After months of rumours, it has happened - the Amiga has Quake. id Soft's legendary super Doom clone first appeared on the Amiga in early 1997 in the form of the Amiquake hack, an unofficial port which was made by a small group of Amiga coders after the source code to the game found it's way onto a cracker's bulletin board and made it's way around the internet. Back then legal threats from id Software stopped Amiquake pretty fast, but after months of negotiation, Canadian software company ClickBoom have acquired a license to sell the Amiga version commercially. It is ironic that Clickboom acquired the rights to Quake after a small group of hackers was able to prove to the original software house that the Amiga was capable of running the software, as this is a very similar story to the one that lead to the publication of Amiga Myst, also by ClickBoom.
Quake, second choice amongst Amiga users responding to the ClickBoom wishlist.
It is currently about the most popular and well known game on any computing system, and
getting a conversion for the Amiga is something of a coup. Currently, Quake only
runs on the Sega Saturn, the PC and the Macintosh. Versions for the Nintendo 64 and
Playstation are on again off again affairs that have been long awaited but still
appear a way off; by contrast the Amiga version is already almost complete. The Amiga
version of Quake has all the features of the PC version. It should be possible to use
a wide range of Quake add-ons, and network access has also been promised. Indeed we
can expect to see Quake "clans" of Amiga users turning up on the internet
based multi user Quakeworlds.
We'll have to wait and see how well the final version of Quake runs on the
Amiga before we can tell you exactly how fast it will run on your system, but from
what we have seen, it's going to be pretty good. Keeping in low resolution, it should
be playable on an AGA machine with a 68040 or better accelerator, although clearly the
better the processor the better it will run. We'll have to wait for the PowerPC
version to see Quake running at its best, however. A Quake demo was shown running on
a PowerPC by Haage and Partner in Cologne, and it run at an impressive speed indeed.
We have yet to have confirmation of this, but it seems likely that Clickboom will
also be supporting the Permedia 2 based Cybervision and BlizzardvisionPPC graphics
add-on cards. Quake is noted for using the OpenGL 3D graphics API, which is directly
supported on the phase5 cards by the CyberGL implementation of the OpenGL standard. A
68060 Amiga with a graphics card will run Quake rather nicely, a PPC Amiga with
the 3D card will be something to behold. Look out for the March issue of CU Amiga
Magazine for more exclusive details.
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