Sir Fred: The Legend (also know as Fred) is an action adventure game, published by Ubi Soft in 1989 for the Atari ST and the Amiga (OCS) home computers.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Sir Fred was a noble medieval Knight until an evil dwarf called Ultimor put a spell and transformed him into a tiny gnome. Fred wants to spot Ultimor and gain back his human nature! He also must save his beloved Princess (how original!) He fights through hostile environments like forests, swarmed by deadly dwarfs, spiders, bats, demons and zombies, with his sword and his throwing knives as his only weapons. Sir Fred can move from left-to-right and from right-to-left, while he can also move on the foreground and the background of the screen as well. In order to progress further, Fred must discover and gather the appropriate key, which is usually guarded by armed dwarfs. Once he gets the key, he can go through the exit of each level! The technique of moving the game's character on the foreground and the background is a unique feature of its time (as far as I remember, only Activision's Predator uses a similar feature). But to be honest, this uniqueness makes the game a bit more tricky. Overall, Sir Fred is among the most impressive action adventures for the 16bit home computers and also one of the toughest to play.
GRAPHICS / SOUND Visually, the Atari ST version looks quite close to the Commodore Amiga. The graphics are great though dark and the game has funny looking characters and smooth sprite animation (the sprites move a bit smoother on the Amiga, es expected). The sound on the ST consists of an epic intro music score (but inferior in quality to the Amiga) and some nice in-game digitized sound effects (sword clangs, enemy cries and more). Actually, the main difference between the ST and the Amiga version is on the game's sound since the Amiga offers a wonderful in-game tune and the Atari ST sound effects only!
CPU: Motorola 68000 16/32bit at 8mhz. 16 bit data bus/32 bit internal/24-bit address bus. MEMORY: RAM 512KB (1MB for the 1040ST models) / ROM 192KB GRAPHICS: Digital-to-Analog Converter of 3-bits, eight levels per RGB channel, featuring a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors), 320x200 (16 color), 640x200 (4 color), 640x400 (monochrome). With special programming techniques could display 512 colors on screen in static images. SOUND: Yamaha YM2149F PSG "Programmable Sound Generator" chip provided 3-voice sound synthesis, plus 1-voice white noise mono PSG. It also has two MIDI ports, and support mixed YM2149 sfx and MIDI music in gaming (there are several games supported this).