Gideros Forums

gorkem

Most of us have owned 8-bit computers in the past, and it's time to share our past experiences, good old days, nice projects, demos, intros, youtube links, maybe some code - everything that reminds us 80's.

Let's remember! :)

GregBUG

this is a game that i coded some years ago 2006 (sorry but only PC)

placed a 4th place at "devcrunch christmas copetition"...

it's 320x240 resolution (can not work well in modern system)
and remember me my old good days!!! :)

it's an old school game!!!

try it!.

maybe i can convert for mobile devices.... ;)

edit: it's possible that don't work on win 7 64bit ... :(

atilim

like it! worked on 32-bit win 7 :) \:D/

Scouser

I have to admit that the 8 bit (and to some extent 16 bit) classics are my inspiration for the mobile arena. I may be a little jaded in my view but having worked on titles such as Return of the Jedi, Vindicators, Dragon Spirit (all CPC) and quite a few lesser known titles (including some dross which I won't mention), I feel that games nowadays concentrate more on looks than playability :(.

I prefer the simple games that have the just one more go feel to them ;) and require a bit of thought to progress. Game designers from that era knew what made a game playable, just look at Ultimate Play The Game and some of their games like JetPac, Atic Atac & Sabre Wulf. These were some of the best games produced and still have appeal for me.

@GregBUG:You're game does work on 64bit Win 7, I have just tried it. :D

petec

Graet - it worked on 64 bit win 7 as well! (Edit: Oh, too late with that news)

Reminded me that I never did complete Manic Miner on my Spectrum :(

I found that I naturally entered DAD in the high score table as that's what I used to do when playing with my children on the Spectrum. My eldest is called Oliver and he still spells his name Oly as a left over from when you could only enter 3 letters for you name.

GregBUG

this is one of my favorites on my old c64:

forbidden forest!!!!

ahhh! I'm getting old!

atilim

My favorite ones are ATF and Saboteur on Amstrad, Iron Lord and Creatures 1/2 on C64. It seems I'll install a bunch of emulators today :)

gorkem

Didnt know about Forbidden Forest :)

My favorites were:

C64: International Karate, Last Ninja 2, Barbarian, Bruce Lee, Impossible Mission, Creatures 2, RIVER RAID!, Mayhem in Monsterland, Zaxxon, Pitstop, Wizard of Wor, Blue Max, Boulder Dash, Uridium

Amstrad: Saboteur, Air Tactical Fighter (ATF) - we played this for hours and hours with Atilim, Turrican, Gryzor, Robocop, Exolon

Michal

My first game was "Star Wars" on ZX-81, but that had only ASCII art (but was really playable!). One of my first ZX Spectrum games was JetPac, it would not be difficult to recreate it for Gideros (except for graphics, which is not my domain).

I have "ported" another (almost ascii-art style) ZX Spectrum game for love2d (another lua-based game framework): https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3605 One day I will port it to Gideros, should take just a couple of hours at most (the most difficult part would be handling user input).

I still do have Commodore 128D, but not using it... But never heard of this Forbidden Forest.

techdojo

Elite - 'nuff said!

ar2rsawseen

:-O When I laid my hands on computer for the first time, it had Windows XP on it.

evs

Spectrum with a massive 48K ram - Z80 Book http://www.z80.info/zip/zaks_book.pdf - Picturesque assembler - Heaven!

gorkem

Zaks' book!!! That was a masterpiece!

GregBUG

@evs
zx spectrum 48k... i loved it !!!! with a gummy keyboard!!!!
fantastic!!!

Scouser

@gorkem: Programming the Z80 by Rodney Zaks, the programmers bible. & I can still assemble Z80 in my head. I remember hardcore programming by hand assembling the code and typing the resulting hex data direct to disc sectors on the TRS-80. Them was the days :))

atilim

@Scouser :D We haven't known what assembler is in those days. And I wrote the assembly codes on paper and extracted the opcodes by hand. (and calculating the relative jmp offsets... uhh..)

Do you know a good assembler for Amstrad CPC? :P

Scouser

@atilim: I wrote my own but when developing commercial stuff I seem to remember using Edtasm under CP/M on Amstrad PCW-9512, although as it was CP/M it worked just as well on the CPC-6128.

atilim

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

GregBUG

^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^

@atilim and @scouser

our lords
keepers of "black magic assembly" knowledge!!!

My respect to you !

^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^ ^:)^

atilim

@GregBUG :))

GregBUG

ok. let's go with 16-BIT nostalgia...

after my C64 (the fat brown one! not the "modern" white slim)
i had an Amiga 500
and this video has touched me...

ahhh!! I'm sure my son will never appreciate these games! ...

evs

@atilim I suppose you have the winAPE http://winape.net/features.jsp emulator with included assembler / dissassembler compatible with Maxam???

PS I shouldn't encourage you, as you may be distracted from your Gideros coding!!!!

cheers

evs

Scouser

Just been remembering, another book I used extensively was The Complete
SPECTRUM ROM DISASSEMBLY which I used to write my own high speed cassette loader routines and two channel sound effects and four channel (chords really) music players. Also wrote a 50 fps pixel scrolling proof of concept on both spectrum & CPC machines.

evs

I also had this book in the 80's - Bought it again a few years back in a library sale for 15p
or €0.18 / 20¢

OZApps

Any Spectrum developer will definitely recollect this one

LD HL,16384
LD DE, 16384
LD BC,6144
LD(HL),0
LDIR
RET

Which I can still recollect the op codes as I spend hours first printing the memory locations and the contents on screen and writing them on paper, then converting them into the appropriate op codes, sometime it also was about drawing the same on screen to rip the graphics (once you got an idea where the graphics were in memory, and their masks)

Those were the days... before the OPUS and Disciple interfaces.

evs

@OZApps aaaah cls

--begin saddo moment

Rumour has it that Sir Clive called his disaster on wheels the C5, because it is Hex for the mnemonic PUSH BC (Pushbike)

--end saddo moment

cheers

evs

Magnusviri

I don't think I've recovered from growing up... What I find absolutely amazing is that I knew very few of the 16-bit games that GregBug posted. I took a vacation from computers in the 90's and it shows.

Oh my gosh, I can't believe I just spent the last few hours finding all of these games. Some Atari 400, Mac, C64, Amiga, Genesis and SNES. Here are games that I remember very strongly.

Star Raider:

Dark Castle:

Shufflepuck Café

Crystal Quest:

Boulder Dash:

(iPad version: http://www.lesbird.com/EmeraldMine/)

M.U.L.E.

Rampart:

Elite:

Archon:

Test Drive:

Load Runner:

Jumpman:

Airborn Rangers:

Rad Warrior (I've been trying to find this game since I found emulators 10 years ago...):

Prince of Persia (I read a few weeks ago that the author just found the source code to this after thinking it was lost this whole time):

Rescue on Fractalus:

BC Quest For Tires

The Bards Tale

Samantha Fox Strip Poker (My brothers were not suppose to have this game... And they didn't let me get very far...)

Winter Games

Movie Monster Game

Sentinel:

Starglider:

Law Of The West

Goonies

Racing Destruction Set

Battle Chess

Another World (I never got far in this one but it was such a different sort of game)

PSI-5 Trading Company (I have been looking for this for so long, I finally found it tonight!)

Red Zone:

Zombies ate my Neighbors

I'm not including links to Skate or Die, the many pinball games, Oregan Trails, Lemonade stand, Pitfall, Pong (I had one amazingly--but it was a hand me down lol), some game about robbing fort knox, a mouse game on the Vic-20 that played the 3 blind mice song (whatever it's name was), and a biplane game on the Vic-20. I can't believe I can still remember that stuff. I remember this stuff better than I remember my vacations.

Oh my gosh, so many games... I'm having a hard time not listing the arcade games like R-Type, Smash TV, Marble Madness, Rampage, TMNT, oh my I'm listing them... I will be strong though and just post this and finally go to bed!

As far as modern games go, the only ones I really think I'll remember are the Nintendo classics and Halo lol. Are there even games on Xbox besides Halo?...

Edited to add a few titles and fix a link. Oh and I forgot Zork, and Wumpus, Gorf, Defender, Zaxxon, oh no someone stop me!!

gorkem

I only can remember law of the west and samantha fox strip poker. I think children in different parts of the world played almost entirely different games.

moopf

@GregBug, ah Forbidden Forest! I can remember buying that in a games store and playing it for ages. That was a gem.

Scouser

OZApps said:
Any Spectrum developer will definitely recollect this one

LD HL,16384
LD DE, 16384
LD BC,6144
LD(HL),0
LDIR
RET

Unfortunately @OZApps, that won't clear the screen, the second line should read
LD DE,16385

and the third line should read
LD BC,6143 for just the screen or
LD BC,6911 to clear screen and attributes

The hex values for clearing screen and attributes would be
21 00 40 11 01 40 01 ff 1a ed b0 c9

:D

As for the list of games, The Sentinel was an awesome game.

katze

The good olt times, i still got my c64.
But i did not touched it for like 10 years :(

techdojo

atilim said:
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

So what's new :D

GregBUG

anyone here remember turboloader for C64 ?

◄L "mygame",8,1

;)

OZApps

@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?? :D fun times

OZApps

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

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

@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

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

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

@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

@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

@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

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

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

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

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! :D

OZApps

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

Garyk1968

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

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

57005

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

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