If you liked this story, and haven't yet checked out Jordan Mechner's journals from the mid-80's when he developed Prince of Persia, I highly recommend that you do: https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/
Once again you see that back then, the porting game programmer had no access to the any of the original assets, art, code or assistance. I was doing the same work back in the late eighties and it was part of the job to master the game you were porting and then reverse engineer everything.
Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, and I just had to basically do everything from scratch. I could look at the original source code and art assets, but I was writing 6502 C64 assembly and the original was MSDOS 8088, with absolutely no commonality. Even the art-- I had to be my own artist-- was a tremendous chore. Downgrading 16px16px8 color EGA "tiles" to C64 8x16x4 color sprites when the 8 pixels were double width and one of the 4 colors was "transparent" was frequently an exercise in frustration. At one point I hollered at my boss that "I can't make a duck out of this!" (attempting to create a mallard flapping its wings) and went home early. I came back the next say and made a duck, but only barely. I eventually quit to work on my engineering degree. Never regretted it for a moment. A lot of us got really burned out back then.
I wonder how much the authors of C64/Amiga Bubble Bobble, R-Type, Paperboy, Ghost'n'Goblins, Buggy Boy, Solomon's Key, Pang, Arkanoid, Silkworm played the game? Those were actually good ports.
Not sure on the C64 version, but you can read about the ZX Spectrum conversion of R-Type here: http://bizzley.com/ which I recommend if you're a fan of the spectrum, R-Type, or curious about ports.
It is simply insane to me that companies didn't provide these assets (digital assets, design docs) to the folks producing these ports.
I understand that these ports were often cash grabs. The original Japanese publisher could sign away the home computer rights to one of their games and get a nice check in return.
But, still.
Surely the original owners of these properties must have realized that by providing at least some assistance to their licensees (something requiring almost no effort) they would see better results?
Surely these Japanese publishers must have understood that a bad port of Outrun or some other game would reflect badly on them and tarnish their brand even if they had no involvement in it?
I say this as a long-time fan of Sega and other Japanese game companies, which were filled with some brilliant folks. That's why these decisions have always baffled me.
They may not have had access to them, other than what would be in the ROMs.
There weren't standard digital art tools in the early 80's. Things may have been physically drawn on graph paper, manually converted to binary, and then the drawings disposed of or otherwise inaccessible due to things like contracting situations, etc.
Yes, but that's what I'm talking about. It's crazy that the developers never made some effort to preserve the source materials and get them to the porters. Even a very minimal effort would have surely yielded some large results relative to the effort expended. At the very least, you'd think they'd want to protect their company name by not having it attached to garbage ports.
A lot of those design materials were indeed saved, btw. This book and its sequel collect a lot of them:
Games were small back then, so there was less often an ongoing relationship between a publisher and a developer, and more often just a one-time exchange: software, already finished, for a lump sum. As if the publisher had contracted out work on the game and didn't know it until the contractor showed up at their door. Basically, games as "piece work."
At that point, the developer walked off with money, and the publisher walked off with a game binary they could resell and market however they liked (including taking the IP rights and licensing them to a porter.) But the publisher didn't retain any right to the developer's time; and often, the "developer" was just some college kid who developed just the one game, moved on to other pursuits, and now can't be found.
And the ones working on the licensed ports were lucky, with their fancy arcade machines on free play in the corner of the office. Authors of, er, 'tributes' just had to wander down to the local arcade with a pocket full of coins and play until they'd remembered everything.
I can't find it now, but there was a very impressive story posted to HN about a kid who reverse engineered and patched an arcade game in the 80's and sent the code in to the company that made the game, and they wound up flying him out to meet its developers. I think the game was Robotron, but it might have been something else.
Are you thinking of the story of Ms Pac Man, which reverse engineered and patched the original Pac Man cabinet? I think it was Atari flying out to meet the developers. Great story either way: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-cre...
> When we got the first royalty check my dad gave me a grand and I part-exchanged my Mini Cooper for a Ford Fiesta XR2. A few months later I changed that for a Ford Orion 1.6i Ghia.
This is where i cracked up. I think these models are all European, so American readers won't be familiar with them, but this article is a lovely tour of Shit Fords of the 1980s.
In a true sense the Orion 1.6i was shit but not at the time, at the time it was high in the list of cars you'd want at 18 (I was born 80 so I remember lusting after them) particularly since it was the same engine as the XR3i without the utterly cripling insurance/reputation.
I still have a soft spot for that era but I'd have the even more naff (and lethal) Capri.
How would it be possible for 8-bit machines to successfully emulate a game that used twin 68000 cpus and custom sprite scaling hardware? these conversions were just a marketing gimmick, targeting the wallets of the poor consumers.
It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer
ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that
matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example,
Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
There were serious heaps of silicon inside those arcade machines. No way they could have been (profitably) sold to home users for anything remotely resembling $1K.
Check out the arcade board for After Burner; essentially the same hardware as Outrun:
Gobs of RAM and custom silicon. Compare with any contemporary home computer of the era. No way these massive slabs of arcade silicon could have been produced and sold profitably for less than thousands of dollars.
There were other issues as well. These arcade boards were very power hungry and therefore put out lots of heat. Home consumers willing to put up with that would be a very small niche.
One company did just that in the early 90s -- SNK, with their Neo-Geo console. In fact, the meaningless-looking technobabble that appears on the system's boot screen ("MAX 330 MEGA PRO-GEAR SPEC") actually has a meaning: the system supports a maximum ROM size of 330 megabits (more with tricks like bank switching), and the console's hardware specifications are identical to those of the arcade-cabinet hardware (or "pro gear").
But the Neo-Geo and games for it were expensive -- well outside the price range of all but the most hardcore of game consumers -- and it took until the 90s to make the economics work.
>It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
Actually the X86000 from Sharp was pretty much this. It had perfect ports of arcade games and was also used as the development system by Capcom among other arcade companies.
Here is a funny story: I live in Athens, Greece. In 1987 (or it was later?), I read on the ACE magazine about the Sharp X68000...with magazine at hand, I went down to the local Sharp dealer to see if they will import the machine...they didn't know anything about it! when I showed them the magazine, they didn't believe me and they refused to pick up the phone and phone Japan!!!
The Sharp X68000 was a beast of machine, but it didn't have sprite scaling.
> It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality.
The Amiga did come close-ish, but despite its custom chips, the lack of a custom sprite scaler and too low memory bandwidth would have likely made it impossible to get all that much closer (it's mainly lacking extra details next to the road). The dual 68k's on Outrun also ran on 12.5Mhz vs. ~8Mhz/7.16Mhz (depending on NTSC vs. PAL) for the Amiga's single M68k.
> Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear - Commodore struggled on for years, and sold about 5m Amiga's, and the only reason they survived as long as they did was that Commodore were masters at cost-cutting (arguably that also sank them: they cut their R&D budgets to the bone, among many other mistakes). People who went from working at Apple to Commodore at the time have indicated that attempts at Apple to figure out how Commodore was able to sell the Amiga at the price-points they did for example massively over-estimated Commodores manufacturing costs and could not figure out how Commodore were able to squeeze out a margin at all.
As such we can assume the Amiga price, which including a monitor, joysticks etc. around the time of Outrun would easily ended up in the region of 1000 dollars or more, was the high point of what was commercially possible around the thousand dollar mark at the time.
Nah, the Amiga's Outrun was a silly Atari ST port. It didn't even come close to what the Amiga could do (e.g. Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge).
> In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear
Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan, was engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their top engineering talent.
Those very clever engineers (RJ Michael, Jay Miner etc) could have easily designed chips that did sprite scaling and rotation along with blitting.
These people have developed the Amiga custom chips actually in 1982-1983. In 1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.
And it could be a little pricey at first. Even at double the price or a normal Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100% authentic coin-op conversions?
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge also has exactly the same gap in graphics capability vs arcade Outrun. I thought the same as you and was about to pull it out as a better example, and while it's a clearly better game on the Amiga more graphical detail is isn't really it - put some videos of them side by side.
> Not at all. Commodore was a very shitty company that has no business plan, was engineer-unfriendly and by 1992 they have managed to alienate all their top engineering talent.
And yet, those things were in large part because they spent less per unit sold than pretty much any other company at the time. Their R&D was chronically underfunded, they squeezed suppliers, they squeezed distributors. Commodore survived as long as they did because despite being dysfunctional the one are that dysfunction worked was that they were able to produce their hardware at prices most of the competition thought was impossible.
> In 1989, I am sure they would be able to develop something much better.
Outrun came out in 1986.
> Even at double the price or a normal Amiga, who wouldn't want to play 100% authentic coin-op conversions?
Far fewer than bought Amiga's. It might have done OK, but not well. Others have pointed out the X68000, which did not sell well at all.
I played it a lot, but Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, even the 3rd one, is nowhere near arcade Outrun. It lacks a lot of blitted objects next to the road, and e.g. you'll notice the background graphics does not get filled in with additional details when you're going downhill (that part is actually quite disappointing, as it's something they could have done a lot better with some copper tricks).
> How would it be possible for 8-bit machines to successfully emulate a game that used twin 68000 cpus and custom sprite scaling hardware? these conversions were just a marketing gimmick, targeting the wallets of the poor consumers.
I think you misunderstand my point. I don't expect a perfect conversion of a much larger arcade game. These games sucked because they were crap games with the licence tied to them built to deadlines so US Gold could shovel them onto unsuspecting punters. Compare the unpolished turd that is the Outrun ZX Spectrum port to ZZKJ's Super Hang On port or Enduro Racer. That's what I'm talking about.
Chase HQ, Wec Le Mans and the Crazy Cars series were excellent on the Amstrad CPC. There’s an upcoming homebrew title named Vespertino which looks like what the Outrun conversion should have been.
E-Type on the Acorn Archimedes was pretty good. Unashamedly an OutRun clone, but with a Jaguar E-Type instead of a Ferrari.
One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
I'll give you that. But to a kid playing it on lunch breaks, on the computers we used to do our school work? :)
It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
That was an interesting read, as my relationship with my dad was pretty similar at that age. I was coding image handling systems for newspapers (in 80286 assembly) with my dad handling the business side. We had some success - installations in a few newspapers and some banks in Iceland, but not making real money. The parts about the tension and fights sounded almost exactly like my story. Then I left home at 22 and came to grad school to UC Berkeley, all the way across the country, which was one of the best decisions I ever made.
I'm still doing 2D graphics software! It flows more or less directly from the work I did as a teenager.
Couldn’t read their article because I couldn’t even get passed their cookie consent page:
> You can choose here if you would not like this session tracking to occur.
Does this mean I’m opting in or out? To compound things the options are “yes” and “no” rather than “opt in”, “on”, “enable” nor any other the other verbs typically used on other sites. Which means I have to navigate their maze of double negatives to understand what I’m electing for.
I really dislike sites that employ this kind of language anti-pattern.
