Chromatics (A8)

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Chromatics
Cultivation - Chromatics - A8.jpg
Platform: Atari 8-bit
Year: 1990
Developer: KE-Soft
Online: Download

Chromatics is an early Columns clone for Atari 8-bit computers with 64 KB RAM.

Tiles float down a 8×22 tube. You can choose how colorful and how fast before playing. In-game, you can temporarily make them float faster, but at 1100 points and every further 2000 points, they speed up anyway. When a tile impacts, all horizontal and vertical rows of at least three matching colors vanish. Combos and diagonals are ignored. Once the top middle is occupied, the game ends. One anonymous high score is saved to disk.

The game was made by Kemal Ezcan (now Yoda Zhang). He originally sold it on the back side of Cultivation (A8). In late 2001, he declared his Atari programs freeware. He never liked the game much, specifically due to Atari's 5-color mode.

Screenshots

Chromatics - A8 - Loaded.png

Just loaded.

Chromatics - A8 - Start.png

Piece of cake.

Chromatics - A8 - Up.png

Whoa, difficulty gone hard!!

Chromatics - A8 - Fill.png

Pre-filled the tube myself. It's fun!

Chromatics - A8 - Over.png

...at least for a while...

Chromatics - A8 - Masic.png

Masic's easter egg.

Music

Hearing the music correctly is tricky to begin with:

  1. While turning your Atari on, press the OPTION key, otherwise you hear rhythmic crumbling instead of music. It is a common limit of Atari XL/XE.
  2. If the music does not play at all, press OPTION and RESET. It is a bug in the music alone and occurs at random.
  3. During disk access, the music stutters, and harmonies turn into buzzes till a sound effect plays.

Technicalities aside, you will quickly recognize Bach's famous Air. At 1:14, it seamlessly changes to some other very relaxing composition. Air returns at 2:41 with softer harmonies. Sound effects overdub the music upon every drop, row, next difficulty, and game over.

The music is implemented in Masic, the sound effects are in Turbo-Basic XL. The music was arranged for three channels, while channel 4 is solely for sound effects. The game credits neither individuals nor audio, but Zhang is generally known on Atari 8-bit as a musician and the one man behind KE-Soft.

Recording

The song was recorded from the game in Altirra 4.21 at PAL.

# Title ComposerArranger Length Listen Download
01 Theme Johann Sebastian Bach, UnknownYoda Zhang 4:05
Download

Credits

(No source. Game lacks audio credits.)


Issue - Missing.svg

Source verification is needed.

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Game Rip

Format

Download

SAP.png

Download

(Info)


Audio Devices

This game uses the computer's built-in POKEY chip.

An official NTSC release is unlikely.

Releases

  Germany.svg   Germany
Cultivation - Chromatics - A8.jpg
Title: Cultivation/Chromatics
Platform: Atari XL/XE
Released: 1990-0?-??
Publisher: KE-Soft

Links