Color Dreams

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Color Dreams
Colordreamslogo.jpg
Founded 1989
Headquarters USA
Other Names Wisdom Tree, Bunch Games
Not to be confused with the Japanese game publisher C*Dream.

Color Dreams was an American game developer founded by Dan Lawton who made unlicensed video games, mostly for Nintendo consoles. Color Dreams refused to get Nintendo's permission to license their games because Nintendo was too expensive. Since their games were unlicensed, Color Dreams had to find a way to bypass the 10NES chip, and they managed to successfully do so. Only one game Color Dreams developed was licensed, and that was Crystal Mines II on the Atari Lynx, which originally started out as an NES game.

Color Dreams later started making Christian-themed games, some of which were recycled versions of their already-released games, under the name Wisdom Tree. Their best known game is Super Noah's Ark 3D (SNES).

Color Dreams games were usually black or baby blue cartridges. Color Dreams closed in 1991, though Wisdom Tree still lives on to this day.

Games

Music Development

GB

Color Dreams only developed games under their Wisdom Tree brand.

The music was most likely written in a similar fashion to their NES games; it would use a sound driver written by Dan Lawton, and the music would be written in Music Macro Language.

GEN

Color Dreams only developed Genesis ports of some of their Wisdom Tree titles for the NES including Bible Adventures (GEN), Exodus: Journey to the Promised Land (GEN), Joshua & the Battle of Jericho (GEN), and Spiritual Warfare (GEN). All of these games use the music from their NES counterparts, with very minor exceptions. For some reason, the music in the Genesis versions plays a half-step lower than the NES versions.

The sound driver was most likely also programmed by Dan Lawton, and most likely also written in Music Macro Language, similar to their NES sound driver.

NES

Dan Lawton programmed a sound driver in 6502 assembly machine code, in which music and sound was written in Music Macro Language.

SNES

Wisdom Tree developed only one SNES game, Super Noah's Ark 3D. For this game, the company received the assets for Wolfenstein 3D from id Software. The driver was programmed by Rebecca Heineman and John Carmack (although John says Heineman did a bulk of the programming). The driver took MIDI files and converted them into code. According to Heineman, the instrument samples came from an Ensoniq SQ-1.

Heineman has since released the source code for the driver.

Audio Personnel

The following composers worked at Color Dreams:

As stated above, Rebecca Heineman provided Wisdom Tree with the source code to her sound driver for Super Noah's Ark 3D, but she did not actually work for the company.

Picture Gallery

Links