Many people have this illusion that home computer games were written on the systems they run on, but the more serious devs/publishers had setups like the one here with a host PC.
There were stories of Sinclair game devs using CPCs in a similar way simply because they couldn't stand the Sinclair keyboards.
While some of the professional development probably was on host systems, not all of it was.
Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985, serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.
Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler with REU support, which made development on the machine itself ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I can recall was there was no concept of version management back then.
Of course, this came too late for professional development but it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling from PCs came in vogue.
I remember reading a story about writing games in the 80's, and the programmers were all using some powerful timeshare system, but during the workday it slowed to a crawl as everyone compiled their code.
It was far more productive to just write/run code on a dedicated Atari/C64 or whatever the target system was.
The C64 was being actively developed for for a decade or more, and Blood Money came in 1990, towards the end of that period. The Amiga was reaching its peak popularity by then.
By that point, more powerful development machines and tools will have become much more affordable/available than in the early 80s.
"AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems, all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems themselves because that's all they had. If you buy some teenager's game for £10 at the chemist's, that teenager can't afford a large powerful system to develop with.
I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were designed on the TI-99/4A, which to him proved the machine as a tool for serious creative work.
Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion / DOTT / Monkey Island / SCUMM fame) speaks to this in an interview he gave at Handmade Con, you can find it on youtube.
IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels, presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX box.
Blood Money was a good game - way too hard for me as a child but it had an atmosphere and soundtrack that gave it it's own following at the time and place in my memory banks as an extremely well crafted game. Thanks to OP for the article, appreciated!
Blood Money is way too hard now. Even when playing on an emulator and cheating a bit with savestates!
Was super-impressed by the visuals of the Amiga version at the time, those jellyfish animations and huge claws on the 2nd stage.
(Never played the C64 version back in the day, but it does look surprisingly impressive, quite faithful to the Amiga version, a whole lot of stuff moving around at a good speed)
I don't know if I'm just at an age of gaming incompetence senility but all the NES and many of the SNES games I've played with emulators lately have been so much harder than I remembered.
Some of it is practice, but it can’t be understated that many of those games were built with extreme low latency. Input low latency, CRT low latency.
The games were already “NES hard” add a couple frames of latency, and you may have halved the time to react to an in game event since you’re going from 1-2frames of lag to 4+. That really effects reaction time. And even for games like Super Mario Bros that are largely muscle memory since all the stages are largely deterministic, the added input lag just makes the game harder than you remember since you may already be used to the lower latency. Oh, and I haven’t even touched on jitter. You might be able to deal with exactly 3frames worse input and screen lag, but if there is ever any deviance from that, the game just got exponentially harder. You could expect almost no jitter on a NES (aside from slow downs from too many sprites), and brains are really bad at compensating for random jitter. I’ve seen demos of marquees played on monitors both with 8fps, one looked jerky, the other looked completely smooth, and the only difference was the smooth one had near zero variance in the framerate.
Great to see these technical retrospectives. I remember David Jones wrote a similar one for the original Amiga game and it was published in a magazine around the time of the release. It included a description of how the scrolling works and the code was on the cover disk.
It was actually this code that really kick started my own Amiga game programming of demos and games and lead to a two decade stint in the game industry, so I am forever grateful.
Ahhhhh PDS the memories and the crashes and the corrupted source files... I used it for 2 years against the ZX Spectrum (and I guess Amstrad and MSX but I don't actually remember) hosted on an Atari ST, and it was fast to iterate. But its speed, compared to development on 3" disks on the target machine, also gave me a glimpse into the value of those moments to think while the thing is building.
The PDS sounds like a fairly typical console devkit of the time: basically just a larger, more powerful system to host the build toolchain and an in-circuit emulator you plugged into the cartridge slot. I remember an interview with the Mega Man devs in which they mentioned they used an HP 9000 workstation with an ICE simulating a Famicom cartridge to develop the game.
Fancy devboxes with custom console builds, like the PS2 TOOL, would come later (probably necessary when cartridges were phased out).
Games like Blood Money, Xenon 2, Mr. Heli gave me a lifelong craving for shoot em ups with shops: Games where you want to hone each run to get the most money possible and experiment with different upgrade loadouts, making for an inherently repayable experience.
The problem with these games was that you tended to lose all your upgrades if you die, and later levels were essentially unplayable if you lost all those upgrades. So you really only had one life.
And you'd quickly figure out a fairly optimal upgrade sequence and stick to it.
Still, I enjoyed them back then too. X-Out was another one, with a particularly interesting shop/ship configuration system for its time.
Many people have this illusion that home computer games were written on the systems they run on, but the more serious devs/publishers had setups like the one here with a host PC.
There were stories of Sinclair game devs using CPCs in a similar way simply because they couldn't stand the Sinclair keyboards.
While some of the professional development probably was on host systems, not all of it was.
Especially since the release of Turbo Assembler in 1985, serious development on the C64 was quite comfortable.
Years later in the 90ies, Fairlight enhanced Turbo Assembler with REU support, which made development on the machine itself ridiculously comfortable. Basically the only thing missing I can recall was there was no concept of version management back then.
Of course, this came too late for professional development but it's basically what the demo scene ran on till cross assembling from PCs came in vogue.
I remember reading a story about writing games in the 80's, and the programmers were all using some powerful timeshare system, but during the workday it slowed to a crawl as everyone compiled their code.
It was far more productive to just write/run code on a dedicated Atari/C64 or whatever the target system was.
The C64 was being actively developed for for a decade or more, and Blood Money came in 1990, towards the end of that period. The Amiga was reaching its peak popularity by then.
By that point, more powerful development machines and tools will have become much more affordable/available than in the early 80s.
"AAA" publishers of the period definitely used larger systems, all the way up to VAXen, but smaller devs worked on the systems themselves because that's all they had. If you buy some teenager's game for £10 at the chemist's, that teenager can't afford a large powerful system to develop with.
I seem to recall an interview with Paul Urbanus in which he noted that the graphics for Parsec on the TI-99/4A were designed on the TI-99/4A, which to him proved the machine as a tool for serious creative work.
Ron Gilbert (of Maniac Mansion / DOTT / Monkey Island / SCUMM fame) speaks to this in an interview he gave at Handmade Con, you can find it on youtube.
IIRC he says they used UNIX workstations to develop Maniac Mansion/SCUMM for the C64. Complete with hot loading of levels, presumably they had a similar hardware interface to what's shown in TFA for manipulating C64 memory contents from the UNIX box.
Parts 2 and 3 are password protected, with no obvious hint how to obtain a password. For patreons only or something like that?
Response via Bsky https://bsky.app/profile/mdf200.bsky.social/post/3m3uejt3yi2...
"Parts 2 and 3 will be released over time.... prob one a week or something - if I remember :)
Patreons get access to all locked articles."
Would like to read them as well
Youtube example of it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Igevw8PRRY
Amiga example with intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxciUa4YmeY
From the domain, I was hoping for Lemmings info. They have it! It is here: https://lemmings.info/lemmings-gamehistory/. In its own submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45679873
Man I'm still waiting for a modern (2D) Lemmings remake or spiritual successor :')
A spiritual successor would be Zombie Night Terror [1].
I find it even better in some ways (atmosphere, dark humor, gameplay). Highly recommended.
Edit: it has also an editor and community made levels.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/416680/Zombie_Night_Terro...
Last I checked it wasn't even really possible to buy Lemmings anywhere. I think Sony owns the license nowadays.
Companys remake every game that has some nostalgia but not Lemmings.
Any good suggestions for tools for writing C64 programs in Linux and running them in Vice ? I only found a couple of guides that cover Windows, alas.
I am using ca65 / cc65 for all my Commodore programming. Should run under Linux just fine.
Prog8 requires 64tass (for which a .deb package exists it looks like) and a Java runtime: https://github.com/irmen/prog8
TRSE should also work on Linux: https://lemonspawn.com/turbo-rascal-syntax-error-expected-bu...
Thanks a lot, I will check it out.
https://ide.retrogamecoders.com
Take oscar64 [0]. So far the best C compiler for the C64 with a lot of extra options, good library and a good documentation.
[0] https://github.com/drmortalwombat/oscar64
Blood Money was a good game - way too hard for me as a child but it had an atmosphere and soundtrack that gave it it's own following at the time and place in my memory banks as an extremely well crafted game. Thanks to OP for the article, appreciated!
Blood Money is way too hard now. Even when playing on an emulator and cheating a bit with savestates!
Was super-impressed by the visuals of the Amiga version at the time, those jellyfish animations and huge claws on the 2nd stage.
(Never played the C64 version back in the day, but it does look surprisingly impressive, quite faithful to the Amiga version, a whole lot of stuff moving around at a good speed)
I don't know if I'm just at an age of gaming incompetence senility but all the NES and many of the SNES games I've played with emulators lately have been so much harder than I remembered.
Some of it is practice, but it can’t be understated that many of those games were built with extreme low latency. Input low latency, CRT low latency.
The games were already “NES hard” add a couple frames of latency, and you may have halved the time to react to an in game event since you’re going from 1-2frames of lag to 4+. That really effects reaction time. And even for games like Super Mario Bros that are largely muscle memory since all the stages are largely deterministic, the added input lag just makes the game harder than you remember since you may already be used to the lower latency. Oh, and I haven’t even touched on jitter. You might be able to deal with exactly 3frames worse input and screen lag, but if there is ever any deviance from that, the game just got exponentially harder. You could expect almost no jitter on a NES (aside from slow downs from too many sprites), and brains are really bad at compensating for random jitter. I’ve seen demos of marquees played on monitors both with 8fps, one looked jerky, the other looked completely smooth, and the only difference was the smooth one had near zero variance in the framerate.
It is even harder for me now. I found such games easier as a child.
Yeah, it was hard. Then again, many C64 games were hard, but I remember my brother and I really struggling with Blood Money.
Great to see these technical retrospectives. I remember David Jones wrote a similar one for the original Amiga game and it was published in a magazine around the time of the release. It included a description of how the scrolling works and the code was on the cover disk.
It was actually this code that really kick started my own Amiga game programming of demos and games and lead to a two decade stint in the game industry, so I am forever grateful.
Ahhhhh PDS the memories and the crashes and the corrupted source files... I used it for 2 years against the ZX Spectrum (and I guess Amstrad and MSX but I don't actually remember) hosted on an Atari ST, and it was fast to iterate. But its speed, compared to development on 3" disks on the target machine, also gave me a glimpse into the value of those moments to think while the thing is building.
PDS required a PC with PDS ISA card (not much more than an 8255 iirc), was never available on the ST..
The PDS sounds like a fairly typical console devkit of the time: basically just a larger, more powerful system to host the build toolchain and an in-circuit emulator you plugged into the cartridge slot. I remember an interview with the Mega Man devs in which they mentioned they used an HP 9000 workstation with an ICE simulating a Famicom cartridge to develop the game.
Fancy devboxes with custom console builds, like the PS2 TOOL, would come later (probably necessary when cartridges were phased out).
Games like Blood Money, Xenon 2, Mr. Heli gave me a lifelong craving for shoot em ups with shops: Games where you want to hone each run to get the most money possible and experiment with different upgrade loadouts, making for an inherently repayable experience.
The problem with these games was that you tended to lose all your upgrades if you die, and later levels were essentially unplayable if you lost all those upgrades. So you really only had one life.
And you'd quickly figure out a fairly optimal upgrade sequence and stick to it.
Still, I enjoyed them back then too. X-Out was another one, with a particularly interesting shop/ship configuration system for its time.
Yeah, played both of these on the ST, absolutely loved blowing up weird alien squid things and collecting loot.
"an inherently repayable experience"
Interesting choice of words.