Ciaran’s Random Writings

Last week I found myself hand-assembling some 80×86 opcodes, for reasons I won’t to go into today, and I was reminded of George Ivanov. George was a character and a half, and an excellent programmer, who sadly passed away many years ago. Amongst other things, he was largely responsible for the Spectrum versions of The Empire Strikes Back and Fighter Bomber.

I could tell George-stories all day long, but I’ll restrict myself to the one that brought back the memory - the job interview…

(more…)

Any software developer will be able to tell tales of bug reports that don’t give enough information to reproduce the problem. My all-time favourite said just this: “When you take off from the aircraft carrier in the F4 Phantom, it crashes.” Not an unusual scenario - a complex flight-sim written entirely in 80×86 assembler tends to either work perfectly, or crash.

(more…)

This excellent piece of work raised a smile - the first level of Super Mario Bros implemented very neatly in Javascript. It’s 35K for the whole lot, compressed down to 14K. For comparison, the small screenshot in the article is 24K!

I managed to catch up with a few requests for Hardwar technical information this evening. Various updates can be found in the usual place. I still have a few in the queue, so if I didn’t get round to yours, send it again. More than once if you’re in a hurry!

As the screenshot (click for full size) shows, I’ve also managed to compile a working version of RefMax, which was used to edit the 3D models, terrain, etc. Although progress has been made before editing and creating models without this by converting the game data to different formats, several people expressed an interest in getting hold of ‘the real thing’. It seems to work fine with the data you can extract from the game resource files. I’ll upload a copy when I’ve put together some basic instructions for setting it up and using it, but if anyone is keen to try it, let me know and it will encourage me to get round to it.

Fortunately I haven’t really been eating dog food, I’m talking metaphorically. It started when I ‘accidentally’ purchased an Amiga 500 on Ebay for a fiver, and found that the only Amiga software I had in the house was a still-shrinkwrapped copy of one of my own games, a flight sim called Dogfight - 80 Years of Aerial Warfare. (In the US it was called Air Duel I think)

The first thing I was hit with was the ‘DRM‘, in the form of a “please enter 12 from page 47, paragraph 3 of the manual” question. A classic way to irritate your paying customers repeatedly, while the so-called pirates (arrrrr!) get off scot free. Of course, these days far more devious and dastardly schemes sail the high seas, but it did remind me of various other similar copy-protection fiascos I should be ashamed to have been involved in, so I’ll probably write more about them another day.

The next realisation was that it was really a PC game, shoehorned onto the Amiga, and really needing at least an A1200 rather than the comparitively sluggish A500. It did keep me amused for an hour or so, but all in all it wasn’t a very rewarding experience. Like most (but not all) old games, the memory is better than the reality, and probably best left that way. Suffice to say the game, and manual, have gone back in the box and will probably stay there for a long time.

In fact, until I get hold of some software, the Amiga is going back in the box as well, to sit in the loft with the countless other old computers.

It isn’t every day you see a new trailer for a game you released over nine years ago but that’s what just happened. It’s made entirely from cut-ups of the game video and in-game action, with a Paint It Black thrown into the soundtrack thrown in for good measure. It’s good to see some effort going into the marketing at last, even if it’s by the fans, nearly a decade too late.

There’s a lo-res version on YouTube here. I haven’t got a proper one yet.

I tried to get YouTube to find me more Hardwar-related videos but it got stuck on the idea of hardware and there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell it to find the exact word.

Digging around in some old archived data, I came across the source code for the PC (DOS) version of Star Wars, which consists of about 750K of ASM files -  quite a lot more than I’d have guessed at. A couple of the other files indicate that this is a copy of the source we brought back from California after working on the final testing over there, so it’s definitely the ‘latest’ version. There’s also a compiled EXE, but unsurprisingly it crashes when I try and run it under Windows XP.

(more…)