Hmmm…i’m not 100% sure about this one, but thanks to Romppainen we are able to highlight what seems to be a possible conversion of the impressive Midwinter game from the Amiga/ST. This was a strategy game developed by Mike Singleton and even in the press it was clear that this could never get a proper conversion on the C64 without some epic programming feat.
CSDB has hosted a crack by Lazer for a while now, which contains pretty much a static slideshow of C64 based screens showing gameplay and various parts of the game. Was this just a fan of the game doing some mockups?… a joke for the scene or a real conversion that never got past the proof of concepts in this demo?
Well, one thing is that we know that Midwinter was apparently rumoured as a possible C64GS title, so are these proofs from this? Details about a possible cartridge version was mentioned in an interview with Mike Singleton from Zzap 64 1991. It was talked about doing the game as a sprite based game and making use of cartridge technology, but it was only probably talk to be honest.
Contributor Duc Nguyen found that ACE magazine mentioned that Mike Lyons was behind a conversion of the game – or we think that might be the case. Mike never mentioned this in the past, so we attempted to learn more.
Mike came back and confirmed he was never asked to do a C64 conversion and there were no known attempts of doing an 8-bit conversion at all (which is what you might have expected!). He believes that his name probably popped up purely because he was part of the Maelstrom team and they all helped in some way on other projects if asked by the person programming (for instance, Mike was given code to help display 64 sprites on the screen by another coder called Ollie).
In conclusion, Mike remembered there being a lot of CPU intensive processing for snowflake effects on the vehicle screen for Midwinter. All in all, the game would have been beyond the C64 and framerate far too low.
So it seems likely that this is a case closed and the demo found online was just a fan-made mockup.
Contributions: Romppainen, Andrew Fisher, Duc Nguyen, Mike Lyons
Supporting content
Available downloads
- Preview_Midwinter.zip (zip)
Gallery
Update history
- 07/04/25 – Confirmation it was not being done by Mike Lyons.
- 05/04/25 – Possible credits.
I think according to ACE appears that Mike Lyons, later of the unreleased version of Total Recall is the coder.
Can you recall which issue of ACE this was in?
I think it was 36. Mike Lyons said he was developing the game.
Ah, it does! He’s never mentioned it, but i’ll ping him a message. Might be an error in the magazine.
What are you talking about? I played that on my C64?