Chromatics (A8)
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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.
Contents
Screenshots
Music
Hearing the music correctly is tricky to begin with:
- 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.
- If the music does not play at all, press OPTION and RESET. It is a bug in the music alone and occurs at random.
- 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 | Composer | Arranger | Length | Listen | Download |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Theme | Johann Sebastian Bach, Unknown | Yoda Zhang | 4:05 | Download |
Credits
- Ripper: ASMA
- Recorder: Professor Chaos
- Game Credits:
- Not Credited Composer: Johann Sebastian Bach
- Not Credited Composer: Unknown
- Not Credited Arranger: Yoda Zhang
- Not Credited Foley Artist: Yoda Zhang
- Not Credited Programmer: Unknown
(No source. Game lacks audio credits.)
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Game Rip
Audio Devices
This game uses the computer's built-in POKEY chip.
An official NTSC release is unlikely.
Releases
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