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techdojo · April 2012

writing your own assembler.. whoa ^:)^ I remember we were booting CP/M only for its horrible pascal compiler.

Thanks - he's going to insufferable to work with now for the next week!

Scouser · April 2012

So what's new

GregBUG · April 2012

anyone here remember turboloader for C64 ?

◄L "mygame",8,1

OZApps · April 2012

@scouser, yep... my bad
the DE has to be the next position and BC 6143 as 6144 will go over to the attributes area. The LD(HL),0 can also be replaced with LD (HL),L as L will always be 0 as HL = 0x4000 (16384)

old memories going back to that... Now where's that debugger when the whole thing just crashes on me??? Load the code from a tap over again??

fun times

OZApps · April 2012

My games used to come from my cousin who's parents were both scientists and used to travel overseas for conferences and were based in Italy for a while, there used to be an Italian magazine that used to have 10 games per magazine on the cassette, on one side were C=64 games and the other Spectrum, so most games I played I learned what Sinistra and Destra were and why when I died most of the games said "Fine"

Then there were a quite a few shops that used to have a long list of games that you could buy for about a Dollar each (converted, that was not Cheap, the 48K+ cost about $300 equivalent) and some of my favs were Commando, Green Berret, Target Renegade I & II, R-Type, IK+, Rafael Cecco (Exelon, Cybernoid I & II), Highway Encounter, Alien Highway, Sai Combat (it was called Kendo in the Italian magazine ver) from the top of my head.

gorkem · April 2012

There were hardly a demo scene with Amstrad CPC but it was very active for C64 & Amiga. I was following Script mag by Clique. These were the demos I liked a lot at those times:

C64: Tower Power

Amiga: 9 fingers & spaceballs

(also search for "making of the 9 fingers" on youtube).

OZApps · April 2012

@Gorkem, so we can expect that these features will find their way into Gideros next release

Vector tweening (morphing), Blending and Additive operations, scaling vector and bitmap images, masking and the 3D camera look at function.

OZApps · April 2012

there was one demo I think it was called Heaven7 or something for the PC, it was just Amazing!! I will look that up and post a link or video.

Scouser · April 2012

In my mind, demo writers were wannabe programmers. They could do all this awesome proof of concept stuff but I don't know of one demo writer who had written a commercial game.

As I mentioned earlier, I had developed an 8 directional pixel scroll system for both spectrum and CPC machines which ran at 50fps but never saw the light of day because it couldn't be used in a commercial environment as all the processor power was required to create the visuals which left nothing to handle the actual game mechanics.

Demo's are great for showing what a machine is capable of but don'tactually show what is commercially viable.

OZApps · April 2012

@Scouser, that sounds great. That would have been nice if it could have worked well.

I particularly liked the loaders that had counters that used the IX and IY registers and interrupts (akin something similar to co-routines in lua) to update 2 bytes out of the 8 that made the counter number character in every cycle.

As for the demos, yes they would push the system to the max and I would call them Tools/Library creators than wanna be programmers. They were really great programmers, otherwise they could not manage to do things in limited memory or CPU cycles. I think one of the best programmers in my books has been Costa Panayi, his games like Highway Encounter and Revolution have amazing shadowing systems and 8-bit reflections and all of that in 1984. The bouncing mechanism in Revolution still remains the best. He worked with Isometric views and pseudo 3D. Given that the tools, technologies were limited in those days, these guys were definitely much more talented, not saying that developers today aren't. Do you recollect the game Glider Rider/ it was one that looked good, had some cool title-screen FX, with the three sections of the screen like rollers, the game looked cool, but it was one of the most disappointing games in terms of gameplay.

Then there were some lovely invites for these Demo/scenes that involved 3D or ray tracing and scenes. So these libraries were later integrated into a lot of software that we see. I would love to see and run that library you have on an emulator just to see it. Cannot say how cool I think that would have been, It was in GameOver part1 when the entire screen shook and there was a code listing in YS soon on how to achieve that screen shake fx. In fact the guy that used to write the Machine Code articles in YS, wrote one to emulate the 128K menu on the 48K using machine code was kind of cool too.

How about building a 8-bit machine using Gideros, not an emulator but one with the menu, etc just for fun...

Scouser · April 2012

@OZApps:What I meant by wannabe programmers is that they have the skills to produce amazing code but the majority of them couldn't put it into practice in a commercial environment writing games.

I have to admit, when you mentioned Costa Panayi my mind went back to playing Highway Encounter. I loved that game.

As for the pixel scrolling thing, that was in 1988 I think and wouldn't know where the discs are now but the whole thing worked using pre shifted images which were 'blitted' to the screen using the stack pointer. The screen was built up in memory then shifted, and extracted to 16x16 tiles. All the tiles had a pointer on the tile stack. Each scanline of the screen had a pointer on the screen stack which made the code a horrid mess to follow.

Imagine if you would

ld hl,screen_stack_base
exx
ld de,object_stack_base
-----eek
add hl,sp -- save stack pointer
ex de,hl
ld sp, hl
 
pop af,bc,ix,iy
ex af,af
exx
pop af
pop bc,de
ld sp,hl
push de,bc,af
exx
ex af,af
push iy,ix,bc,af

Anyway something like that where you could read and write 14 bytes at a time in approx 30%-50% faster than 14 ldi instructions

The whole thing was a memory hog but was blazingly fast. Unfortunately, there was no CPU time for anything else which is why it was never pursued.

OZApps · April 2012

@Scouser, interesting methodology.

Part of the code, specially exchanging the registers was not used very commonly, unless it was used for something really wicked. I recollect that in the program that allowed for listening to a piece via the IN port and then digitise it and play it back on the speaker. Who would imagine talking about the code and devices that influenced lives like this

Magnusviri · April 2012

Another World is on the AppStore for iOS. Amazing. I didn't buy it so I don't know what it is like to play, but still, very cool.

Magnusviri · April 2012

Prince of Persia source code published:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/original-apple-ii-prince-of-persia-source-code-published-by-creator.ars

Magnusviri · April 2012

OH wow. I've been reading the journals about the making of Prince of Persia. Blast from the past. Amazing. There are so many good quotes in here that are still applicable today it's amazing...

http://jordanmechner.com/wp-content/uploads/resources/POP_sample.pdf

Page 15:
She said that Broderbund is a really nice, warm, friendly place to work, but for programmers it’s actually not that great a deal. The older ones, like Chris and David, are starting to get scared, because programming’s the only marketable skill they have, and it’s a young man’s game. The new crop of kids coming up are willing to work harder and cheaper, and don’t have girlfriends or families yet to cut into their working hours. And nobody knows how long the games market will be around, or what it’ll be like next year.

Page 17:
Then a strange thing happened. I started getting images in my head of the characters: the Sultan. the Princess. the Boy. I saw the scenes in my mind as if it were a Disney movie. So I wrote up a scenario — churned it out in an hour.

Page 31:
Visited Danny Gorlin. He’s sunk more money into developing the development system to end all development systems. Saw the final version of Airheart. It’s got some staggering special effects and it’s no fun at all to play.
Danny thinks spending a million bucks on a development system will give him an edge. He might be right. But the best Apple games have been developed on a plain Apple II with two disk drives. Lucasfilm spent a million bucks to make Rescue on Fractalus and Ball Blaster, and those games aren’t signicantly better than, or different from, the competition. The real strides forward – Raster Blaster, Choplifter, (what the hell) Karateka – were the work of solo programmers with no special resources.

Page 37:
Everyone in the office has been playing a lot of Tetris – a Russian submission for the IBM PC. It’s a classic, like Breakout. But I don’t think Broderbund is going to publish it. The knaves.

Oh my gosh I must quit reading this, it's like a movie!

robleong · April 2012

Anyone here owned a BBC micro? It was my favorite programming computer with built-in BASIC and assembler! My version had only 16K RAM, but it was upgradeable to a massive 32K!

OZApps · April 2012

I had worked with that, the long beige boxes, I thought they were slightly large, but sturdy.

Garyk1968 · April 2012

Started with a ZX81, then a vic20, zx spec, c64, atari st and ste and then the big bad world of PCs (286 xt)

games I still enjoy:

uridium/paradroid c64 (theres a neat version of uridium called iuridium written entirely in cocos2d and you can buy the source)
wizball - atari st
manic miner - zx spec
jet set willy - zx spec
jetpac - zx spec

plus any aracde clones; defender, robotron, gorf, asteroids, 1942, galaxians, galaga

ahhh happy days!

petec · April 2012

In case you haven't seen it, google.co.uk has marked the 30th Anniversary of the Spectrum (and St George's day) with a Spec inspired doodle

evs · May 2012

57005

http://www.myspace.com/music/player?sid=73205964&ac=now

Averett · January 2013

You guys make me weep with joy!
Sinclair Spectrum 48k (upgraded).
I even had a customized hard keyboard that I soldered the motherboard into...
...then came an Amiga 2000... with a PC emulator card (that sucked)... and then my first Mac ... sigh.
Dealing with Assembler on the Spectrum and adding my own RAM extension to it gave me the courage to build a Hackintosh today... great to meet you guys!

jdbc · January 2013

One of my favourite game in Amstrad CPC 6128 was the difficult Goody

talis · January 2013

When we were small with my brother (me 6-8 and my brother 10-12 i guess) my father has won a computer from Pepsi puzzle competition. And it was my first computer. It was opening like a command prompt interface(greenish colors:) which was operating with Basic. Unfortunately the computer had no storage cartage and we could'nt find any in Turkey those times which is compaitable. So every time my brother was writing a simple game in basic (like guess the number, simple space invaders vs vs..) whenever we swithed it off it is lost:D
Good old days..

gorkem · January 2013

Talis what was the type & model?

WauloK · January 2013

My first computer was a VZ 200 aka Laser 210 with 4K RAM standard.

http://www.gateman.com/museum/images/vz200.jpg

Next, a Commodore 64. Then IBM clone 386SX25 with a 128Mb MFM HDD!

OZApps · January 2013

@Waulok, welcome.

phongtt · January 2013

My first computer was an Intel 386

SinisterSoft · January 2013

I wrote these:

Cabal (NES)

Mercs (Amiga and ST)

SuperHero (Amiga)

gorkem · January 2013

@sinistersoft :x did you work for Psynosis? Were you there when they released shadow of the beast?

OZApps · January 2013

@SinisterSoft, have you tried re-writing Cabal with the accelerometer, it would be fun, I almost contemplated this over a dozen times to focus on other priorities.

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