musicForProgramming();

phongtt

"A series of mixes intended for listening
while programming to aid concentration
and increase productivity (also compatible
with other activities)."

http://musicforprogramming.net/

Will you listen? :-?

petec

Does it include the track "Oh b*gg*r, what's gone wrong now?" - if it does, I could sing along!

Scouser

@petec: You can only sing along if you pay me for performing rights as I wrote that song in the 80s when that was the only thing you heard in the office as the Spectrum / C64 / Amstrad crashed (or power went) while saving your work to cassette. )

OZApps

@petec: You can only sing along if you pay me for performing rights as I wrote that song in the 80s when that was the only thing you heard in the office as the Spectrum / C64 / Amstrad crashed (or power went) while saving your work to cassette. )

R: Tape Loading Error 0:1

Scouser

@OZApps: Thar dreaded message was even more of a concern if you accidentally wrote over the tape containing the last update so you invariably lost more work than you realised. Microdrives & then discs were a godsend.

petec

I remember using bits of card to alter the height of some casettes to get them to load on my Spectrum.

john26

@Scouser, were you a Spectrum developer in the 80s (kudos if so...!) May I ask which games?

Scouser

@john26: I worked on Dark Sceptre and Lord of the rings with Mike Singleton, my name is in the interview somewhere We also did Return of the Jedi for the Amstrad CPC. Some of my other less known & less popular titles can be seen here plus quite a few others.

john26

@Scouser Wow, not worthy! ^:)^ . If you are ever in London please look me up. I'd love to hear any tales you have about the good old days. I used to love my Spectrum and followed the games scene religiously (via Your Sinclair etc) Must have been very exciting to be part of all that... Perhaps you could do an interview for Retro Gamer? :-)

Scouser

A few people have suggested Retro Gamer to me but that's just not me, I did all that stuff 25+ years ago. I may do something like that again if I ever make a mobile game as popular as some of the old 8 bit titles

techdojo

@john26 I was a little like that when I first went to work at the same company as @Scouser and some other "8-bit" legends (like the guy who wrote Hunchback for Ocean) but as the years rolled by (12 now and counting) the novelty soon wears off

ar2rsawseen

@techdojo well you still make him coffee, don't you?

OZApps

@techdojo well you still make him coffee, don't you?

Till the novelty wears off ?

john26

@techdojo, yes I can imagine reality hits home eventually. I have the notion of games programmers working in a sort of Ivory Tower Nirvana. Intellectually, I know its a hard grind and there's going to be office politics etc same as everywhere else. And at the end of the day its sitting in front of a computer for hours. I know all that, but still I feel there must be something special, something magical about games programming, just because of the nature of the product. Surely it can't be the same as writing a database app (tell me it isn't!) There must be just a bit of magic...

Scouser

Sorry to disappoint you John but there is no difference really. Oh sure there is the novelty factor at the start but there is nothing magical here.

I must admit that some of the things I get to do in my day job are satisfying as they can involve breaking new ground and developing stuff that nobody has ever done/had before.

Like taking a binary file for a CPU you've never seen before, writing a disassembler from scratch (sometimes without even having access to the instruction set) and then reverse engineering the binary. That is satisfying & fulfilling

john26

@Scouser, May I ask what you do in your day job? (hope I'm not being too nosy...) I'd be interested to know what sort of company employs so many 8-bit legends!

techdojo

@techdojo well you still make him coffee, don't you?

We take it in turns, but I usually drink more than him, at his age it's not a good idea to have him shambling down the hall to the toilet every five minutes!

OZApps

@techdojo, @john26 I recollect sending letters to Ocean pitching ideas for games in the latter part of mid 80's. Getting books on development and Crash, YS or any similar magazines were a luxury as they were imported from UK and not available regularly.

I would have loved to work at an office where they made games for the spectrum, I had made some applications (a shipping calculator that visually helped organise palettes into a container) but it was used by just one person, my client (i.e. Dad) and yes as @Techdojo says, the novelty would wear off pretty soon.

techdojo

It doesn't employ that many of them any more!
(and I was never a legend - unless you count making tea, I'm pretty good at that!)

OZApps

Like taking a binary file for a CPU you've never seen before, writing a disassembler from scratch (sometimes without even having access to the instruction set) and then reverse engineering the binary. That is satisfying & fulfilling

That sounds like so much fun... specially all that time disassembling Z80 code by hand

It doesn't employ that many of them any more!
(and I was never a legend - unless you count making tea, I'm pretty good at that!)

I am confused, do you do Coffee or Tea?? Your skill sets have changed between comments.

techdojo

I would HATE to develop for the Spectrum or other 8 bit machines, think of the frustration factor you get with modern day tools and multiply that x1000, hard drives - no way, gig's of space - no way, source control - you wish, remote debugging - no way, micro second compile times - in your deams.

With modern tools and modern machines maybe, but with the kind of kit most people had in the 80's - you lot don't know you were born

I used to work with a guy (not @Scouser although legend's say he possess these skills as well), who used to write Z80 by keying in the hex directly on a keypad he made for himself for the spectrum.

Initially he started writing the code on paper then hand assembling it (that's converting to hex BY HAND, no software tools, compilers, assemblers or anything fancy like that!), after he got good at that he migrated to just writing the hex on paper to get the layout of a function, then progressed to just seeing the function in his head, converting it directly into hex and entering it directly. No real chance to edit or go back and change something and what makes it more mindblowing is when you realise that the size of the relative jumps (both forward and back) have to coded as part of the instruction, which is bad enough for a backwards step, but is even worse for a forward branch where you might not know how many instructions your going to need.

It's like doing a multipass assemble in your head in one pass!

I have the utmost respect for programmers who did stuff like that (one of the reasons why I make the coffee for @Scouser, that and my Mum always told me to be nice to the elderly).

techdojo

@OZApps - I drink tea (white one sugar), @Scouser has coffee (white two sugars) think of it as multidisciplinary beverage development, a bit like having to write code in C++ and Lua at the same time

john26

@techdojo. I absolutely take your point on the difficulty of 8 bit programming. I did some Z80 assembler myself and it was very hard as the spectrum would constantly lock up if you made a mistake! I did have an assembler, however and a spectrum +3 with disk so I was spoilt compared to some!

But what was much easier in those days was publicity/advertising. Just send your game to Your Sinclair, Crash etc and your done! None of this mass emailing hundreds of websites or Twitter/Facebook. The game community seemed to be simpler and more coherent. Personally, I'd rather write machine code on punch cards than use FB etc... :-)

Scouser

@techdojo: Enough waffle, get the kettle on
And yes I do still possess the Z80 ninja skills of assembling code in my head and typing the hex values direct onto disc sectors (remembering to factor in the track / sector gap information).
@john26: Now I tend to just take stuff apart, software / hardware to see what makes it tick and then try to enhance it with extra functionality and put it back together.
The other legend @techdojo was talking about was a guy who worked for me in the 80s and we have worked together many times since (until he moved to USA & got married) was Christian Urquhart.

techdojo

@Scouser - Yes boss

@john26 - "back in the day" Your Sinclair, Crash, C&VG etc were the Facebook, Twitter / Social media of their day, you had followers, interaction, feeback, achievements (C&VG used to have a highscore section), the tech was lower but the concepts were (still are) identical.

john26

@techdojo, pff, I'd much rather read Your Sinclair than go on Facebook. YS is probably more comparable to Touch Arcade though even TA is a mere shadow of the greatness of YS...

OZApps

@techdojo, it was interesting to note how the game was similar or different from those using a C=64 or Atari and the issues that I had were with Maria Whittaker on the cover for the game Barabarian. There was another one called ACE, this included information about the Amiga and Atari ST and a lot of articles were about creating 3D images, etc and articles on number of polygons rendered by the hardware.

phongtt

I don't understand what you guys are talking about

plamen

It looks like i am not alone with pin codes and security passes like 6502,6800,8080 and stuff like that.

OZApps

@phongtt

I don't understand what you guys are talking about

It's just some guys that used to write Z80 assembly code for the ZX Spectrum in the late 80's. The IT industry was nascent but at the same time it was equally interesting and exciting. The ZX Spectrum was what an iPod is today and there were amazing apps/games that were created for this platform.

The language to program was built-in Basic from the ROM or the Z80 assembly which is made up of OP Codes that a lot of developers knew from the top of their minds. The way graphics were displayed and code written was very clever. To understand this conversation thread, you have to have been a programmer in the 80's and have been influenced by the British IT industry (hardware and software). Ocean, Imagine, Konami were companies that are equivalent of Rovio, Chillingo, etc

techdojo

@techdojo, it was interesting to note how the game was similar or different from those using a C=64 or Atari and the issues that I had were with Maria Whittaker on the cover for the game Barabarian. There was another one called ACE, this included information about the Amiga and Atari ST and a lot of articles were about creating 3D images, etc and articles on number of polygons rendered by the hardware.

@OZApps - What game are we talking about?

Interestingly enough I went the (re)Play Expo in Manchester a couple of months ago and had some long interesting chats with some other 8bit "legends" Jeff Minter and Dino Dini, I also saw stands selling loads of "antique" stuff and there was some promo posters and game boxes for Barbarian, even after thirty years later Maria Whittaker still looked good in a fur lined bikini, shame she wasn't there in person to recreate the shot

One thing I never realised was that the big guy in the cover shot with her was the guy who ended up playing the bad guy "Wolf" in the UK Gladiators show in the early 90's.

Due to the internal differences between the C64 and the Speccy often the games that were supposed "ports" differed greatly in implementation as two different programmers often had different ideas as to how a concept should be implemented.

Interestingly enough, most of each systems "classics" are remembered best in their original implementations and often because they were designed to take advantage of what each machine did best, ie, Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg, Knight Lore & Alien 8 on the Speccy vs. Pitstop II, Uridium, Powerdroid & GridRunner on the C64.

As the 8 bit days gave over to 16bit dominance there were lot's of magazines that delved into the more technical aspects, I can remember learning to program in C and basic 3D from articles in a number ST magazines (I think I've still got a load in the attic at home).