SunDog: Frozen Legacy (Atari ST)

SunDog: Frozen Legacy
Developer: FTL Games Publishers: FTL Games, Accolade Platform: Atari ST Released in US: 1985 Released in EU: 1988 This game has a hidden developer message. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused items.

SunDog: Frozen Legacy is a space trading and combat simulator game. Sundog was first developed for the Apple II, with version 1.0 being released in March 1984. In 1985, version 3.0 was released for the Atari ST with much-improved graphics.

Items

This is the full list of icons in the Atari ST version of the game. This includes both UI elements and player-usable items. This being an Apple II game originally, and memory/disk space being of the essence, there are only 32 slots:

Id	Flags	Name	Description
0x00	0x00	(nothing)	UI element
0x01	0x00	(freeze/quit)	UI element
0x02	0x00	(trash)	UI element
0x03	0x00	(next frame)	UI element
0x04	0x00	(time)	UI element
0x05	0x00	(money)	UI element
0x06	0x00	(location)	UI element
0x07	0x00	(dead part)	Exploded ship part
0x08	0x02	burger	Player item
0x09	0x01	beer	Player item
0x0a	0x32	rapidheal	Player item
0x0b	0x64	shield	Player item
0x0c	0xbe	stinger	Player item
0x0d	0xe1	scattergun	Player item
0x0e	0x00	(reserved)	Ship component?
0x0f	0x13	peptab	Player item
0x10	0x29	charmer	Player item
0x11	0x3f	dexboost	Player item
0x12	0x49	nutrapack	Player item
0x13	0xb4	concentrator	Ship component
0x14	0xff	decloaker	Ship component
0x15	0x0a	cloaker	Ship component
0x16	0x64	ground scanner	Ship component
0x17	0x0c	shunt	Ship component
0x18	0x12	cryofuse	Ship component
0x19	0x1f	j-junc module	Ship component
0x1a	0x34	photon bridge	Ship component
0x1b	0x55	scanner	Ship component
0x1c	0x73	flux modulator	Ship component
0x1d	0x8e	plasma tube	Ship component
0x1e	0xbf	s/t distorter	Ship component
0x1f	0xff	control node	Ship component

This makes it even more surprising that there is a reserved slot, 0x0e. This item looks like a ship component, but it doesn't appear to fit in any of the repair bays. Speculation back in the day was that this was a leftover from the Apple II version which has an "Autoslew" component which no one could ever locate in the Atari ST version. If someone can find graphics from the Apple II version to confirm or refute this, please do.

Developer easter egg

There's a dialog script in the game where the player meets one of the developers, probably randomly selected. Here's the deobfuscated text:

Address	Text
0x8a7c	pretty neat, huh
0x8a8c	hi! my name is
0x8a98	I wrote the
0x8aa2	for this game
0x8aae	[35] Wayne Holder. [36] dialog you're reading here. Pretty great game, huh[3f]
0x8ae8	[35] Bruce Webster. [36] original SunDog. [34][3f]
0x8b0a	[35] Donald Geddis. [36] dialog compiler [37]. [34][3f]
0x8b2c	[35] Mike Newton. [36] ship modules [37]. [34][3f]
0x8b4a	[35] Doug Bell. [36] library [37] and integrated the rest. [34][3f]
0x8b76	[35] Andy Jaros. I designed the graphics [37]. [34][3f]
0x8b9a	Glad you like it! Oh, by the way here's [24]. Enjoy it!
0x8bc2	Well, you've got no class[2e] Just for that [2b] won't get the [24] I was going to give you[21]

The developer will introduce themselves to the player and ask whether they like the game. If they do, they will give them some Cr, otherwise not. While this is used in the game, the script is very rarely triggered and may take several playthroughs to finally see it, as it appears randomly.