<Duck Out is the CPC port of the homonymous videogame originally developed for Spectrum and MSX by Fernando de la Villa and Ignacio Ferreras (who according to the texts within the game seemed to label themselves “Bytemess”) and published in 1989 by the Spanish company Xortrapa.
Back in the day they announced that versions for CPC and C64 would be released, but they never came to be, something understandable given the general ephemeral career of Xortrapa and the particular internal problems in the original versions of “Duck Out”, with serious errors of design and programming that the generous magazine “Microhobby” forgave but the more severe “Micromanía” didn’t.
Original scroll was unacceptably slow, especially given that on the Spectrum we move half as much VRAM as on the CPC. Thus it got rewrited almost completely unrolled 6×1 character (48×8 pixels) tile blitter and a similarly forced sprite renderer, as well as using the CPC hardware double buffer. All these things meant since very early a serious handicap: lack of memory. Even by shrinking the visible VRAM to 32×24 characters and using the invisible VRAM to store graphics (for example, the hero sprites) the rich graphics from the original game made me rely on a “super-tile” system to compress the game maps to one ninth part, the most I could pack them down while keeping the tiles and super-tiles in 8 bits per item, and to give up on a custom character set: instead, the game uses the CPC ROM default characters.
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