release is closing the gaps towards feature-completeness: cutscenes and audio with full support for 4MB hardware. Intro, mission briefings and other movie sequences play back in beautiful 16 colors, even on 8MHz CPUs. Sound effects, speech and music work even on 4MB machines, no strings attached. Command & Conquer for Atari ST is, as far as I know, the first Atari ST game with full-motion video. The remix tool was updated for this pipeline — it converts VQA movies to STV (with quality and encoding-effort options) and prepares the new audio format.”

System Requirements : 

Minimum: Any Atari ST-compatible computer with at least 4MB of RAM.Recommended: 68020+ @ 32MHz, 4MB+ RAM, DMA sound, Blitter.

Links :1) Source