PC Atletismo is one of the last video games developed by the Spanish company Dinamic Multimedia before they went bankrupt. This game became very popular in 2003, when it was released with an expansion in a Spanish newspaper for a very low price.
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Debugging Features#
Free-Look Mode#
At speed challenges (100, 200, and 400 meter challenges) you can gain access to a development related free-look mode by pressing F10. After the key is pressed, the camera will stop following the player. This free-look mode allows you to navigate to every part of the stadium, see it from every angle, and also to go out of bounds. To access the free look mode in the rest of the challenges, you must set the camera mode value at 0x66697C to 64 through hacking. The free look mode can be controlled with the mouse and the keyboard:
- You can rotate the camera angle moving the mouse to look around.
- Pressing the left mouse buttonwill move the camera forward. Pressing the right mouse button will move the camera backward.
- Pressing the Space Bar, you can pause the game (it's the default keyboard action) but it also toogles between speed/slow mode for moving forward/backward.
- Pressing Shift while moving forward/backward increases the moving speed significantly until the key is released.
- Pressing Ctrl / Alt gr while moving forward/backward decreases the moving speed significantly until the key is released.
- To exit free-look mode, you can press the F1-F4 keys that change between different camera views.
Rotational Camera#
Another unused camera mode can be accessed only through hacking, by setting the camera mode value at 0x66697C to 4. This camera follows the player, and can be controlled with the mouse:
- Moving the mouse right and left, makes the camera rotate around the player.
- Moving the mouse up and down, makes the camera zoom-in and zoom-out.
Debugging Log#
A debugging log functionality was used during development and disabled for the final release. This debugging log functionality logs debug messages of resource loading, game events,... Alternating between English and Spanish in a very colloquial language to a text file debug.txt and, unlike other games, it significantly slows down the game, especially during the resource loading. You can re-enable all the log messages by setting the byte from PCA2000.exe at 0xCC63E from 0x84 to 0x85.
Screenshot Feature#
You can take screenshots from the game pressing F12. These screenshots are stored on the game folder with the name SHOOTn.BMP where n is a number starting from 0.
Unused Audio#
Unused Music#
This game has only 5 music tracks. One of them (arcade.mp3), made for a cut Arcade mode is totally unused and has no references to it in the executable.
A short fragment of this song can be heard in the intro video from the early version of the game PC Atletismo 2000.
Unused Sounds#
Some unused sound samples.
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This needs some investigation. |
Unused Graphics#
As a curiosity, there are lots of duplicated graphics in the *.dat files for every competition instead of a common graphics file. Plus, they are BMP files compressed with deflate. As a result, a lot of disk space is wasted.
Animals!#
Typing "CHOCHONA" at the main screen allows you to play with animals instead of humans. This is one of the more well known Easter eggs.
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The pig's textures have an unseen sign from one of the developers.
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There's also an unfinished texture for a dog inside gordo.dat and gorda.dat.
English Version#
An English version was planned at some point, but went unreleased due to Dinamic's bankruptcy. Interestingly, this loading screen has the Spanish name in the background.
file:PCAtletismo_eng1.bmp.png file:PCAtletismo_eng2.bmp.png file:PCAtletismo_eng3.bmp.png
Some buttons.
Demo Version#
file:PCAtletismo_demo2.bmp.png
A demo was planned, too. And there's leftovers!
Swimming Pool#
file:PCAtletismo_piscina_(2).bmp.png
Only a small fragment of sky can be seen from the background texture in the cutscenes. The full background texture has a meadow.
Early Score Tables#
Score tables from early in development. They use English instead of Spanish, and the second may refer to a testing minigame.
Other Textures#
file:PCAtletismo_marcador_(1).bmp.png
There were plans for tips on the starting screen, but they ended up being cut.
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The graphics for the meter used in the jump and throwing competitions are in square blocks, and they go up to 18m. There's an empty space in the last graphic for the meter that has a developer's message saying "Put your advert here".
file:PCAtletismo_marcador_(3).bmp.png
The purpose of this is unknown.
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The game has a lot of fake ads. However, in this unused image, they're arranged rather strangely.
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This unused icon is found in the graphics for the menu.
file:PCAtletismo_plato.bmp.png
An unused, rather detailed image of the clay pigeon shooting plate.
