syntax#1

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1

IT’S

THE

FIRST

XMAS

SPECIAL

AGK

THE C64

REVIEWS

SPECTRUM

2

By Zeotrope

Blitz3D

3

A

LETTER

from

Qube

Cover: GaborD

Wow! When I created this site I never

expected it to become what it is

today. I’ve always loved a community

of dedicated coders who truly enjoy

coding, game creating and sharing

their experiences. Over the last

couple of years we’ve gained fantastic

loyal members who have taken the

time to post, reply, create worklogs

and help others to which I say a huge

thank you.

The game coding competitions have

exceeded my expectations which just

goes to show the great talent of our

members who create such great

games within a short time span. When

I first launched them I never expected

to see the quality that our members

have created. Many of them remind

me of dashing to the shops at the

weekend with my pocket money to

buy the latest and greatest releases

from Mastertronic. Huge appreciation

to all those that have joined in the fun

and I look forward to seeing what we

can all come up with in 2020.

So here we are once more with the

yearly madness that is Christmas. I

say madness by which I mean

watching others buy a months worth

of shopping because the stores are

closed for one whole day. All the

people asking you the same thing

every year, “Are you all ready for

Christmas?”. I tell them I’ve written an

app which organises the whole of the

Christmas routine for me. The array

of statements and comments you get

in return are class.

Welcome to SyntaxBomb’s first

Christmas magazine \o/

As far as traditions go, every year I try

and watch at least one classic

Christmas movie with a plate full of

mince pies and of course a few

(festive) beers. When the big day

arrives I look forward to stuffing

myself with Christmas dinner and

afterwards complain on the couch

that I’ve eaten too much, then

proceed to stuff myself with

Christmas cake. In the evening the

festive water *cough* flows and we all

have a great laugh doing anything

from board games to karaoke. Simple

but very fun leading to me and the

misses walking home at around 4am.

I say walking but it’s more of a zigzag

while still complaining we’ve

eaten too much followed by the old

“is this the right key for the door”.

Someone once asked me why there

was no room at the inn for Mary and

Jesus. I said it was because of

Christmas! - I’ll leave the response

they gave up to your imagination.

What ever your festive traditions are I

hope you all have a great, peaceful

and fun Christmas.

Finally a special thanks to iWasAdam

for putting together this magazine.

Rudolph happily donates a carrot to

you and Santa happily gives you one

mince pie (but just one as he’s a busy

guy)

All that’s left to be said is…

Merry Christmas and a

Happy New Year. Qube.

CO

NTENTS

Pitch Perfect

find out what made the 80’s sound

the way they did

86

14

Punk Brtania

what made Thatcher’s Britain so

brilliant ?

Ready Set Go

rev your engines over the top

racing games

Greetings From...

hand drawn greetings from down

under

14

30

50

1

Missing

Do you have any information about

this computer?

38

I Loved My Amstrad

Dabs gets into cold water over his

Amstrad

Game Over

want to know what goes into a

game?

TV Tower

it started small and it’s still going

strong

66

120

72

66

5

20

86

30

50

8

72

CONTENTS

Mix It Up

the recent syntaxbomb competition

8

Creating The Cover

how the cover was put together

12

AGK

what is it and how does it compare

20

From Dust

it wasn’t so simple back in the day

29

Santa Solitaire

Krampus for xmas?

40

The American

Commodore C64

44

Crash

do you member?

58

Game Over

stinky and sticky arcades

60

Atari

will it be back?

65

Low Poly Tree

how to create one

82

Moist Wanted

some Atari xmas humour

94

Chapter 1

Vic20 and Grandpa and me

98

The Editor

can you use it yet?

101

Being Green

QasarBeach goes back in time

105

A* Santa

how will Santa get to you?

108

Love of Computers

a life lived with computers...

116

8

Mix-It-Up with the latest SyntaxBomb

competition that ran from August

25th to October 20th 2019.

Entrants had to choose from one of the following five options and make a game

that has a mix of those genres.

Option 1 : Tactical / Role-Playing (RPG)

Option 2 : Retro / Shooter

Option 3 : Puzzle / First Person Shooters (FPS)

Option 4 : Escape the room / Beat-em-up

Option 5 : Retro / Endless

In then end there were 6 entries, with everyone having the usual ups and downs of

developing anything in such a small timescale. But with another competiton ended

all the entrants had learnt something new, had a great amount of feedback and all

sorts of fun on their journey.

Stevie G was the well deserved

winner with Gunstar.

Taking his previous work with 3d

in Polymaniacs and Vanarchy, he

takes the concept of TimePilot and

Defender and gives us a retro

isometric shooter with endless

variety. Couple this with a great

soundtrack and sound effects and

you have all the best ingredients

for a top-class winner. With praise

from everyone this is the fingertwitching

action we all wanted and

got.. With abundance!

Stevie first created the

models in his own format

using a custom primtive

editor. The results were then

exported as a rotational 2d

sprite map. So what looks like

3d is really 2d sprites. Very

clever and very ingenius.

https://stevieg.itch.io/gunstar?secret=qpSAuh6TnXfdOw94mJ0e6czB9k

9

Voting was complete and it was clear that GUNSTAR had romped home

with nearly twice the vote percentage that the other two had. Second

place was TYOOB beating third place HONEYTHINGS by only 1

percentage point.

Voting was secret with the results announced at the end. Here is the table

of votes:

10

AND THE OTHERS...

Taking Atari's Centipede as

it's core idea, Xerra's Creepy

Crawlies showed what could

be done with a little thought.

Delivering a solid game with

some very nice visuals and

sound.

Everything was well

packaged and presented

with progress and scores

making for a real treat.

https://xerra.itch.io/creepy-crawlies

Matty gave us Endless Horde which is

the only web based entry. Bt far his

best competition entry this firmly took

the strategy concept and spun it nicely.

Definitely a good one from him.

Using the familiar D&D strategy

concept, you guid various characters

around on an isometric hex grid.

Sometime confusing, but very nice

presentation and use of the style.

Kudos goes out for the graphics which

give and very different feel to this kind

of game.

http://www.mattiesgames.com/endlesshorde/

https://gpsrunningdude.itch.io/wildestwest

And finally we have Wildest West from

3DzForMe. A fitting tribute to the (very)

anvuent but well loved BootHill game

from the late 70's. Unfortunately Reallife

stuck it nose into the development

and nearly stopped it, but luckily for us

3DzForMe persisted and the game made

it by the skin of its teeth. A well

presented entry that made the jump

from 2d projection to 3d!

11

BasicBoy was

second with Tyoob

Completing anything is a trial,

and BasicBoy went after Atari's

Tempest and beat it to death in

a stunning entry that brought

back memories of Jeff Minter.

Hypnotic tubes come out of the

screen as your ship rotates and

fires upon wave after wave of

enemies. Such a well deserved

second place.

If frantic shooters is your

thing? Then you cant go wrong

with this excellent winner.

https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,6107.msg30995.html#msg30995

Bringing up the rear

in third place was

IWasAdam with

Honey Things a

strange if unwieldy

strategy puzzler!

Yet again showing his penchant for luscious bitmap

graphics, IWasAdam just missed second place with

this ingenious puzzler. With a thumping soundtrack

to go alongside some glittering visuals. HoneyThings

follows a Bear in search of the fabled Honey Swirl.

Unfortunately old bone bonce has set the sweet

things into nasty mode. So there! Some mind

bending puzzles await you...

https://adamstrange.itch.io/honeythings

IT’S

THE

FIRST

XMAS

SPECIAL

13

CREATING

THE COVER

GaborD shows us how

the cover was produced

The scene is put together in Blender completely.

First a simple non directional lightmap is generated

(HDR) for diffuse and about 8 probes for reflections

(mostly for the tree ornaments that are quite shiny

Rendering is a forward pass, and in post a bit of

bloom, ACES tonemapping, tiny bit of CA and

vignette are added.

Poly count is not too bad because things like the

ornaments and the tree lights are instanced

geometry. It can be rendered in AGK realtime

allowing the camera to be flown around until I get

the angle I want. It’s really as simple as that!

14

P U

N K

Built on his previous work with the kitbash zx80

and zx81 the (then) zx82 was to have color and

be more powerful and cheaper than everything

around it. The specifications were in part Clive’s

response to the BBC’s requirements for a

computer system to go with its proposed new

educational programme. Unfortunately Sinclair

lost out to Acorn, but the new machine still made

perfect sense, offering a true upgrade to the

earlier ZX series.

With a Zilog Z80A CPU running at a modest

3.5MHz forming it's beating heart. this 8bit

beauty had internal 16bit I/O addressing, on chip

dynamic memory refresh control and very simple

power requirements.

The simple ROM from the zx81 would be

expanded from 8kb to 16kb, written by John

Grant and Steven Vickers, and allowing for a

more comprehensive Sinclair BASIC. 16Kb of

Dynamic RAM would be standard, with the option

of an upgrade to 48Kb for enthusiasts.

It's screen resolution of 256x192 would be

available through a colour video generator

offering 8 colours, and 2 shades of each, apart

from the black, which was just… black. and like

most computers of this era, the machine has a

56 line border (in PAL regions), whose colour can

be changed but can’t be populated with graphics

under normal use. But was used superbly well as

the tape loading indication.

Sound was just a simple single channel 'beep',

although later revisions included a 4 voice synth

chip - but we are interested in the original model

here.

The infamous rubber keyboard was present and

was either brilliant or terrible depending on your

view. From My own view I kind of liked it as my

(then) small fingers bounced and pounded away

with some speed on it back in the day alongside

a very small 5" black and white tv!

Lastly this tiny, but perfect package was housed

in a compact design by Rick Dickinson. The

elegant case was created with guidance from

Clive Sinclair, and the final flair being the

iconic rainbow effect, along with a

new name from zx82 to Spectrum.

A name that told customers

about the improvements over

the earlier machines.

The early 80's, breadline Britain was having a

party and we were all invited. Punk was out

and the new kids with their makeup and

computers were coming. Into this Clive

Sinclair launched "The Spectrum" and

IWasAdam was there to witness it all.

15

16

Britain took the humble Spectrum

to its heart and the we all loved

the games. And until 1984 this

little machine rode the market

hard and made computers and

programming open to everyone...

MICRO-WHATSITS...

Derided, comical and hated. The dreaded

Micro-drive arrived late and not quite ready.

But it did (mostly) work and was as cute as

hell. Tiny little things of joy...

17

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

To be honest: Not a lot!

It came with either 16k or

48k and that included 8k

shared with the screen!

The board itself was very

well laid out but it did

suffer from the infamous

UART port wobble (hidden

under that big shield).

Where any connected

peripheral could and would

reset the machine with just

a minor jiggle!

So don’t knock that joystick

port or your hiscore is toast

- and maybe your Spectrum

too!

18

P U

N

FUTUR

You just

can’t keep a

good thing down.

And the Spectrum Next is

the Spectrum we were all

waiting for made real. Here’s a quick

look at the hardware and just a peek at the

games being developed for this new Spectrum.

E

19

AGK

WINDOW INTO

AppGameKit comes in 2 kinds: Classic

and Studio. With Studio they have reimagined

the user interface with an

all-in-one work space. You can now

quickly drag & drop assets to visualise

your scenes, code with AppGameKit

script, easily browse app media, run live

debugging sessions, access online help

and lots more! But we are going to be

looking at what AGK is capable of as a 3d

engine...

21

I couldn't resist, had to test how far we can push AGK polycount wise.

It's all about massaging the bottlenecks in my opinion, the engine can actually handle a lot.

The thing I love about AGK is that it gives the user so much control. We can optimize a lot of things.

Here is a quick bruteforce terrain test, 2 million polies at 1300FPS on a GTX1070. (I took out LOD, to

push polycount >:D )

Polycount fetched with GetPolygonsDrawn(), should be accurate.

This could be quite a bit faster, but I also bruteforced texturing and fillrate with non-LODded 4K

textures and per pixel realtime lighting. (really wanted to see how much AGK can handle)

22

With the right eye, thought and

some amazing talent. GaborD

shows what is possible

23

24

25

AGK Realtime 3d

GaborD

SO WHAT IS

It’s an easy to learn game development

engine, ideal for Beginners, Hobbyists &

Indie developers. It solves many problems

caused by mobile device fragmentation. With

it you can code your game once and then

deploy it to multiple platforms, mobile and

desktop. Different resolutions and input

systems are all easily handled by it.

3D, Augmented Reality, 2D Sprites, and even VR are

all here, able to be included in your end result.

You can drag and drop in the same sort of way that

both Unity and Unreal function, or just code it out.

There are several hundred commands included

within coverig everything from sound, to graphics

2d and 3d. Just take a look at the work by GaborD

to appreciate what you could do using AGK’s 3d

commands and a bit of skill.

AGK is being constantly updated and there are new

features being added all the time, plus a very active

community that is not going anywhere anytime

soon.

Features include a new asset browser, inbuilt

debugging and profiling and not forgetting write

once and export to many platforms including

MACOS, Windows, Linux, IOS and android!

27

29

FROM DUST

Join johnno56 as he searches

the 70’s for computer relics...

The very first computer that I owned was a kit

that was advertised in "Electronics Australia". I

think it was back in 1979. It was the Dream

6800 chip-8. This one was special because it

was my first "kit" that I had ever built. It had

1K of RAM, a HEX keypad, a speaker and a

cassette tape interface.

After building it, I then plugged it into the RF

socket of a TV... Spent the next 45 minutes

keying in a simple "hit the moving target"

game... This was done several times as the

listing was a photocopy of a photocopy...

Editing the program was not possible. There

were no error messages. After, I think the

third time of keying in the whole listing, the

game ran. Saved it on cassette. Then proudly "showed off" the game to

my wife of 1 year... and was presented with, "Is that all it can do?".

"Soul Crushing" would be putting it lightly. I think I only keyed in one

other chip 8 game and the machine was "relegated" to storage...

Two years later I then attempted another

computer kit. The Dick Smith Super 80. A

Zilog Z80 machine with 16K of ram with a 32

x 16 text only display via the RF input of a

TV. Almost $300 dollars later and some

hours of soldering further along, the TV

displayed a blinking cursor and waited for

some input. I chose to have the Basic

interpreter on EPROM and recycled the

casstte from my previous machine for the

storage of programs.

My wife was a little more impressed... not much more... but a little.

This machine was special because it had a proper keyboard (keys had to be

mounted directly onto the PCB) and it was faster and could do much more than my

previous 1K machine... and it worked on the first power up!!

My only mistake was not shelling out the extra $50 for the metal case.

The computer "lived" on top of the television set mainly because of having short

leads...

Did you know that "dusters" can get "caught" on some of the motherboard

components? The energy stored in the motion of said duster, can be instantly

transferred to the motherboard, then propel said motherboard off the television and

bounce, with a sickening "crunch", off the floorboards below...

I was good with a soldering iron, but not 'that' good. The 'crack' went through both

the upper AND lower sides of the motherboard. This machine would be my last kit.

Closing point: It was "not" me who did the dusting...

TO DUST

READY.. SET...

Atari Pole Position – arcade game. Pumping 20 pence pieces

into this trend setter at Cowdenbeath Technical College 32

years ago is the first recollections of a decent racing game.

17

16

Lotus Turbo Esprit – Grand

Theft Auto for the eighties.

15

13

14

is Indy 500,

another Amiga

title. Again, the

physics on this

exceptionally low

poly game were

great and some of

the smashes that

could result by

pushing it just

that little bit too

much were

something else.

GO !!!

Join

3DzForMe on his Grand Prix

through his favorite racing games

31

Geoff Crammond's

Grand Prix on the

Amiga 1200. Fantastic

physics for the time –

the book accompanying

the game was well put

together and helped

with the feeling of

immersion, for all the

graphics were some

way of the eye candy

we have by today's

standards. Oh the

hours spent perfecting

lap times – I think it

had replays!

Stunt-Car Racer. Hooking up two Amigas with a Null modem cable –

racing with a pal at home had never been so much fun!

Put put of the engine, drop onto the track and off you go.

I've enjoyed many a console and

computer game through the

decades. From pumping 20 pence

pieces into Atari's Pole Position

some 30 years ago when at college,

to the fun of playing Paperboy with

controls of a bike's handlebars, to

role playing games ranging from

Never Winter Nights, Age of

Empires, Command and Conquer,

Lemmings and various incarnations

of a little known game which had

shouts of 'Hey...... its a me, Mario!'

My appeal for driving games even

seen me playing around in Blitz3D

with articulated trucks with ducks

on top driving around Mario Kart

Fort Block-esque structures

(rendered by yours truly). Moved

onto having a car in the back of the

trailer KITT (aka Knight Rider) car

style – you could drop down the tail

gate and drive the car out – I know –

its crazy what can be achieved with

Blitz3D and JV-ODE, one great

physics library.

As I've got older, the one gaming

genre which has kept me coming

back for more is racing games. I'm

going to touch upon my top 17

driving games (it was going to be 10

– there were just so many games I

could not omit from the list though!)

through the decades, finishing off

with the one which is currently

eating up maybe 2-4 hours of my

week at the moment. Yeah, it

doesn't seem like much but other

life stuff happens these days. So,

the games within this article I had

the benefit of playing / owning. One

thing that struck me whilst collating

images for this is the large amount

of other driving games available that

I was simply unaware of. Anyhow, I

digress without further adieu – the

list – the majority of which I

own/have owned (excepting the

arcade machines).

32

12

Top Gear Rally N64 style cartridge fun

11

Power Drift (Amiga):

game – this was ahea

it was trying to achie

awesome multi-level

height to be gained a

Driver. Fab to look at but a nightmare to play.

9

33

Roller Coaster esque racing

d of its time regarding what

ve graphically – nonetheless,

fun with some serious

round the varying tracks.

10

Lucky for some – Super Skid Marks on the Amiga.

The home computer edition of potentially the

first multiplayer arcade racing game with up to 4

steering wheels!

8

CodeMasters

Touring Car

Racing (PS 2) This

is where

codemasters

really started to

show their mettle

regarding what

they could do

with limited

hardware and an

exceptionally

gifted set of

software

engineers.

34

7

Viper Racing on the PC: One

of the first games with

seemingly 'Rolling Hills' to

race through. This was my

first decent simulation style

racing game that allowed

you to tweak a whole

manner of set up options.

Not that I'm one for too

much choice in that way,

generally speaking its good

to get a good set up , but

any more than 5 mins its a

case of – jeez, I just wanna

race the blooming car.

Project Gotham Racing 2 on Xbox. I picked my Xbox up for 30 quid second hand as a treat

for completing my HNC in business information technology back in 2009 – it came with two

controllers and numerous games (one of which was PGR). The PGR series of games got some

serious gameplay – PGR2 stands out though as setting some arcade style gaming fun.

6

4

35

5

Gran Turismo 4 on

Playstation 2. I picked up a

book Gran Turismo 4 –

Driving the game for £1 in a

book shop in a Glasgow

shopping centre. It makes

for a fascinating read on the

effort expended by the

development team to

produce a polished product

like Gran Tourismo. The lack

of destruction to the cars is

what put me off this game,

nevertheless, many a happy

hour racing was spent in

GT4 on the PS2.

Forza Horizon (Xbox 360): This

game had bouncing tunes and

the cake didn't seem to be over

egged. The (second hand) copy I

picked up came in a steel case,

on of only two games I posses in

metal cases.

3

Project Cars 2: The level of detail

in this game is outstanding. From

the way you can modify the

difficulty of the AI (ability,

aggression, restarts allowed) to

the fact there is no 'rewind'. I've

just started racing in a 600 brake

horse power Ford Capri. Its the

first racing game where you need

to 'back off' on the level off

accelerator you're applying in the

lower revs – or else you find you

are tail spinning down the track.

Having had a Ford Sierra and a

200SX in the real world – I can

appreciate how this is possible in

an old Capri.

1

Grid II Autoworld –

the destruction

physics on this

game are

stupendously

good and the

feeling of

immersion is just

awesome. Provides

you with a limited

number of

rewinds. I've a side

project to set this

up in the mobile

man cave – it

might have to wait

until the spring

though!

2

The Future of Car and Racing Simulation

37

Flat Out Ultimate Carnage

(Xbox360) – This game has

the most outstanding

destruction engine – there

seemed to be something

lost on the jump by

bugbear studios from the

Xbox360 platform to the

Xbox One. Just goes to

show, better graphics

doesn't necessarily bring

better game play. Just

looking at this screen grab

has got me to thinking

about digging the game

out. Might even make Flat

Out Ultimate carnage my

new Tuesday night treat.

All I need to do is to make

sure the Xbox 360 is hookable

up-able. Perhaps I'll

make the first week of the

month arcade style games,

then on the even weeks

make them more

simulation games. Who'd

have thought it – my new

years resolution is planning

more gameplay.

Where can they go from here? Better graphics does not

necessarily correlate with better gameplay. The various

VR games must have a good degree of immersion via

either the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive or the Playstation VR).

Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft are late to the VR

party regarding consoles, correction – they're not even

at the party! Sony clearly have one-up here. So, my

research has revealed that the following titles worthy of

your consideration if considering a VR driving

experience are:

Assetto Corsa (HTC Vive), Project Cars 2 (PS 4), Drive

Club VR(PS 2), Dirt Rally VR (PS 4) and..... Grid Autosport

is available on Oculus Go! So, in order to play Grid

Autosport in Virtual Reality headgear, as of the 30 Nov

19, you will be looking at roughly an outlay of :-

Oculus Go 64GByte: £149

£399

Oculus Quest 64GByte:

I'll settle for my big telly – at least until the new year

sales!

38

MISSING IN

Have you seen this computer?

It was confirmed today (by Tina - The

Cleaner) that both the computer formally

known as 'Beryl' and the corresponding

article have gone missing!

An incident room has been set up and

persons of interest have been contacted, but

so far there has been no known sighting of

‘Beryl’.

Chief Detective Fang has further stated that

a number of cartridges and a 'diskette drive'

have also gone missing. possibly pertaining

to both 'Beryl' and the accompanying article.

The owner: a Mr Qube, has been extremely

helpful and a reward is being considdered.

Mr Qube has previously stated that both he

and 'Beryl' were very close and our thoughts

are with him and his family at this stressful

time.

If you have any knowledge or details about

the whereabouts, hereabouts, or layabouts

responsible for this theft, please do not

hesitate to contact Detective Fang at

SyntaxBomb Investigations.

ACTION...

39

40

IT’S YOUR

TURN

SANTA

Another year and another

solitaire game to play !

We’re going to let revills

tell you all about it...

41

Another year, another

solitaire game! Building

from our previous solitaire

games we enhanced the

game engine to include 3

solitaire types:

* One Up, One Down

* Pair Match

* Sum of 14

We have gone back to what

made solitaire solitaire!

Instead of objectives per

hand, it is all about

removing cards.

42

We have gone back to what made

solitaire solitaire! Instead of

objectives per hand, it is all about

removing cards.

And taking inspiration from

Shadowhand, we have included a

snowball fight card game in which

Santa will do battle with Krampus

and his army of teddy bears!

Coded in the classic BlitzMax

programming language which has

been rock solid for years, Santa's

Christmas Solitaire 2 is going to

be released on major casual game

portals (Big Fish Games,

GameHouse etc) and Steam!

So if this is your sort of thing? Pop along to steam and get it now!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1202710/Santas_Christmas_Solitaire_2/

43

44

THE

DESPERATELY SEEKING

AMERICAN

The once mighty Commodore:

From humble beginnings to

eventual demise.

There isn't much that can

be added to their story,

but lets try... It was Jack

Tramiel who created

Commodore, bought MOS

technologies and their

6502 CPU and distributed

them at a very low price

thus giving birth to the

Apple and BBC Micro.

After acquiring MOS

Technology Jack gave

designers six months to

build a computer. The

"Personal Electronic

Transactior," or PET was

announced in 1976 and

first shown at the

Consumer Electronics

Show in June of 1977. It

came with either a 4K or

8K memory, built-in green

video monitor, tape deck

and the keyboard was built

like a Commodore

calculator. It was an

instant winner and Tramiel

doubled the price and

introduced the PET into the

United

Kingdom and

Europe.

Within a

short time

45

Commodore

had rounded-up 80% of

the market overseas.

In 1978, MOS Technology

developed the Video Interface

Chip, or VIC which could

display on a color monitor or

color TV. But the VIC chip

didn't sell because the price

of color displays.

Two

years

later, Apple

and Atari had color

computers, and Commodore

had none so Jack Tramiel

suddenly announced that he

wanted to market a color

computer right away, and he

wanted to retail it for $300!

Introduced in January 1981, at

the Winter Consumer

Electronics Show (CES) in Las

Vegas , the VIC-20 was a big

success. The press very

favourably compared it to the

new TI-99/4 and the Atari

400 computers. One very

important thing about the

VIC-20 was that its expansion

gave birth to the most

popular computer ever built:

the Commodore 64.

46

The Commodore 64 had 16 colors in place

of the eight on the VIC-20. It had a 40-

column screen rather than 22. It had a

music synthesiser chip (SID chip) and

easy-to-use graphics called Sprites, and it

could use all the VIC-20 peripherals. Most

of all, it had 64K of RAM at a time when

Apple had a maximum of 48K. It went on

sale to computer store dealers for $595,

and a few months later was reduced to

$400 in other stores across the US.

With Sinclair dominant in the UK and

Commodore over the US the battle lines

were drawn. Playgrounds everywhere were

full of "mines better than yours" and other

companies such as Atari and Texas

Instruments were getting heavy in the

markets on price. The blood was flowing

all over the home computer industry.

Commodore's costs were so low that even

at the depressed prices they

actually made money on

their computers. However,

Texas Instruments was

losing $100 million in a

quarter, and things were not

getting better. Texas

Instruments' president

resigned, and the company

quit the home computer

business after taking

enormous losses. During the

summer of 1983, Commodore

announced the totally unexpected

resignation of Jack Tramiel. The

industry was shocked; there had

been little indication that Jack was

that unhappy with conditions at

Commodore.

After a succession of CEOs and

(revolving door) executives in its

executive suite. The C-64, in

various versions (including the

upgraded C-128), had lasted for

more than ten years. Their

numbers alone make them the

most popular computer ever built.

Commodore had one last success:

The Amiga; a 16-bit machine

developed by the Lorrane Amiga

company!

47

DELUX PAINT

Arguably one of the most important pieces of

graphics software for the Amiga or any machine

of this era. Delux Paint or DPaint was created

by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts, and was what

many call a “pixel editor”. It dealt with the

individual pixels and allowed the user to use set

the screen mode used and the colours. You could

directly “paint” on the screen using the available

tools, change the colour and generally mess

about to your hearts content years before

Photoshop became the ultimate winner.

Virtually all games had DPaint graphics and color

cycling was an amazing discovery that allowed for

some amazing animations for smoke, water, etc

all without an avi or film strip of pictures!

Most famous for the image of King Tut used in

the Amiga demonstrations and also favoured by

Andy Warhol

and for

introducing

Lightwave 3d

graphics to TV

providing all the

space shots and

effects for

"Babylon 5".

BUY THE CARTRIDGE

A cartridge is a piece of electronics

which plugs into the expansion port

on the C64, adding extra memory

and/or special hardware to the

system. This provides a convenient

alternative to comparatively slow and

error-prone floppies and tapes: Plug

it in, turn it on, and the

software/hardware add-on is ready

to use right away.

PLAY THE FILM

With tie-ins galore, you could

always play your favourite film

or tv show in game form...

49

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

The first thing you notice (like all older 8bit computers) is how neat and tidy the board is. CPU, memory

and a few custom chips to handle the graphics. very nice simplicity to the board. Unlike the Spectrum

which went for minimal cost, the C64 has lots of nice connectors including inbuilt joystick ports, sound

output and a cartridge slot. Custom chips were deriggour for Commodore - they liked the MOS CPU they

bought the company!

Greetings

51

from Matty

and Merry

Christmas

Over the time I've been with

Syntaxbomb I've also been

improving my artistic skills

which comes in handy for the

games we create on this site.

My art journey really began in

mid 2016 with pencil. I was

given a Wacom tablet in

Christmas 2016 (thanks

Mum), which has been a

useful tool to learn with.

I've been trying a variety of

techniques including painting

over pencil drawings, tracing

over photos and colouring as

well as simply painting free

hand from a reference with

the tablet.

52

53

In the case of the more complex images,

such as the knight and water woman, I

typically combine a host of references into

an arrangement and then paint over them.

54

Some of my im

as well - such

against the vi

ages relate to mental health

as the knight facing off

sualisation of inner demons.

55

With the skills

acquired I enjoy

creating my own 2d

graphics for the

games I create more

recently. And the goal

is to keep improving

day by day.

If you look at the

progress on my

website from 2016

until 2019 you can see

that with practice,

regular practice, the

quality of pictures

produced grows.

I'm still many miles

from the level of skill

I'd like to reach, but

the improvement is

obvious.

56

Sound

in the

80s

Either love it or hate it. You

just can’t ignore the sound

that made the 80’s.

With pumping basslines, synthetic drum sounds from

Simmons arpeggios from Roland and the mighty

Fairlight breathy samples: the 80’s had excess both in

fashion and sound in abundance. We’re going to take

a (very) random look at the big hitters and the big

artists that help make the 80’s the amazing (or

diabolical) place it was.

Starting off with some gender-bending culture clash;

no pop program would be complete without the

multicolored hexagonal Simmons drums. Classically

electronic their sound can be heard all over Culture

Club, with harsh snares, power bass and the

crasssshhhhh. Simmons Drums are everywhere in the

80’s

Next up is the elusive LinnDrum: the first real drum

sound computer made famous by Prince starting

with Purple Rain and through his entire career.

Just throw on “When Doves Cry”. That’s the

LinnDrum, that is... Now you can hear it

everywhere. That knocking, that cow bell

those dark pitched sounds.

First analogue then digital and now back

to Analogue. This time with the Seminal Roland

Jupiter 8. This flagship synth provided Van Halen with

“Jump”, Duran Duran with that amazing opening

from Rio and more. It’s lush, it’s smooth and

it looks fab on-screen. You want one? You

can’t afford one!

57

And now we move truely into digital with the crystal

perfection that is the Yamaha DX7. It used a new fangled

method called FM to produce pure clear digital goodness. It was

used by everyone, but can be heard throughout “I Wanna Dance with

(Somebody Who Loves Me)” by Whitney Houston, Enya, Tina

Turners’ “What’s Love Got to Do With it”. If it sounds like cut glass -

Bells, piano, screeching violins and cutting bass guitars. You can bet

your life it’s a DX7. “Bring on the Dancing Girls” Nik! Cut one in half

and you’ll find ‘Miami Vice’ written in it! An absolute horror to

program, no knobs, just a lot of buttons and sin waves and

frequency modulation parameters. But boy, those stock sounds are

all over the 80’s and 90’s.

And finally we come to the mighty Fairlight CMI, not just an

instrument, a computer. And not just a single computer, but loads

of them all housed in that great big box with a TV on it! The CMI

stands for Computer Music Instrument. It came in four exotic

versions: I (which brought that greenscreen and lightpen), II (which

brought the infamous Page R sequencer), IIx (that introduced MIDI

to the world), and the mighty III (with a CPU for each voice and more

besides). Created in 1977 and released in 1979, If eveything before

was shades of black the Fairlight was white! It cost more than your

nans’ house and yours put together and brought ‘Sampling’ to

everyones ears. Made famous by Kate Bush (think of the glass

sounds in Babooshka, and Army Dreamers all of “The Hounds Of

Love” album), Sledghammer by Peter Gabrial (his brother even sold

them. Fairlights not hammers!), Everything by

“The Art of Noise”, “Propaganda”, “Frankie

Goes To Hollywood”, “OMD”. The list goes on

and on and on. If you want famous sounds

then just think of a breathy unnatural voice or

THAT orchestral stab. Oh, and the entire

“Terminator 2” soundtrack - that’s the

Fairlight in full swing!

And there we have it. A quick trip down

memory lane. Did I mention 12” singles and

picture discs? ‘ Member them...

59

Who can forget Crash ?

Published in the grand heyday of computer magazines from

1984 to 1991, Crash started life with the Sinclair Spectrum. It

was created by Roger Kean, Oliver Frey and Franco Frey, and it

was immediately popular owing to the quality of writing and

distinctive (and occasionally controversial) artwork created by

Oliver Frey. By 1986 it had become the biggest-selling British

computer magazine with over 100,000 copies sold monthly.

Reviewers would give their direct opinions on whether a

game was good or not, regardless of advertising or any

pressure from software houses. And this gave Crash a

superb reputation and industry influence.

Unfortunately all great things come to an end.

And with mounting pressure from other

magazines and the slow decline in home

computers. Crash eventually closed it’s doors

in 1992.

Every town, cafe and seaside resort had

them, with neon lights, strange smells

and damp sticky carpets. Here, the arcade

was king! IWasAdam peeks into history...

If you are of a certain age you will remember

shoveling coins into their hungry slots. Your

only reward: a fenzied burst of activity as you

strive to get that elusive high score. Maybe it

was family camping holiday that introduced you

to the likes of “Centipede”, “Galaxians” and

“Frogger”? Or was it that two day travelling fair

with their boxed off bootlegs, modified

gameplay and vomit inducing colors mixed with

the smell of candyfloss and axel grease. I’m on

the Waltzer feeling sick and nearly horizontal

and hearing Depeche Mode on the tannoy! And

not forgetting the mini-arcade - where the

local chip shop has “Pong”

and “Scramble”. It’s free to

get in but for every 4 spotty

oiks you must have at least

one bag of chips or a

battered sausage!

And who can forget the immortal high-score table? With the

usual ‘DIV’ and ‘BAM’ sandwitched between ‘666’, ‘TIT’,

‘BUM’, and “FUK”! The hallowed Pinball machines were just a

quick test of skill and snide side-tilt bashing complete with

parka wearing moped gang. The video game actually allowed

you to leave your mark: WNK, CNT, GAY, XXX an all!

“

Just close your eyes

and then remember

“

61

Yes, the arcade

was a right of passage. For me it

started with “Asteroids” and “Space Invaders” at

a dive-cafe frequented by leather clad bikers (of all

varieties), but did a great lunch with buttered bread

and everything. I could only watch as they crowded

round these mystical machines beeping hooting and

thumping them with gusto as Gran wolfed down

beans and slurped tea from clear Pyrex cups and

chipped saucers!

But soon it was ‘The Penny Farthing” arcade and the

mind-bending “Gyrus” accompanied by a nonplussed

Gran stacked for the Backroom Bingo and

Penny Falls! Sunday afternoon was never the same

without a blast on “BattleZone” or “SpaceWar” and

the sound of beeps and crashing of coins.

Then my holiday money was eaten by the like of

“The Pit” and later I would be drawn into the

isometric wonder that was “Marble Madness”

complete with trackball that if handled too rough

would bite back and nip your hand! Oh the happy

days of beach chips, trailer tents and Snake ‘N’

Skidney pie. If you were really lucky you got to see

the Radio 1 Roadshow. Mine’s a Kajagoogoo,

possibly a Strawberry Switchblade and ingnore the

Flock of Seagulls - they will fly away soon...

And later it was the local pub with pool table, beer

garden and sit-down cocktail “Pheonix”. Why were

there so many bras and knickers nailed to the bar?

Everyone had their place and Sue had her 17th

Birthday there, even though she’d been going there

for at least the last 2 years! I got given a black

leather jacket (that was left) and had the best fun

with four people playing “Gauntlet”... “Red Wizard

needs food badly!” and “Trog”

It all feels so... “Since Yesterday”

DARK

&

DINGY

DELICIOUS

IT’S TIME FOR...

63

IS IT BACK

YET?

Following a successful Indiegogo

launch nearly 2 years ago. How far

has the fabled new Atari VCS come?

In short, no one really

knows. but here is what

we think we know at

Rumour Central...

The CPU has been

changed to the new

AMD Ryzen SOC R1000

and promises HD

playback and advanced

shaders, etc. Plus loads

of grunt when you need

it. but what will be done

with the grunt is not

really known.

The OS had been confirmed as

a version of Linux (Debian) and

some quarters are still

mentioning the ill-fated Ouya.

According to their blog, a

brand new front end has been

finalised being written in Unity,

thus providing the much

needed 3d box art display as

shown to initial backers.

We have pictures of the new

board, the plastic housing and

joy controllers, but again no

one has got their grubbies on

anything remotely 'real'

Behind the scenes there are

talks of lawsuits, firings and

walkouts, but who really knows

the truth.

This is Rumour Central signing

off and keeping my fingers

crossed for a new Atari x

66

I LOVE

Well, it was Christmas

morning 1987

I think, I was just a little chub,

all excited when I opened my

eyes, I got up, went down

stairs to see what Santa had

brought me. I walk into the

living room and it was magic,

presents everywhere (I do have four

brothers and one sister, so you can

imagine the scene), everyone was up, me mam

pointed out that I had to wait to open two presents

last… So, in my pile I went and plundered it for all it was

worth. Finally, I got to the last two, and cracked them open… I was

like “WOW”, yep, it was an Amstrad 464 CPC micro, I was stunned, it was

what I wanted, I’d seen them in the shops and in catalogues, but never did I

think I would get one in a million years, even that young I knew they were

expensive… What a morning! :)

I knew that the CPC came with a promotional pack, obviously it was advertised alongside the main

hardware, so naturally once it was all setup, I set myself away loading and playing the titles in there… And

this is what this article is about, me just having a quick look back at the games/apps I played from that

very special morning in 1987! :)

Harrier Attack

Obviously, being a little whipper snapper at the time, seeing a picture of fighter

jets on the cover, it was a knocky bet this was to be loaded up first. And well, I

was a happy little bunny, and not disappointed. Very arcadey in format, take off

from a carrier, shoot and bomb your way across an enemy island, obliterating a

city while your going… Then ACTUALLY LAND THE PLANE at the end… What

more do you want?

Yeah, it was pretty basic graphically, very basic sounds (No music) but back then,

that didn't matter, it was all about the imagination, and it worked well and I had

many hours of fun with Harrier Attack. There were a few things you picked up on

though while playing. First off, you could bomb the crap out of your carrier when

taking off… Always fun. Secondly, it didn't take long to realise that your

just fired rocket would follow you on the vertical if you moved the plane up

or down, so you could wipe out enemy jets pretty easily, unless of course, it

hit flack in the air. Most of the fun in the game was hitting the city though,

so you learnt to keep your bombs till that came into view, then when over

the top, you tore the place a new arse. Magic

All in all, this is one I’ll always fondly remember from that Christmas Day

morning. Now as an adult [lol], I still play it on occasion, but it doesn't quite

hold my attention for very long as it used to back then, but, I cannot blame

the game for that. Its not the best game in the promotional pack, far from

it, but, like I said, it was my first micro computer game I ever played, and

that still means something till this day!

67

D MY

Animal Vegetable Mineral

Not really a game, sorta educational in some respects, let me explain… The idea behind

Animal Vegetable Mineral is for the user to “teach” the computer to guess the right word

after it asks a few questions. Now, that's all well and good, but, like, I never really

understood the point of it even back then, even when I was little, because I was the one

pumping the thing with questions and answers, and, I was hardly surprised when it

would churn out the right answer after it asked the questions I gave it, which I answered

because I know what the answers are because I… Never mind!!!

Anyway, yeah, it was a text based application so not very exciting to look at, you could

save the data you were putting in and reload it later, but, I had no reason to do so,

maybe in a class room this would have been better suited, it got used once, then put

back in its cassette case and we never spoke of that thing again… Until now!

Timeman One

Another educational one from Amsoft, which, I only

loaded up the once for a peek. As you can guess, the

premise behind this one is to teach kids the time, this is

achieved by playing little setting/reading the time games,

when playing, if you get any timing whatsits correct, a

little bloke climbs up the ladder while the big arsed

emoticon pops a smile, get it wrong, and said emoticon

goes all sad on you and you drop down the ladder. Once

you get to the top, it belts out a jaunty little jingle, geezer

does a little jig and you get a flag and rinse repeat. So,

not the best, I can see the point of it (More then Animal

Vegetable Mineral), does what it says on the tin and I

reckon kids would of learnt to tell the time using this.

Replay value if you can tell the time? Absolutely none!

Oh Mummy

A maze game that isn't

very mazey really, but,

actually quite good

back then and another one

that I used to play a lot

when I got my CPC. The

basic premise was that you

walked around the pyramid

floor being chased by

mummy’s. If you walked all

the way around a room on

the floor you would open

up the item contained in

that room. These items

contained stuff like a key, a

tombstone, scroll or even

another baddie mummy.

You could keep track of

where you hadn't been on

the level pretty easily, as

when walking on new

areas, you’d leave foot

prints on the ground, a bit

like an inverted Pacman

setup really. To exit the

level you needed to find a

key and tombstone in the

rooms. The

scroll let you

wipe a

mummy out

by running

into it.

Graphical

wise, again,

basic but it

all works very

nice, the

sound is

pretty good,

nice little effects and we

have music here too, which

is a nice rendition of “The

Streets of Cairo”, which

becomes a little bit of an

ear worm after a while! :D

68

Sultan's Maze

the patience to wait

for every turn for

the scene to be

drawn, I cannot be

chewed to have to

find a jewel, then

head back and

dump it at Hampton

Palace, rinse repeat

because you literally

could only carry one

jewel at a time, and

it just made it a

sheer boreslog!

This one holds a few conundrums for me. For one, the

cover art shows you being chased by a werewolf style

monster, in game, its a ghost, and two, I’m torn with it…

Without going deep into the plot, your in a maze, there’s

jewels you need to pick up, there's a ghost chasing you,

and as you can see, this is all in primitive 3D. Sounds

lovely, but, it really bores the shite out of me when I play

it. I really want to like it because this thing does 3D, and

makes a half decent job creating a 3D world, like, this was

1984, and written in BASIC, running on an interpreter… I

am amazed (No pun intended) on the technical level, its

great, I can really really appreciate what it is, yet, I haven't

I know people liked

this, I know people

played it a lot, I’m

defo not one of

them people mind,

not my type of

game, even though, I can

see the brilliance behind it!

Xanagrams

Another educational game,

about the best of the

educational bunch here. It’s

basically a cross between a

crossword, and, well, an

anagram word finder. You

basically are told the letters

of the words, and then you

have to place each letter in

the correct place for points,

get a guess wrong, and you

lose a few points. Complete

the Xanagram and you get

a nice little jingle for your

efforts. Not much to go on

otherwise, theres no clues

at the start so the first few

tries are sheer luck really

until you hit a few letters.

Cute little spelling game

with settings for young and

old. Nothing really to add

to it really, for a basic

puzzle game, you could

waste 15 minutes in it

easily enough I suppose.

Do I still play it?

Nahhhhhhh

The Galactic Plague

We all love Space Invaders, it defined so much

all them years ago, and as soon as I saw the

tape cover of this, I was like “Ohhhh, its a

Space Invaders game!”. In it went into the tape

deck, loaded up, and I set myself away… Sadly,

its not a Space Invaders clone, but in some

ways, its a little better, for one, the bugger is

hard, you really need to remember the

patterns of the enemies hurtling towards you,

because they come from all angles, honestly, if

you can picture the scene where a pack of

dogs go completely crackers running about the

house, while shooting doggy chocolate drops

at you, and all the while you’ve got to dodge

them, and the chocco drops, and as you

manage to get the numbers down, the remainder ones go

faster and faster… You’ve got level 1 of The Galactic

Plague, lol!

Seriously, your

lives are gone in

a crack, and

your sitting

there like “Bloody hell, what happened there?”, the game

area itself isn't very big, there's no bases to hide behind,

once your playing, your in… And I like that in a game,

some may think its an inferior clone of Space Invaders,

but, it doesn't pretend to be, it is different, and in the

most part, its just a straight up shooter that I like!

The graphics again, are okay, not breathtaking, but, they

do, and the sound is minimal, basic shooty shooty

sounds, explosions and what not… Bit of a shame, but, it

is what it is!

For a freebie, you cannot

complain, I play this still, cannot

remember what my highest level

is… But it’s always a battle…

And for me, that's the point,

and why I loved old games back

in the day, no cotton wool to

be wrapped up in… A game

would really try to beat you!

69

Roland On The Ropes

If your an ex-Amstrad

owner, you know the

Roland character, he was

the Amstrad CPC’s main

mascot, and featured in a

variety of

games.

Roland On

The Ropes

is one of

them and

is a big

fluffy

looking

jaunt of a

maze

adventure. You start off at

the bottom of the level and

you have to make your way

to the top climbing up

ropes, dodging enemies

and collecting stuff, once

you reach the top, your

FREEEEEEE!!!!

Nice little

idea of a

game,

graphics

are nice,

but, the

downfall

here is

they are

flickery,

the

scrolling is

a bit juddery, and because

of this, the controls of

Roland are a bit, well,

blocky if you get me. It

makes dodging enemies a

pain, and in the most part,

you cannot escape some of

them, like, trying to jump

over rats, they are nearly

impossible to dodge. This

makes the game a real

pain, and as such, spoils it,

but, I’m guessing it’s

because the developers

never really had a handle

on the hardware and the

tricks used for smooth

scrolling weren't thought

of, so you can let them off.

The sound is okay, nice

little tune on the menu

screen, but in game,

nothing much then a

bopping noise when

walking, a shooting sound

and

what

not.

I don't

play this

at all, its

just too

stifled to

persevere

with in the

controls department, so

yeah, looks nice, but, a

little bit ahead of its time in

what it was trying to

achieve, 10/10 for trying

though for the developers,

they had a go, and you

cannot knock them for

that!

Rolands BACK!!!!

This time, he’s

in the future,

and landed on a

strange planet in

his spaceship.

To help him

explore the

place, he turns

himself into a

flea! Yep, thats

basically why Roland is the

character he is, and, as you

can guess, he’s got himself

into a bit of bother and

rolled into a cave, which

you have to get out of.

Like Roland On The Ropes,

you start at the bottom of

the level, and have to get

to the exit at the top. You

achieve this by jumping

Roland In The Caves

diagonally to the left and

right, landing on platforms

as you go up, hoping not to

land on a fire pit when you

smack a wall and fall down,

you also have to outwit a

flea eating dragon thing

that chases you throughout

the level.

I actually like this game

me, its one of them I could

just while away a good

hour or so playing it, the

graphics are okay, the big

fat funky choon on the

menu screen is well done,

sound effects only in-game

but they work nice and

bring that springy feel to

the jumping mechanism.

The only draw is that when

you complete the level, the

next level is the same

layout, only slightly more

difficult (More fire pits

really), it would have been

great if they mixed it up a

bit, or made a little editor

for it, but, never mind..

This is one I do enjoy going

back to, it is probably my

favourite game overall

really from the promotional

pack.

There is a little fact I’ll

finish with, this game

wasnt Amstrad only, it was

released on other systems,

its actually called Bugaboo

(The Flea) and then just

plain old La Pulga

[Spanish], it was never

meant to be a Roland game

really, hence why Amsoft

devised a weird plot to

paper over that fact! :D

IT’S SAFE TO GET IN THE WATER

Bridge-It

Right, I’ll cut to the chase,

the upside of the game is

that the graphics look nice

and colourful… The

downside is, Bridge-It is

actually a game where the

whole point of it is to put

it’s cassette in the tape

deck, load it up, realise in

about 40 seconds its a pile

of crap, reset your

Amstrad, take the tape

out and sellotape over the

recording holes on top of

the cassette and save

something decent on it,

like maybe the following

BASIC program

10 PRINT “Hello There”

20 GOTO 10

Was shite… Still shite!!! :P

Easi-Amsword

The only serious

application in the pack,

and as you can guess, its a

word processor. I’ll be

honest, I never used it, I

loaded it up, created a new

document, typed some

text, reset the CPC and

loaded up a game. I can’t

comment on how good this

was, it was just there. In

later years though, like

years and years, I did use a

one called Protext in

conjunction with Maxam (A

Z80 assembler), and that

was really good. And as

another little fact,

LibreWriter, which is the

well known open source

word processor I’m writing

this on, has roots to the

Amstrad CPC as another

Amstrad word processor

called Star-Writer is an

ancestor of it… You learn

something new every day!

;)

71

Fruit Machine

You may think the image is a screenie from NBA

2K20, but, alas, you’ll be wrong. This is Fruit

Machine, and it was actually a bit of a favourite in

my house, especially for me mam, lol, I’d get in

from school and noticed she’s had the tape in the

Amstrad, bless her, she likes a little gamble and all

that, bingo and what not. And yeah, you won no

actual money obviously, but, as a fruit machine

game, it was good, really good. You had the lot in there,

holds, nudges, gambles and winspins.

The visuals were decent enough for a bandit game, but

what drove it was the sound

effects… From the clunk clunk clunk

of the reels, the exciting loop of the

gamble feature, with rising pitch

when you got further and further up

the gambling ladder, to the all out

mental mode your CPC went into

when you dropped the jackpot…

The sound setup was really clever if

you ask me. I’ve never known the

jackpot drop in straight off a spin,

usually that could only be won by

either nudges or gambles. When it

came to nudges,

you could cheat

a little as the

fruit order on

each reel was

inside the tape cover, sneaky! It was

all packaged together nice and a good

bit of fun for literally everyone, oh,

and no micro transactions needed to

play it either! :P

Do I still play this… Of course I do.

There’s something quite therapeutic

getting the jackpot and watching your

CPC go into an all out seizure! ;)

And there we go… The whole round-up, what a ride it was, and it was nice revisiting these

games/apps, especially the ones I haven't touched for, well, 32 years! Even them brought a nice

feeling of nostalgia now looking back at them, which is nice. All in all this was a great collection of

free software for users to start off with on the CPC, there can be no complaints at all really, apart

from Bridge-It, lol, can you tell I truly hate that game or what! :D

So with that, I thank you for reading my little piece here, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did

writing it… Tara for now! :) Dabz

72

IT survived the year

2000 bug. And a

young DERRON

decided to “just

remake” a certain

game.

As a teenager I played a lot of sessions of Mad TV on our aging

personal computer. Loosing in Civilization 1 (and 2) against my

way older brother or father I had to choose this to have at least a

chance. And I was a movie maniac, so the decision fell to this

game classic about being the program director of a broadcasting

channel. Created in Germany it was a mix of (German) humour

and economical simulation. That the game was not famous or

too well-known outside of German- speaking countries, was

nothing I was concerned of at that time. Honestly, this is a pity

as the game is pretty amazing and not as hectic as the classic

Running a website about reviewing freeware games (at

the end I played >1,000 games) allowed me to be in

contact with interested users via our forums. People

became excited about the idea of remaking Mad TV.

Ideas were posted and wishes written daily. I checked

out on how to access DirectX via Delphi and found the

“omega” components which allowed drawing stuff on

a Window. Yes! Game almost finished!

So first things first was of

course to create some graphics.

I was still a heavy user of „Paint

Shop Pro 5“ that time as it was a

full version provided on a cover disc

of a German magazine. I pixel

painted the building in which the

game takes place, did some early

revisions of the player figures and

other elements. First background

music (a cover of the Mad TV game)

was done by some user and so in

April 2002 I published the “Tech

demo 7” to the forum users. There

was almost no interaction possible.

You were able to enter the elevator

and the elevator moved to the target

floor you just had chosen before.

THE GRAPHICS

FROM C TO BLITZMAX

As I already encountered some issues

in how to progress with my code I

happily agreed to learn C and become

more the coordinator and graphic artist

of the game. Months flew by and as a

lot C coders sooner or later my fellow

team comrade encountered memory

leaks and decided to jump on a

language he found: BlitzBasic – and

then, when BlitzMax approached, he

switched to it.

In 2004 we

attended the

“DUSmania“ (an

event for “indie

coders” albeit it

was not named

that way this time).

People liked what

they saw but such

motivational

events did not help

to keep up interest

of our coder. When personal life for him

changed (finishing his studies) it was

time to move on – and for me, to dive

into BlitzMax programming.

Adding little features which just made

stuff work was achieved pretty fast. I

asked a lot of questions in the BlitzMax

forums (under the user name of my

former coder colleague from across the

other side of Germany). Made a lot of

mistakes, tried out stuff and developed

auxiliary tools like a web based

editor for our game data.

73

Just around this time another user of our

forums approached to me and presented

a little demo he wrote in C.

Development progressed and many

game functions got added. Enough to

reach more than 1000 users for our

releases. Let me clarify: the game was

far from complete. It just offered some

basic game-play but it provided what the

original Mad TV was not able to provide

so easily (except with some hacks):

current movies, series, other

advertisements and custom news to

broadcast. People were able to open

some TXT files

and edit to their

likes.

That time I read a

lot about legal

issues (I was

“cease and

desisted” for a

Dutch freeware

game on my

freeware website

just before). An

employer of a unnamed company came

to me warning that “Gigant” is

something the company JoWood

registered now and no game will be

allowed to use “Gigant” in the title now.

They had the games “Industriegigant”

and others – so I was afraid of having to

pay a lot more money once my game

became more popular. New names

were discussed and at the end the

community and I decided to name it

TVTower, it even added a bit more

international flair.

74

BUGS AND BEASTIES

But then more and more little annoyances, limitations and bugs were

reported. Functionality needed to get rewritten, breaking other

functions and so forth. If you are a self-taught coder, you were surely

putting your feet into the shiny glaring trap right ahead of you.

Fixing bugs and rewriting functions is what most of us would describe

as boring and so motivation declined more and more. Progress became slower and formerly

active people focused on other things.

“

Having hard-coded settings in your application hides a lot of trouble you else will have to face.

I left the secure haven of hard-coded stuff I was required to code some proper GUI elements.

People like to rename their player chars, to select from drop down lists and all the little basic

functionality people of today just expect. Using BlitzMax meant easy access to graphics, sound

and other important stuff. But it did not provide access to a game GUI fitting to what I planned.

While writing the GUI stuff and other game functions I was also coding helper

functions to allow manipulating graphics in software. There was no „Render to

texture“ functionality abstracting the bindings to DirectX and OpenGL, so I needed

to do certain stuff on raw pixel data. At the end I was able to replace all “gray”

parts of an image portion with a colorized version. So player figures were drawn in

gray across all parts requiring colorization and then I was able to tint it properly.

Elements which were to display in gray were not possible without a little hack: a

slight tint (adding 4 to the blue channel). Having a GUI consisting of many single

image textures made the performance drop on the older computers some

people used for TVTower. So I‘ve read about sprite atlases. BlitzMax did not

offer support for sprite atlases per-se but allowed rendering parts of an image.

I utilized this in a custom sprite class which also handled animation setups and

special drawing variants. Having written all the helper functions increased

performance quite a bit and the game even drew tinted assets back to the

sprite atlases.

Next to the graphical parts the game required some proper data storage for the

game data , and so we switched from regular TXT files to XML.

The game became more and more playable. A lot of the game core mechanics

were working. It felt really playable. A big important step then was that another

user approached to me ...

In 2007 another German fellow applied for coding the AI in Lua. I gladly

accepted especially as BlitzMax offered Lua support already. Just needed to

learn how to make the AI be able to access game information. Months passed

and the AI started to move around in the building and to do simple

program schedule planning. Things got more and more complex and a

lot of requests were created. Instead of extending the game play

functions I was again just coding internal stuff nobody except the AI

would ever see. People loose interest if stuff does not change for

months. And I cannot expect the players to keep waiting for the game

for years.

75

He had no

clue about

programming

So some years passed by us doing a lot of stuff

but still no finish line in sight. The AI coder

meanwhile became more and more experienced

with BlitzMax and coded amongst other things

the first sound manager revision and also a

pretty complex audience rating calculation

“

taking a lot of stuff like audience flow into

consideration. Thanks for this Manuel!. Together

we decided to release TVTower as Open

Source in 2014. He was not really liking the idea to give it away

in a too permissive license, so we restricted it in a way that any

commercial usage requires our permission (aka “ask first”).

Yet with the time he found out that his interests focus to different

stuff – and left the project for good. Another loss and another task

for me to take over. I was coding the engine functions, the game

functionality, was doing the graphics and now were also required

to dive into AI programming. I was glad to have externalized the

game data years before. People were able to adjust data.

Another colleague entered our forum some time before, and he

took over the position of to balance stuff or to at least structure

this process a bit. He had no clue about programming but wrote the first (lengthy) manual for the

game and wrote some game data. Yet he was one of the players who had certain requirements.

The Linux version required Pulse Audio – which he was not able to get installed on his Knoppix

distribution. So workarounds needed to get coded. Supporting other platforms became something I

needed to tackle. Compiling on a Hackintosh for Mac support, testing stuff in Virtual Machines

running different Windows versions,

running them on real hardware. Even different Linux distributions had different issues – most of the

times some “glibc” issues (on Manjaro for example). This is all stuff which made me often think

about ditching BlitzMax and moving on to a more current kit like Unity, Godot ...

But then I try them out and come back to BlitzMax. I tried writing games in different languages and

frameworks. Most of the time I am having this thought: “TVTower is the wrong game mechanic for

this kind of kits”. Writing an arcade game with Godot? Doable. Writing a plat-former with Unity?

Doable without holding breathe. But as soon as you have to leave the paved ways you will have to

make your hands dirty. Means you could keep using your grunt work kit – like BlitzMax.

76

So many years passed starting with the

decline of the original BlitzMax

development (and even two of his official

successors). I came into contact with our

SyntaxBomb.com fellow Brucey. We wrote

more than 4,000 mails since then (most

of them are of course stupid questions by

me ;D). He kept BlitzMax alive as BlitzMax

NG and I used my game to check for bugs

or missing backward xompatibilities. Some

code I used was not compatible with NG’s

capabilities to target 64 bit platforms so

what did Brucey do? He made them work.

Glad to have him next to me. He is a coding

beast which spotted so many issues in my

code. Helped me in so many cases I wonder

every day how he achieves what he does. A

pure one man show this Scotsman. So over

the years NG matured more and more which

allowed me to get rid of the old and no

longer supported BlitzMax. I was used to

compiling public releases with the old

version just to ensure it does not contain

bugs I was not aware of.

Since summer, I rewrote some internals of

my game. Why was this needed? My AI just

got more to do. Playing against 3 AI players

who do complex planning of their program

schedule, estimating audience ratings and

way more stuff, just lead to micro lags on

slower computers. I needed to split up

their tasks into micro tasks, so they could

optimize their schedule in multiple ticks

instead of one. Some users also

complained about mouse clicks getting

missed here and there. It is not that my code

was flawed – but the way BlitzMax

(polledInput.mod) works. If a computer had

micro lags, it received multiple mouse events

at right after each other: down, up, down, up.

With the in betweens being missed. If you ever

required proper single and double click

detection in BlitzMax and encountered micro

lags you would have suffered of it.

Having the plan to make my AI running

in threads was a nice chance for the

BlitzMax NG project to fix any issue

connected to it – and there were some.

Running the AI in threads means you do

no longer hand out every game event

directly to the AI. Events land on a

queue which the AI processes. Think

of command queues lockstep

multiplayer loops. This exposed some

bugs in the game code not being

prepared of being processed that

way. Decoupling action and reaction

is interesting but also error prone.

Next to thee issues another one

became apparent: the legacy

BlitzMax had a memory leak which

only happened when using

threaded AI. Users reported 2

Gigabytes of RAM being used after a while

– NG at the same time was happy to

occupy just 300 MB. I then decided to

finally leave legacy BlitzMax behind. There

was only one problem left: NG and my

used “maxmod2.mod” had trouble

creating 32 bit binaries. As some users

requested 32 bit Windows binaries, we

needed to tackle that too. So Brucey

finished a previously started module for

the SoLoud library. I wrapped my sound

manager around it – and this exposed

some bugs in the library itself. So

(mostly) Brucey and I tackled that too.

Now other BlitzMax NG users can easily

use streamed audio on the supported

platforms without having to change

more than two lines of code in their whole

project – and we could even extend to use

the 3D capabilities of SoLoud for our

purposes. The new audio module does

not require Pulse Audio to be installed on

Linux (but could use it via SDL). Nice

additional effect.

77

So what’s coming up next? The core game mechanics are in and for

now I add a lot of sugar on top to certain game aspects – simulators

for the song writers / musicians of a cast, they could go on tour,

have album chart placements and so on – stuff enabling content

creation without requiring the help of the community. And also

elements which allow affecting other parts of the game slightly.

Having a now famous star in a movie will increase chances to make

people watch our channel instead of the others. Little cog wheels

interlock more and more and it is nice to see the “magic” resulting

out of all these experiments. Nonetheless, I have to confess that

most players will never be aware of such extras. There is a weather

forecast to broadcast? Yes and what it broadcasts really happens (so

outside of the building it actually rains, snows and/or storms) – with

fewer people watching TV on warm sunny days or stormy days with

outages.

Chances to complete? With Brucey and NG being the backbone of

my 15-years-and-growing WIP game I am sure we can finish it

sooner or later. I just hope we all are still able to control a mouse

with our shaky hands then ;)

Want to see the game in action? Just open up youtube and check

“Let’s play TVTower” - have to confess almost all of them are

German even if there is a (incomplete)

English translation of interface

and game data.

OH PALETTES!

A

B

C

D

Ello! I'm Berk, overworked

minion of ole grumpypants

Qube. I've taken a

quick five minutes off

from popping his various

pustules to present some

well known color palettes,

but they are all mixed up!

Can you help Drutt

and Boney sort

em out?

E

Er... Yes Sire...

Coming. I better be

off quick

before he

explodes

one of his

enormous

nuts! OOER!

A. ZX Spectrum, B. MSX, C. Commodore 64, D. Apple 2, E. Amstrad CPC

NOMS!

NOMNOMS!

81

82

CREATE A

TREE

LOW POLY

Low Poly is the minimal amount of triangles and

vertexes that can be used to make a 3d object.

We are not going to say “use 3ds Max or Blender”,

just use whatever 3d application you are happy with.

We are going to be using basic 3d primitives,

extruding, moves and scaling.

1

Start with a cube

2

Extrue the top face

4

Give it some color

3

Extrude and scale

5

Move them vertexes

83

6

Select

7

And Extrude

8

Keep going

9

STOP!

OK. We should have a some

sort of tree shaped thing?

LOW POLY LEAFS

1

Start with a 5 sided shape

5

Duplicate and mix with your tree

85

2

Select the middle, scale it

You now have the basic understanding of low poly 3d work

3

And rotate it

4

Color it. Pink is good?

86

PITCHPERFE

When computers

took over music

The 1980s have been called many things

by many people. “The Decade That Style

Forgot” is a favourite, although in my very

humble opinion, as someone who lived

through the decade as a teenager and

beyond, I thought we were VERY stylish.

But that’s another story. Let me Rob

Puricelli (a.k.a. Failed Muso) tell you about

the machine that changed everything: The

Fairlight CMI!

CT

87

The 80’s; one thing that CAN be said of that decade

is that it was one of great innovation and

technological revolution. It was the decade where

computers became household objects and the

future really felt like it was up for grabs. And it was

the development of one computer in particular, in

Australia, that would change the way music is made

to this very day. Born out of the desire to create

acoustic sounds using electronics, the Fairlight

Computer Music Instrument, or CMI for short, would

be ground zero for almost every facet of modern

music technology that we use today. But how did it

achieve such status?

The CMI’s story began in the

basement of the house

belonging to one of its coinventor’s,

Kim Ryrie. Ryrie had

enlisted the help of his school

friend and a dangerously

curious guy called Peter Vogel.

Their plan was to create an

instrument that could authentically reproduce

acoustic sounds using electronics. This was the goal

of most synth manufacturers of the day. Look at any

analogue synthesiser during the 1970s, and most

would have settings or patch sheets named after

trumpets, violins or oboes. But try as they might,

using additive synthesis, they kept failing, unable to

create and process harmonic tones well enough to

deliver what they wanted to hear.

“

Access to the

new Motorola

6800 CPU’s

“

Coincidentally, in Australia’s

capital city, Tony Furse was

trying, and failing, to do the

same. But Tony worked for

RCA and had access to the

then new Motorola 6800

CPU. He decided this was the

way forward and developed

his QASAR Multimode 8 (aka

the M8). A veritable birds

nest of wire wrapping and no

PCBs, it began to show signs

of promise and utilised a

very modern CRT monitor

and light pen to draw

harmonic waveforms and

used Fast Fourier Transform

to try and get those elusive

sounds. But it wasn’t

happening. Vogel & Ryrie got wind of Furse’s work,

drove down to Canberra from their Sydney base, liked

what they saw and licensed the tech to see if they

could take it further. Soon, the M8 became the

QASAR CMI, the wire wrapping replaced by custom

built PCB’s, set out in a modular fashion, each with a

specific task. But still, they failed to make anything

sound authentic enough. Until one day, exasperated

by their persistent failure, Vogel wondered if he could

convert analogue sound into digital data, store it in

RAM and then play it back via a keyboard. Building

his own ADC/DAC’s, his initial experiments yielded

not only success, but delivered a truly authentic

recreation of the sound fed in. Little did he know that

he had just discovered digital

sampling and that he was about

to change the world.

Feeling like a cheat, he showed

his discovery to his partner and

they decided to run with it.

Development continued apace

until November of 1979 when the first CMI, the Series

I, was unveiled to the world at various shows such as

AES and NAMM. As luck would have it, or maybe not,

Elvis died just two years previously and a member of

his band and fellow Aussie, by the name of Bruce

Jackson, returned home looking for work. His mother,

Ryrie’s neighbour told him to check out the two guys

next door as they were doing something “musical”.

What he saw blew his mind and he immediately set

about getting Vogel and a functioning prototype

across the Pacific to LA. What happened next was a

serendipitous and hugely fortuitous chain of events

that saw the fledgling business take its first orders

from the likes of Stevie Wonder and word soon

spread to the UK, where Peter Gabriel fell for this new

musical tool, so much so that he set up a distribution

company with his cousin, Stephen Paine.

The rest, as they say, is history. The Fairlight CMI

became a household name, loved and despised in

equal measure for its revolutionary sound and

musical compositional capabilities as well as the fear

of making working musicians completely redundant.

But how did it work and what was inside that beige

mainframe that turned music production on its head?

Let’s take a look at the Series IIx, the most popular

and influential model, given its use of MIDI and

graphical on-screen sequencing via Page R.

88

Lets take a peek

inside a CMI...

The mainframe looked like many computers

did back then. A plethora of PCBs, PSU’s and

various inputs and outputs, with two 8”

floppy disk drives to the left, one to supply

the OS and applications, and the other for

loading and saving data, such as samples.

The drop down panel at the front contained

a number of CPU halt and reset switches

and was opened by two catches at the top.

This exposed the PSU on the left, with its

huge capacitors and to the right of those,

the individual function cards.

89

Those cards from left to right:

1x CMI-02 - Master Card

1x CMI-28 - General Interface Card (Clock/MIDI)

1-8x CMI-01 - Channel Card (Each with 16k Sample RAM)

1x CMI-07 - Analog Interface Card (Optional CV Functionality)

1x Q148 - Light pen Interface Card

1x Q256 - System RAM (256k)

1x Q133 - CPU Control Card

1x Q209 - Dual Motorola 6809 CPU Card

1x Q219 - Light pen/Graphics Card

1x QFC9 - Floppy Disk Controller

1x Q077 - Hard Disk Controller (Optional HDD Feature)

1x Q137 - Front Panel Control Card

Tech Tip

The Fairlight did something

very strange and very

interesting with it’s CPU’s:

2x 6809. For every clock

cycle, one CPU was

triggered on the up clock

(as is usual), but the

Fairlight also triggered the

second CPU on the down

clock. Thus having twice the

power with a single clock!

Music Keyboard

Aside from its keyboard mechanism (You could have

weighted or custom versions of the keys depending

on your tastes), it contained a CMI-10 Keyboard

controller card (with another CPU!) which received

note on/off and velocity data from a set of three

CMI-11 switch modules that held the individual key

contacts.

And see that little keypad at the top? It had LED

display that allowed you to control the CMI, change

voices and see other information as you played!

Kate Bush takes a tinkle on hers!

90

1978 Lightpen UI

Famed for the green screen,

but many failed to notice

the pen on the side.

The lightpen was (like

everything else) custom

designed and created

for the Fairlight and

allowed the user to

control things by

touching the screen.

This even allowed you

to directly 'draw'

waveforms and

harmonic profiles.

Series III revisions

allowed you to connect

a mouse (if desired) and

the lightpen was

removed to an

integrated keyboard/tablet design in

1983!

Is your screen damaged? Replacement

screens have a special coating and

were manufactured by Philips in the

USA for the US special air-force in the

late 90s. So keeping a Fairlight alive

can be an expensive business!

Speaking of the keyboard, the Fairlight was really

controlled through this and not the alternate input

do-hickies. Looking at the UI the top line has a

Command: and pressing escape would bring up a

cursor ready to accept input from you. Hence owning

a Fairlight meant either learning a lot of interesting

and arcane commands (PP or L,2 or LP,1,127 anyone?)

or having an engineer who know all of this by heart.

You could always use the manual, the Fairlight came

with several of those, each multi-hundred page

behemoths covering everything in incredible detail.

And did I mention there was a CPU lurking in there

too? Well there is...

91

PAGE R and that UI

Introducing sampling was never enough. Fairlight

also introduced the world to sequencing with PAGE R

With sampling still in the

recording studio and MIDI

a distant thought, PAGE R

(Rhythm Composer) was

released as an add on.

Designed for making drum

beats, musicians soon

found it could do a lot

more and the sequencer

was born! Patterns were

built up from the available

8 voices and then joined

together to make songs. A

complex process to begin

with, but the results speak

for themselves. Petshop

Boys anyone?

Not forgetting PAGE D which allowed you to actually

SEE your sound IN 3D! The waveform would slowly

and hypnotically be drawn up the screen revealing

itself.

And you weren't just stuck with sample. Oh No! The

Fairlight was also a fully fledged additive

synthesiser allowing you to draw various harmonics

and let the CPU calculate the results. It didn't matter

that is was complex and not hugely rewarding, but

with lots of time and a bit of luck, some amazing

results could be achieved. Like a draw sin wave to a

square wave to a wiggly thing (RIGHT)

92

And round the back

Here is where the magic happens: The connections.

Each sound card connects to a custom Digital

to Analog converter. and you connect those

to your mixing desk and some much needed

talent and your hit record will dominate the

charts...

Pictured here is the later Series III back plane

cards featuring multiple MIDI input and

outputs, SMPTE clock inputs (great for film

production), XLR microphone inputs (for

catching that much needed dog bark) and

finally the voice outputs which in this case 2

per card.

And below is an 8 voice module showing

everything it’s got for the world to see. And

you all thought opening that PET or Spectrum

looked complicated!

93

An orchestra of sounds

The Fairlight came with 33x 8” disks. A

library of unique and unusual sounds.

Each 8” disk was labled: Bells, Brass, Choral, Organs, Drums, Effects. Each

disk holding a maximum of 64 sounds. Each sound being 8bit with a length

of 16k or 16384bytes. Sound too short, then you have to loop it, but make

sure you get rid of that CLICK!

Two sounds stand out in the library: SARARR.VC which is a breathy layered

human voice that can be heard on Tears For Fears mega hit:’Shout’ and the

80’s defining ORCH2.VC (which was taken from Stravinsky's Firebird Suite)

and was used by EVERYONE! It was first heard in Afrika Bambaataa's ‘Planet

Rock’ and soon after in Kate Bush's ‘The Dreaming’. Other examples include

En Vogue's ‘Hold On’ and Duran Duran's ‘A View to a Kill’ not forgetting Yes's

‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ And if anyone says “it was ORCH5.VC or

SARAR.VC”, the library names kept changing through various revisions.

Jean Michel Jarre - preperation for Lyon concert 1986

Tech Tip

The Fairlight had an

extensive and very well

known library of sounds.

Each new customer would

also feed back their

creations to Fairlight, and

the library expanded. There

was even competition

between producers to see

whose sounds would be

included in the next update!

All of these components, assembled by hand in Fairlight’s facility in Rushcutter’s Bay, came together to

form the Computer Music Instrument and, quite literally, changed the way we make music forever. Both

technologically and culturally important, the legacy of the CMI lives on to this day. Thankfully, its internal

design does not. If I had a penny for every time someone tells me that their mobile phone has “a million

times more processing power”, I’d be a very rich guy. But what your mobile device lacks is character. It

lacks brazen ingenuity, unshackled by the bean counters and style gurus. It doesn’t smell of warm

electronics, nor does it deliver a

deep sense of satisfaction every

time it powers up and boots

Rob and a (now very working) Series III

without failing. Most importantly, it

is too clean. Too pristine. There’s

no sonic colour or quaint glitches.

It’s too perfect and that’s what is

missing in so much today. And

that’s why I slave over broken

CMI’s, every spare minute I have.

If you want to know more, or

want your Fairlight restored, or

want to buy one (deep pockets

are still required). Pop along to

www.failedmuso.com and let’s

chat.

94

MOIST

Join IWasAdam on a (very silly and definitely) hazy trip

down memory lane. Caused mainly by too much Eggnog!

It was nineteen dickety seven and the

Kaiser had just crossed his legs and

snuffed out the candle!

6 o-clock... 7 o-clock... 8 would

usually come next, but we were so

poor mother had already prised the

numbers of the cuckoo clock looking

for eggs! Father came in from the

cold, the snow whipping round him

like a large lass nibbling a baked ham,

water poured from his coat and we all

grabbed our glasses so that some

xmas cheer could be

sought.

For what had seemed

like years (but was infact

just a few days)

we had all been

badgering father for

the latest gadget: the

fabled Atari VCS. I

had been stoating

mother as I wasn't big

enough to be a

badger and my sister

had been wolverining

the locals - but that

was the year she finally got arrested

and we sort of never saw her again.

Happy days indeed! But I am

digressing (much better that your

usual disgusting - Qube), it was Xmas

and all we wanted was the Atari VCS

(and some new veneered teeth for

mother - her 40 a day Woodbine habit

would have to stop).

Like all good Victorian children we

were mercilessly beaten, sent to the

workhouse and made to varnish the

road with the scrapings from our

fingernails! We had seen the adverts,

well peeked through the cracked glass

door of Curries (this was

not a famous electrical

supplier, more an

immigrant clearing house

for Balti-soacked takeaway

drivers) and watched

the 12inch black and white

that perched on top of old

copies of Peoples Friend.

We were not sure what a

VCS was, but we knew we

must have it, desired to

have it, ached for it (Stop it

at once - you'll be carried

away again - Qube).

Everyone worked hard that December.

Father did double shifts at the local

supermarket sexing toads on the fish

counter. Mother took a second job as

an anvil at the local smithies. Even

Little Timmy even took an afternoon

job as a Monkeys Knee Wrencher! And

soon there was just enough money to

pay the leccy! Father said we couldn't

afford it, but promised to talk to (his

friend) 'Stan: the Man'. Stan could get

you anything... Anything for a price, a

price that was certainly NOT right. Our

first TV was a flat screen, it had fell off

the back of a lorry going to

Nuttingham and was subsequently run

over by heavy-duty road roller - what

are the chances of that I wondered

now we're living in the modern world?

We were the only ones in the whole

WANTED

95

“

Let me

kiss those

yellow lips

“

street to have a TV (come to think about it we were the

only ones in the street - it having been condemned

during the 60's when such things were rife in our neck of

the woods). Well I think that a family in dank Street had a

TV, nut they als ohad a stringvestite with a very

interesting tale to tell. But I am straying from our Atari

VCS tale of Xmas...

It was late and we were all meant to be asleep when I

heard the jingle of metal on the tin roof, the clatter of

hooves and the unmistaken thud from something warm

and heavy falling into the lounge. Was it Mother with

Dear Old Aunt Annie and her collection of fur? NO... He

had arrived! Quickly and quietly I put on my flame-proof

nighty - the result of having an older sister with a

terrible habit and a Bette Davis complex "Oh Dahling",

she would croon, "could you sit in the other room? Body

odour offends me". And we would all laugh till we were

sick (Get On With IT - Qube). Were was I, creeping

towards the open door and looking for Satan (sorry I'm a

bit dyslexic). Standing in the middle of the room was

father: Covered head to toe in strawberry jam and

whipped cream - Sorry wrong story!

In the middle of the room was a large packet and it (in

turn) was attached to Stan, who in one hand was placing

a large TV sized box to one side and in another hand he

was placing another oblong box. The oblong box was

smaller (much smaller that the coffin we got for mother

last year). I couldn't quite see as it was still dark (being

night-time and all), but it looked like the same size box I

had witnessed being loaded into an electrical bay of a

local toy store - the one that sold the fabled Atari VCS!

That next day as Xmas arrived (and overfilled our

stocking with assorted... something?) we found a new

14inch color telly and an Atari VCS system.

Mother was so shocked she stuffed the cat

and fed the turkey kibble, but would it work?

None of us was very good with chemistry, but

I had the faintest feeling that trying to raise a

dead turkey on kibble was not going to work

96

out well - much better to eat it, then we can

have the cat for afters... Us kids (in the know)

got busy with the soldering iron and various

colored wires in the hope that one of us

might have a Scooby or even a Doo and make

the dratted thing work. UHF to MFI, Paddle A

into socket B, Stick P into A and finally Blue to

live and Major Tom to Earth! Luckily it did

work and the funeral for Little Timmy was

arranged for the following week...

The phosphors glowed and we held in our

hands 4 black plastic wedges: Breakout,

Combat, Pac-Man and Spaced Invaders

(Qube, should that be Space Invaders? Not in

our house it wasn't - if you get my drift?). So

breakout it was. We all clustered round the

set as Fathers balls pinged and ponged from

each side of the room like an oversize Gnip-

Gnop... The party had begun! "Me next, Me

next." I cried as each of us jostled for the

paddles and the chance to hit fathers balls.

Up and down they went, bricks falling, tin

roof crashing. and all this before we had

turned the VCS on!

Mother was next, she had a pill fixation and

was quickly gobbling round the maze, which

made a change from dogging in the carpark.

Ping PING went the pills and the ghosts

chased her round and we all laughed as

father held cherry tomatoes to his eyes and

said "I'm the Pac-Man, let me kiss those

yellow lips my love? wacca-wacca-wacca" and

did his best to imitate the sound of a dying

pac-man. Who cared if he bore no more of a

resemblance to Pac-Man than the 8bit

97

monstrosity on the screen did - it was pure

pleasure in a small plastic box. And on prescription

from any crooked family doctor but not a social

worker and certainly not from Mal at the clinic. You

know Dr Mal? Mal-Practice his name is...

Next up was combat with those little tanks and

planes and one on one combat. This time everyone

kept their clothes intact whilst they hid behind the

hedges waiting for the tanks to come around the

corner. No one knew what was going on, but it

brought us all together into one single family

group. We played as one, me against mother (and

not for the first time), father against Little Timmy

who always lost due to the lack life the previous

electric shock had dealt him. Even a dog got

involved when it ate a paddle. We never worked out

where the dog came from, it just wandered in

through the hole in the wall (father called it a

picture window, but we all knew different), had a

paddle and wandered out again!

“ the paddles

It ate one of

“

And finally it was Spaced Invaders. We were so high

on life by this time that we thought nothing could

top Combat, but those little aliens with their funny

little voices was the tops. Beep, beep, bop, bop,

blubble went father who was so full of the Xmas

spirit we couldn’t light the candles! And Beep, ping

beep went those little alien voices - but we knew

what they meant! Who could imagine what they

were thinking in their little ships, cruising around

the night sky waiting for us to shoot them from

below. It was all we could do to stop breaking the

stick thing. Mother would shout and jump on the

sofa, father would throw things to put us off - well

that was his excuse anyway. And for a few days the

horrors of the workhouse and the thought of an

impending conservative government casting further

cuts and saying the opposite was so far away.

Standing in my gingham dress (a-line pleat with no

bust darts) and swinging my basket I just knew we

weren’t in Kansas anymore Toto. We were in Atari!

Join Xerra on a

trip with VIC into

Adventure...

Chapter One

I sat in the armchair in my grandfather’s house

staring nervously at the television set. The blinking

cursor of the Vic 20 flashed accusingly at me. I was

about to be found out.

This was the summer of 1981. The year I had finally

left junior school, to my great delight, and was

looking forward to starting secondary school after

the six week holidays that we had back then. I was

twelve years old and for me the home computer

revolution was just beginning. We had recently had

the royal wedding of Charles and Diana, there

seemed to always be snow every year in December

and this was the first time I’d ever been allowed to

go all the way to Wrexham in Wales to stay with my

grandparents from my mother’s side. Excited wasn’t

the word because I knew Grandad had recently

bought the Vic 20 and I was just itching to get my

hands on it.

“Okay, Tony. You’ve told me you love playing with

computers so now here’s your chance. Show me

what you can do with one.” Grandad was not really

one to mince words.

I glanced at Grandad hoping he was going to have a

giggle then pull out some program tapes but he just

glared sternly at me. “You said you had used

computers and knew how to program them?”

I gulped. “I’ve seen some at school. And I’ve looked

at the ones in Harrow. I do know about computers.”

But, as my grandfather had just discovered, I only

knew all this from the games I’d seen and some

adverts I’d seen showing them off. I’d been caught

out and all I could think was that I’d let him down.

We had only two sessions on the computer in the

whole ten days I spent in Wales. In retrospect I

don’t think he lost interest in us spending time

doing this but more of a case that I was finding

myself at that age and spent a lot of time going off

on other pursuits as teenagers are prone to do. He

was very ill by that time so, on both occasions, it

was Nan who actually dragged us away from the

machine when we’d been messing with it for too

long. I learned a little bit more about the Vic by the

time I came back, as well as finally teaching myself

to swim and wandering all over Wrexham exploring.

When I came back home and got ready to start

secondary school, there were two things definitively

on my mind. I wanted a Vic 20 and I was absolutely

determined that I was going to prove to Grandad

that I could do something with it. I was lucky

enough to get the opportunity in 1987 a short while

before he passed away but I will never forget the

moment I let him down until my dying day.

99

10 Print "<clr screen>"

20 T = 8186

30 For X = 7680 to 8185

40 poke x, peek(T)

50 T = T + 1

60 Next X Chapter Two

70 Get A$

80 If A$ = "" then Goto 70

90 Goto 30

It was around two years before Grandad passed

down the Vic to my mother when he eventually

upgraded to a Commodore 64. In that time I grew up

a bit. It was around Xmas of 1982 when I started

spending a lot of time after school in the computer

department of the local Debenhams in Harrow. I

hadn’t had much more experience of computers up

to that time because I didn’t own one and the only

place to really use one for any length of time was

after school with the BBC in one of the classrooms –

and everyone else wanted to do that. My interest had

not waned, though, so I had taken to tinkering with

the machines in Debenhams whenever I wasn’t being

kicked off them by the sales staff there because they

all knew that a spotty kid in a school uniform isn’t

likely to be buying one.

The computers in Debenhams

weren’t just interesting to me,

however. All the kids wanted to

tinker with them. Naturally, it was

mostly for the games, but we were

all teenagers looking for the next

big thing. We considered it a result

if we could get on one of them and

tinker with it – especially if it was

one of the few times that it had a

game pre-loaded onto the machine

where a salesman had been

demonstrating it earlier and

forgotten to switch it off.

Not long after this the Vic 20 finally

made it into our house but it was considered a family

hand-me-down by both my Grandad and Mum so I

couldn’t have it in my room, even though both my

sisters had zero interest in the machine. My mother,

however, definitely did.

My mother used to type in magazine listings and

spent nearly a whole weekend typing in the lines for

a game called Citadel that did work when finished,

although there were so many errors that more time

was spent actually trying to fix it than actually

playing. I would have probably destroyed the tape in

frustration if I had typed in any programs of these

lengths only to find that they had not recorded

properly on a cheap tape and I had to start again. I

have very vivid memories of sitting in the front room

dictating the listing – including punctuation that had

to be correct – so she could fix any typing errors just

so we could actually run it. Then there was the real

problem of trying to work out what was wrong

when it actually didn’t crash with a syntax-error, or

similar.

The appeal of buying games on tape was much

greater after a few back breaking sessions of

typing, that much was certain. And the Vic 20 had

one more ace up its sleeve in the form of cartridges

which you could buy with software or games on

them and just plug in the back. These were

instantly loaded as soon as the machine was turned

on and we had some absolute gems.

For our family the text adventure games by Scott

Adams were the clear favourites. Scott had written

several games already by the time the

Vic came out but only the first five were

licensed and put out on cartridges for

the public. They were Adventureland,

Pirate Adventure, Impossible Mission

(Secret Mission), Voodoo Castle and

The Count. Of these we only owned

Voodoo Castle at the start so that was

the game that mum and I set out to

finish. And we eventually did after

being stuck at a block point for what

seemed like forever. Just on a chance

conversation with a pal at school, I

realised that there was something

obvious in one of the rooms that wasn’t

just an object but actually a location I

could go into, and that was the final

hurdle to finishing the game.

The text games used the input system of two words

, being Verb/Noun syntax, so often we could work

out what commands you could use that we had not

used yet. This worked pretty well with The Count

due to how tough it was to get the right things

done on the right day as the game was played over

three virtual days.

I had dabbled with some of the Vic 20 commands

up to this point and even written some programs to

do simple things but it was probably doing this that

got me into the idea of looking how other programs

worked extensively so that I could better what I was

doing.

To put it simply: I was hooked.

CLOSER TO

101

THE EDITOR

You know that feeling: If only there

was something visual, something

like an editor to make my life more

simple? Such wonders I could come

up with...

And do you know what? HardCoal has had the same thought too and

has spent the last few years busy with BlitzMax making his dream a

reality. SyntaxBomb spoke with him about his work with it, how it is

progressing and thoughts about it:

Hi, Im Hardcoal.

For some years I have been working on a visual Game

Editor. It is completely designed and programmed by

me using Blitzmax language as the programming

language.

102

This editor is based on

a Blueprint Building

style, mixed with the

possibility of adding

your own code as well.

At the moment I’m at a critical

stage; one that will determine if the

path i’ve taken is really the right

one or not.

Some people ask why am I doing it?

Well.. Im doing it because I started

it, and I’m doing it mainly for myself.

One goal is: I definately want to offer stuff that is not presented on other

Frameworks.

Its an interesting process. Always challenging and sometimes Very Hard!

But since I feel that I am nearing the End, I want to see what will come out of it.

I’ve put too much time and suffering to give up on it. :)

103

“

My goal is make it as

So... There we have

it. Harcoals’ Visual

Editor. This is

testament to the

love, dedication and

passion people put

into their projects.

People may put you

down, Developers

may quit and cease

development of your

language... But never

let that put you off.

Programming is fun,

had and rewarding.

Believe in yourself,

believe in your

mission... It is all

worth it

convenient as possible for

“

myself and maybe others.

VERSATILE

DEPENDABLE

COMPATIBLE

(maybe even sexy)

Meet the new IBM 1620 Data Processor.

It’s everything you want, when you want it.

Contact us for more details. We take care of everything!

105

EASYOh Lordy,

IT’S NOT

BEING GREEN

not more retinaburning

old skool DOS style

UI’s? Join IWasAdam on a trip

through the sound window...

Well yes and much more

importantly no! On the

right you can see the

main menu of the

Fairlight CMI (J.Jeczalik

being one of the

members of “The Art Of

Noise”)

And now for a different

look:

On the right is the main

menu of QasarBeach

CMI. Which is a

complete copy of the

original Fairlight IIx

including all voice and

sound functions, 3d

waveform drawing and a

complete copy of Page R

- the worlds first true

visual music sequencer.

Just Load up a WAV, or OGG or AIF, or

VC or VCD, or SND, or EB1 and EB2, or

8SVX or many more...

And the famous Fairlight 3d

view of sound is also present.

You can’t rotate it, but you

can see where in the sample

you are and what it looks

like. All presented exactly as

the Original did...

The Fairlight was slow

and clunky with it’s 8”

floppy drives.

QasarBeach gives you

instant playable access

to stereo and mono

samples and supports

oodles of formats. plus

a nice mini view too!

106

Amongst its many firsts, the Fairlight was

known for having a light pen (later versions

supported a mouse and drawing tablet too!).

So you just point and click directly on the

screen in 1978!

Although QasarBeach doesn’t have a light pen,

it is fully mouse controlled. So you just need to

point and click in the same way, with the scroll

wheel to modify parameters too.

You might also have noticed the text

“COMMAND:” on each page. That is because

the Fairlight was accessed through a string of

commands entered from the keyboard. Sort of

like a DOS command system. QasarBeach tries

to replicate almost all Fairlight commands so if

you can use one, then you will feel at home.

And if this is all new - then you feel lost at sea.

But wait... QasarBeach has it’s own help system

cobbled together from the original help files.

And don’t forget that QasarBeach also has full

editing of sounds, both mono and stereo and a

range of facilities to allow you to sculpt and

generally mangle anything before you start

playing it!

And PAGE 7 give you complete realtime control

over many of the parameters. This thing is a

synth powerhouse...

PAGE R and

The Birth of 80’s POP

PAGE R is where things get interesting. It’s the

first usable computer controlled sequencer.

Originally designed to create drum rhythms

(Hence PAGE R).

But soon, enterprising composers mastered it

and began using it directly in their

compositions. And the Fairlight sound plus

tight computer timing got everyone dancing.

It’s simple display appearing on Top Of The

Pops and anywhere else.

QasarBeach replicates PAGE R but with added

controls for volume, and panning, and double

the voices from the original 8 to 16 (Not n-nn-n-n

19!)

107

“

Its all so Fairlight

“

SO HOW DOES IT ALL WORK?

a voice is made from

modules that control

how the sound is

produced. Play sample,

loop points, filters, etc

You then have

wires that

connect things

together to

produce a

sound

It’s programmed in MX2 which is

a fork of Monkey2. I got very

frustrated with the sound errors I

was having plus lack of proper

loops. So slowly I rebuilt the

sound system from scratch.

Left you can see the actual sound

core - it’s complex, but allows for

some very interesting sound

mangling.

The QasarBeach core is built on

top of this audio core with the

sequencing stuff added directly

into the audio core.

In essence every sound is

processed in realtime allowing for

multiple manipulations of the

sound as it plays.

There has also been input from

the creator of the Fairlight itself:

Mr Peter Vogel!

108

In recent times there is way less

snow in Europe forcing Santa to

replace the deer with a flying

vehicle, electric powered (good

speed, low consumption,

recharged by etheric particles,

day and night, whatever the

weather (I know amazing tech...),

and silent (so kids can't track

him)), and since there is

more and more people

on this planet, he is

going to use a

(modified) PNA

wayfinding

system, to find

its way to your

home (chimney

or air shaft).

I have been

working on my

path finding

system recently, and

my implementation uses

Astar structure / logic,

but in a way that it can be

used for all kinds of

universes (2d or 3d) and all kinds

of maps, and also so that the

nodes and links can be activated /

deactivated at any time. (this can

be useful if an obstacle is created

/ destroyed / moved and blocks a

node or interrupts a link)

While coding all that, I have

noticed how similar it is to PNA

roadfinding (when you drive a car

and you are here and you need to

go there, by using roads and

respecting the road driving rules)

In this article, I will explain (with

words), how (my implementation

of) Astar works, with nodes / links,

and the path finding procedure,

the path following procedure.

Then I will explain how the road

structure and driving rules are

similar to Astar structure / logic.

Finally I will explain how Santa is

going to approach the pathfinding

to reach each house (chimney or

air shaft) fast!

A*...

Santa

RemiD looks at

pathfinding and PNA

(personal navigation

assistant wayfinding)

and shows us how

Santa will find a way

to your home

PART 1 : Astar structure / logic with nodes and links

1.1

map structure and astar structure

To begin let me define some terms:

node = a point in space with coordinates

which is positioned in areas where a bot is

allowed to go, and which will be used by a

bot to follow a path

link = a connection between one node and

another node which can be reached (not

obstructed by an obstacle / wall)

The map can have any structure, it does

not need to be based on a grid, but it can

be, it is better to use a map made of zones

and passages, so that the nodes are within

a zone, and a path is calculated

considering only the nodes in one zone

(leading to a passage) rather than all nodes

of the map.

to keep it simple, I am going to assume

that the map is small enough so that we

don't have to use zones.

in the map, there would be obstacles /

walls that are not crossable, and the bots

would have to go around it, so nodes

would be positioned around the obstacles,

and there would be passages, and the bots

would have to go through them, so nodes

would be positioned on these passages,

and there would be also "incorners" and

"outcorners" on the extremities of the map,

so nodes would be positionned along these

corners.

110

once the nodes are positioned (along a grid or

around obstacles / walls/ passages / corners), we

have to know, for each node, which others nodes it

can reach, and these will be the links.

the links can be created automatically by using a

procedure with raypicks from one node to another

node, and if the other node can be reached (not

obstructed by an obstacle / wall), a

link would be created, and have its length (from one

node to the other node) stored

each node will have its number of links +

corresponding links indexes stored

the map could have static obstacles or dynamic

obstacles (which can be moved, added, removed).

for dynamic obstacles, i have found that it is easier

to use nodes positioned along a grid, and activate /

deactivate some nodes and some links depending

on where the obstacle is (since when a node is

positioned along a grid, it is easy to do determine

which nodes / links need to be updated depending

on the moving obstacle position). but this is for

another article...

1.2

astar logic:

for the pathfinding / pathfollowing

system i propose to use these lists /

variables : (i am just going to explain the

structure / logic, i let you write the code

as you want)

bots

to store the origin of the bot (reference

of a pivot), to store the followpath state

(true or false), to store the target

(reference of a pivot)

temps

to store indexes temporarily

nodes

to store the origin of the node (reference

of a pivot), to store the active state of

each node (On or Off), the AS (ASTAR)

state of each node (Not, Discovered,

Processed), the discoveredfrom index (of

another node) from which this node has

been discovered, the reach length

(length from start node to this node, by

following a temporary path through

others nodes), the fly length (length

from this node to end node)

links

to store the count of links (to others

nodes) of this node, the active state of

each link (On or Off), the index (of

another node) linked to this node

paths

(one path for each bot)

to store the count of nodes in this path,

the indexes (of nodes) in this path, the

origin of the start node (reference of a

pivot), the origin of the end node

(reference of a pivot), the index of the

next node to target (in this path)

1.2.1

finding a path

procedure FindPath :

;reset nodes ASstate (=all Not)

;loop

;current node is best node

;analyze the others nodes linked to this node

;if other node ASstate is not discovered / processed

;if other node is end node

;set the node ASstate to discovered

;store the index of the node which has allowed to discover this node

;the best node is this node

;a path is possible, set the path state to true

;if other node is another node

;calculate / store the ReachLength (length from start node to this nodes, by following

a temporary path through others nodes) and the FlyLength (length from this node to end

node)

;set the node ASstate to discovered

;store the index of the node which has allowed to find this node

;set the ASstate of the current node to processed

;if the end node has node been discovered yet

;check if there are nodes with a ASstate discovered

;if yes

;determine which is the min value of the FDistance of the discovered nodes

;the best node is the node with the min value

;if no

;a path is impossible, set the path state to false

;if the end node has been discovered, set the path state to true

;until pathState = true or pathState = false

;if a path has been found

;reset the path

;store the index of the start node

;store the index of the end node

;determine which nodes compose this path by going back from end node to start node

(using the discoveredfrom indexes) and store them in a temporary list

;discovered node is the end node

;loop

;add the discovered node to the temporary list

;retrieve the other node which allowed to discover this node

;set the other node has the discoverednode

;until discovered node = start node

;browse the temporary list, in reverse (from last to first) to get the nodes of the path,

from start to end

;set the start node as the next node (index of the list of nodes in the path) to target

;return true (a path has been found)

;if no path has been found

;return false (no path has been found)

end of procedure

112

1.2.2

following a path

procedure FollowPath :

;target node is first node of path

;calculate distance between bot and target node

;if bot is far from target node

;oriente / move bot towards target node

;if bot is near target node

;if target node is the end node

;the path is complete, set the FollowPath state to false, the Target to 0

;if the target node is another node (not the end node)

;set the next node of the path, as the target node

end of procedure

You should have a good idea on how a pathfinding / pathfollowing system, using AStar logic, works.

PART 2: the road structure / rules similarities with Astar

2.1

Road structure and similarities with AStar structure

on a road map, there are roads and intersections and accesses

in this case the nodes would be the intersections and the accesses, the links would

be the roads. The length of a link would correspond to the length of the road

2.2

road driving rules and similarities with AStar logic

the astar logic can be applied to find a

path on a roadmap, but some things /

rules will have to be considered to

prevent an accident or to be annoyed by

cops

for example :

one way roads : a link going from one

node to another node, but only one way

(no link from other node to one node)

dead end roads : a link going from

intersection (node) to a node at dead

end, and another link going from dead

end (node) to a node at intersection

temporary obstructeds road : one or

several links and / or nodes disactivated

traffic lights / stops : a temporarily

disactivated link, or a link of a higher

length than its real length (to take into

account the slowing down of a redlight /

stop)

113

roundabouts / giveways : a link of a

higher length than its real length (to

take into account the slowing down of

the giveways)

traffic jams / frequently crossed roads

(by people) : a link of a higher length

than its real length, at specific times of

the day (to take into account the

slowingdown of the trafficjam / people

crossing the road)

speed limits : a link of a higher or

smaller length depending on the time it

takes to travel this distance when

respecting the speed limit (maybe use a

factor of 1.0 for a speed limit of

100km/h, and others factors for other

speed limits, and multiply the

corresponding factor by the normal

length to calculate the considering speed

length)

PART 3 : how Santa is going to reach each chimney fast

3.1

sky structure and similarities with AStar structure

on a skymap, assuming you can go at

any altitude, there are free ways

everywhere, (the exeption would be high

mountains, and tornados, and storms,

and lightning, and others planes /

helicopters, which could be considered

as obstacles), and there are roofs with

chimenys / air shafts where to drop the

gifts

in this case, the nodes would be the

chimneys / air shafts, the links would be

the free ways between them

115

3.2

sky navigation rules and similarities with AStar logic

again the astar logic can be applied to

find a path on a skymap, but some

things / rules will have to be considered

to prevent an accident or to be annoyed

by the customs / army

dense snowfall: the PNA may not work

accurately

storms / strongwinds / tornados:

difficulty to fly

for example:

customs / army: they want to seize

(steal) your gifts for national security (of

course...)

planes / helicopters may provoke a

crash

high mountains: weather conditions

usually harsh there, so to consider if you

want to deliver all gifts in good state and

in time

frosty surfaces (roof): slippery ! be

careful not too fall

really hot surfaces (chimneys): it burns

! it burns!

toxic smoke: not good for health if

inhaled repeadly

sexy babes : may provoke an accident

when looking at them too long during

the flight

conclusion

I hope this article may have helped

you have a clearer understanding of

how astar can be used for

pathfinding / pathfollowing, and

also that you have smiled at least

one time with the (attempt at)

humour that i have tried to put here

and there.

Santa wish you the best for this

period of the year

RemiD

116

A LIFE AND A LOVE

Join bsisko as he gives us

a peek into his life and his

beloved computers.

The High School Years:

My first dream of making

it rich was to write for

the comics industry. At

that time in 1968, there

were only two big

names in the industry,

DC and Marvel. I still

remember the first

comic I ever bought,

an Aquaman story

wherein he is

restrained on a machine,

while his kidnappers are reading his

mind. While I have many four-colored heroes

of my own creation in my mind, many of

them have never been committed to paper

and never published due to the lack of money

and lack of interest by relatives and the

community. At this time, apples were still

something people ate for food, and IBM were

letters on a typewriter.

The College Years:

After high school, I was lucky enough to land my

first real job. It was basically a food service position

at a mental hospital for the criminally insane. I

started working there 4 hours a day, then gradually

worked my way to 8 hours a day. Of course, my

search for money didn't end there. While working

there, I lived with my parents, spending my

money on a college education, mainly for a

theatrical career, (can you blame me! Hollywood

was where the deals were being made) At that

time the only people that used computers on a

daily basis were the federation in their 5 year

mission exploring the galaxy for new life, new

planets in the final frontier and the Robinsons that

ended up Lost in Space. Steve Jobs hadn't even

pioneered the Apple II at this time. My thinking was

this. Since I was going to be earning mega money as

an actor-writer, what would I do with my money

since I didn't want a wife and kids. It was in college

that I picked up an $6.00 magazine about a war

game. It was a paper and cardboard affair. I thought

to myself this would be a good time waster while I

save up to buy an house. Well, on one of the pages I

saw an advertisement that mentioned an $2000.00

war game. I thought to myself ìWho would spend so

much money on something like this?î It turned out

that the ad was for the first Apple II machine. Well,

being 17 and no real interest in computers at the

time, I thumbed up my nose at the deal. A couple of

months later, I saw an ad for a $100.00 ZX81. This

was well in my budget line. I wasn't worried about

starving while I play around with this thing.

The

ZX81

was a black

and white

computer from

England manufactured by

Clive Sinclair of Sinclair

Research. It had no on/off switch,

no sound, and no real keyboard. I

purchased it for curiosity to see if

I could actually learn how to

program.

After a few

weeks with

it, I fell in love

with it. If it had

a keyboard and

disc drive, it would

have been my favourite

computer. Since this was my first

computer, I remain loyal to it. I

learned BASIC on this thing. I

wrote maybe 4 simple games for

this machine which I considered

complete, but never published.

One of them is a find the pea

game. It was a simulation of the

common street hustle many

people play on unwary and naive

people where you have three

cups, hide the pea under one of

them, switch them around and

dare the player to find which cup

the pea is under. The other was a

guess the number type of game.

The other two, unfortunately I do

not remember what they were.

They are now lost.

117

The Commodore

64 was the first

computer that I

considered real. It

had color, sound, a

tape drive, and later on, a disc

drive. It had come out at the same time the

ZX Spectrum came out, and I had so much wanted to buy

that machine, being loyal to the Sinclair brand of

computers. However, since the spectrum was a mail order

affair, and I could buy the C-64 in a local store, (I forget

which store it was, Sears or K-Mart. Wal-Mart didn't exist

at the time) I purchased the commodore. I continued my

BASIC education with this machine. I only wrote 1 game

that I considered complete with this one. Home

computers being new, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to

know that its basic language didn't cover the whole

machine. For regular computing, it was enough, but the

graphics and sound needed to be accessed by pokes and

peeks. I was beginning to learn 6502 assembly language

to make the

fantastic

games that I

was buying

when

Commodore

published

the 128.

The Commodore 128 was my third

computer. This

machine increased the

memory by 64 kbs.

The language was

vastly improved, and it

had a monitor mode

that let users access the

memory, something that

the Apple II had since its

inception. With this

machine I let my education

of assembly language take

a backseat since the BASIC

language covered the graphics and sound

capabilities of this machine. Because of its 128 k of

memory, its vastly improved BASIC language, several

utilities like a Sprite Editor, an ml monitor, a numeric

keypad, and redesigned layout, this became my favourite

computer to work with. It was at this time that I consider

four major companies, maybe five were producing

computers for the mass market. That was of course

Apple, Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, and Texas

Instruments. However it there was a manufacturer that

believed he could cash in on the fad, he had a machine to

sell. Besides the Spectrum, the British computers that I

wanted to own were the Amstrad CPC, the Dragon, and

the BBC micro. The American computers were too many to

remember. While I was in love with this machine, a

traveling salesman stopped by home to introduce me into

the IBM world.

At this time, Commodore was

introducing the Amiga to the

world, while Atari was marketing

the ST. It was my intent to

purchase both of those machines

when someone stopped at my

door to sell me an education by

mail thing. The version of

Macintosh that Apple was selling

was black and white only, and

there were some design choices

that Apple made that I didn't like,

so I didn't bother waiting for that

machine, not until they made a

color version. But then they

priced their machines too high.

But back to the traveling

salesman. Learn computer

programming by mail and

get a free IBM computer.

Read the guidebook, answer

the questions, mail them

back in, and get a free

computer. Well, the

computer featured was an

Maxar 88T. Well, I jumped at

the chance to get this thing,

because that was what the

corporate users used. If I

knew how to program this thing,

my chances in the corporate

world was secured. This machine

was an amber and black machine

with two 5 º drives. I focused my

time on GW-Basic with this

machine, bought some games

that ran exceptionally well. My

favourite was something called

Karnov. I have since lost this

computer. My next machine was a

Tandy 1000TL. Once again, I was

back to color. This one, like the

IBMjr, featured an special mode

only available for Tandy machines

that featured 16 colored

graphics, which were not quite up

to VGA standards, but better than

CGA. I later upgraded this

machine to two 720K floppies, 1

360K, and an 10 MB (yeah, that's

right folks, only 10 MB) hard

drive. I still own this machine. It

was with this machine that I

learned QuickBASIC, while I was

attempting to learn 8086

assembly. It was at this time that

I came across C++, but the

syntax was so complicated from

BASIC, that I couldn't do anything

with it. It was also that I was

working on my first game that I

never completed, an Othello

derivative that I named after an

actor named Voltaire. Someday,

when time is available , I want to

complete that game. Because of

the 8-bit Guy, and the interest in

retro computers, I want to use

this computer to learn Assembly

language programming. I have a

game project that I intend to

develop across the C-64, Apple

IIGS, Spectrum, Amiga, and Atari

ST, all in assembly language.

118

Post-College Purchases...

I got tired of paying a guy to read books to me. I finally convinced

the managers of the hospital where I earn a living to hire me for 8

hours and pay me. I use that money to pay the rent, buy food,

computer supplies, and watch a movie every now and then. I now

want to seriously concentrate on game development even if

family members don't want me to, so my next computer

purchases were:

An interesting Compaq Presario 2200. I would have

stayed with the Tandy machine a while longer, but at

work, I met a guy that was praising the machine he had

bought, and he wanted to design an RTS type game. I

showed him the QB script I was working on, and we

started a type of friendship. He later introduced me to a

guy working in the same hospital, but at a different site. I

bought this machine to keep up with him. It used VGA

graphics, brought me up to date with an CD-Rom drive,

and a larger hard drive. It also introduced me to the world

of Windows. The Tandy machine had its own GUI called

Deskmate. As Commodore and Atari went out of

business, I abandoned my interest in the Amiga and ST,

though I wish I had bought one when I had the chance.

With my

friendship

with Randy

Morgan, my

interest in the C++

language increased. I bought

scores of books on learning C++, 3d

game design and DirectX. It was with this machine

that I purchased my copy of C++ Builder and Delphi. I

later relinquished this machine as a settlement to a bad

deal with a disgruntled customer. I could not fix her

computer that I promised to fix.

The HP Slim line (in name only!). And now we're

back to the Compaq world. I liked the Compaq

machine so much that I went back to them this

time under their Hewlett-Packard model. My

other choices were Dell and Gateway, but with

Dell, I didn't like their mail only service, and

Gateway wasn't sold in nearby stores. It was

this machine that introduced me to flash drives

and USB ports. I still own this machine, and use

it as my primary machine for game

development, writing, and artistic endeavours.

Onto the notebook end I had bought.

Unfortunately, I forget the name of this

machine, but it was a black and white used

machine sold to me by Beverly Kniffen. She was

the same lady that handled my first bankruptcy

claim. I had intended to use it for writing.

Unfortunately, my brother had sat on it and

broke it.

DUMPSTER DIVING

The IBM Aptiva. I just knew

that this was a bad deal

the whole way around.

While the machine itself

wasn't bad, the way I had

purchased it was, and it is

this event that sheds a

black light on this

machine. I bought it

through a rent to own deal.

It took me two years to pay

for the machine. It was a

used machine that the

rental company overcharged

me for. A deal I

will never make again. I

later threw the machine in

the trash when I moved.

The (well loved) Averatec 3500. I really

like this machine. It has gone trough

some hard times. It became cracked,

only has a DVD drive, but can write to

CD. It has four USB ports, and Windows

XP. It was also the first computer that

introduced the new type of laptop that

manufactures called tablet pcís. You are

able to swivel the screen and close it,

and use it as a tablet. I use my Slimline

when I am at home, and this machine

when I am away from home. I also use

this machine to write and artistic

desires.

The Post-Employment Years

I am now retired, and I earn a good enough

sum of money to pay for rent, and food,

and other basic necessities of life. The rest

is learning how to manage my money, and

putting a check on my desires (more

computers, video games, leisure time).

Lucky enough I didn't become addicted to

drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. My current

studio is comprised of two HP Slimline

desktops, two HP Stream laptops. While

there are many projects I have in my mind,

my current are:

Johnny Trouble ( while not exactly a FPS, it is a trivia, puzzle based game).

You have a choice of playing two characters who are searching for

government agents that have been abducted. It is being developed using

the Torque3D engine that was created by the GarageGames set of

programmers. I hope to have this game completed within three months.

Universe (the public domain game published by SPI in the 1980s) It is an

RPG game that I plan on to develop using the Godot engine. I think this

might take some years to complete.

Delta 11 (a machine language game for the machines C-64, Apple IIGS, ZX

Spectrum, Amiga, and Atari ST, and Tandy 1000TL) Like most of computing

nowadays, I'm too am jumping on the retro computing bandwagon.

An Youtube channel. I don't plan on becoming a millionaire overnight. This

channel is made for a bit of money, to keep myself relevant in the world,

and have a bit of fun.

Thanks and

Happy

Holidays.

120

With it's Sinclair Spectrum vibe and

isometric madness, IWasAdam spills the

beans on his stonking hit: VivaMortis.

Well, the inspiration was the recent SyntaxBomb competition:

'8 Bit Wars'. I decided on the spectrum because I liked the

palette and had a spectrum back in the day. I also wanted to

see how far I could push things while keeping the same look

and feel.

The isometric was a no-brainer because I loved all the

Ultimate hits: 'Knightlore', 'Alien8', etc. My first thought was

to update 'SaberWulf' to isometric and while this was going

well, other Syntax bomb members felt that the main

SaberMan character should have a more unique look. So he

got covered and then became Mortis.

Once Mortis appeared

everything just sort of fell

into place. The colors

suggested a Mexican feel

and the skulls fitted my

thoughts and the basic

style. What was really good

was how the low res

graphics were brought to

life. I found

that a good

things was to

put a 2 pixel

black border

around all

sprites, this

made them

POP much

more.

122

The graphics were created entirely in my own

sprite editor: FontSprite. I use this because is gives

me very quick results, fast color changes and

animation and I know it will always work when

ported into the game engine as they are based on

the same internal code. It has the palettes, the

brushes, the complete spritesheet and all the tools

I need. It's also doing well on its own with nearly

2,000 downloads and I try to keep it frequently

updated.

The sound was interesting as it has been a longrunning

project I have been working on in the

background for ages. It is a completely new sound

engine which allows me great flexibility both in

creating the sounds and also sequencing them.

The 8-bit sounds are just simple single square

waves as with the original Spectrum, and the

sampled sounds are suitably low-fi and respect

the new Spectrum Next capabilities. Switching the

sound track was just a case of muting unused

tracks.

123

The last thing was the map. Again this

was created via another customs project:

FontMap. This takes a font (created in

FontSprite) and allows you to construct

'maps' with many different layers in the

same file. Both the room layout and the

actual world map is designed here and

imported into VivaMortis. I just reference

the required map data and interoperate it

as I need. The same tools have been

honed and used with every game I have

produced, so they are quite advanced and

more bomb-proof now :)

124

The Spectrum vs Spectrum Next

graphics options were created

using a custom shader. once I

got it working I could just

forget about it, as it did the rest

and always perfectly!

Because Viva Mortis has been

soo popular I am very tempted

to do a sequel. I have some

ideas including one about

Mortis's pet dog: Fido. So that

could be called "Fido Mortis"!

Let's just see what happens eh?

So... Did you play VivaMortis?

Did you find the 5 runes? Did

you wonder how color graphics

could turn into black and white?

Or Did Mr De'Ath just munch on

your tired ole bones!

https://adamstrange.itch.io/viva-mortis

125

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