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Minter on the History of Llamasoft
Tmuk writes "Just thought I'd bring to your attention the first of a new series of articles by Jeff Minter over at the mighty Way of the Rodent. For the first time ever, the complete history of Llamasoft is being brought together by the man himself, with new articles appearing regularly. Enjoy!"
In case it gets Slashdotted, mirror can be found here
...don't question it!!!
I played Llamatron incessantly for a good part of my late teens and twenties. Even today's bi tech FPS games can't compete for playability with a classic like Llamatron. I even got it running in DOSBox on Linux. Woohoo! :)
Un-news
Is winamp still kicking their respective ass? Sorry... :)
Other than a remake of Robotron, what other games did he make? I can't find any references in the article.
Anyone have any information about how his new Gamecube game Unity is progressing?
Haven't seen much new on either his site (aside from the initial announcement) or Lionheads about it for a while?
Sounds like an interesting (and typically Minteresque) project, seems like it is meant to be a cross between his music lightshow idea and a shoot-em-up.
Let's sit around the fire and tell the hilarious joke about that time the cat ran off with our cassette containing that 63K Pong - clone....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Flamebait my arse....back in the day, Jeff Minter was a god-like figure among game coders - Llamatron (atari version) and T2K (Jaguar version) are among my fave games of all time.
;)
So - words from the hand of God....? Certainly, Edge worship's him
+++ BASELINE REALITY FAILURE+++ +++ PLEASE REBOOT UNIVERSE +++
I remember that Jeff Minter was THE Man when it came to making the Atari ST do the impossible. I haven't thought of my old ST for many years...
If a bunch of geeks can't put things into proper perspective, then it's all meaningless. The guy COPIED a game and released it as shareware. Big F'ing whoop!
Yeah, Tempest 2000 kicked ass. What has done for me lately?
I started drink Guinness thanks to Jeff's advice... Hopefully I was too young for LSD...
----- Sorry for poor english, I usually speak Klingon -----
I read a story that I believe Bill G. has confirmed as true.
When Bill was in high school, he wrote the software that handled class registration. Not only did the system work great, but all of Bill's classes were two thirds girls. Nice.
-B
from the article:
"On the first lesson, we were told that we would be learning a language called CESIL. This wasn't any kind of a real language that anyone used to really do things with, from what I recall, but some synthetic language purely for the purposes of education (or perhaps places on real comp.sci courses were already getting oversubscribed, and CESIL was deployed to send lesser students running gibbering and screaming into the hills, vowing never to go near a drop of code ever again)."
lol. When I was at university I thought the same thing about PASCAL.
CMDRTACO CHECK YOUR EMAIL!
T3K (Nuon).
Working on Unity for Lionhead these days...
+++ BASELINE REALITY FAILURE+++ +++ PLEASE REBOOT UNIVERSE +++
Well, yes, he was. He had a long collaboration with Atari, and it's strange that in the last few weeks I got a (boxed, new) copy of Temptest 2000 for my Jaguar.
:)
I still have my STe too, so I could crank out Revenge of the Mutant Camels when I get home
What a fucking brilliant game - man those missiles got difficult to dodge as the levels counted up! I must have worn out 3 QuickShot 2s on that bad mofo.
That was classic intercourse!
I found a link to that story (Bill writing the software that put him in the same class with lots of girls).
I also googled with "myth" and "urban legend" but I couldn't find anything that quickly. (Doesn't prove it's true, though!)
Reinout
Reinout van Rees
Remember that Minter is perhaps most famous for Llamatron; you can fire it up to this day in any Atari ST emulator pretty much, such as STeem or SainT, or WinSTon, etc etc. STonX runs very well under Unix/Linux for instance..
h tml
h tml
If you're into handhelds, then try out CaSTaway..
Palm OS:
http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.
GP32:
http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/gp32.
Finkle
Surely you mean: "[i-am-hung.com]".
A good insight into how things were at the start of the home computer revolution.
People take things like RAM, disk space and CPU cycles for granted these days. A readme file for a piece of software these days is likely to be bigger than a game on some of the first 8-bit home computers.
One thing that is sad is how 3D games programming is out of the reach of the hobbyist these days. Purely down to the complexity of modern games, they take too long to create if one person tries to do all the work. Then there's the SDK and development hardware required if you want to develop for a console.
I work for AssemblyTV and I seem to remember we interviewed him. [checks] We did.
3 %2 Fassembly03%2Fassemblytv%2F2003-08-08_1210-jeff_mi nters.mpg&fileinfo
http://scene.org/file.php?file=%2Fparties%2F200
Best $700.00 I got my parents to spend. I remember them asking, "Do you think this will help you with school". Let's see I passed, went to college, passed, got a job in the IT field, got a better job in the IT field, etc.
Yeah, it helped.
So thanks Mom & Dad.
And some day it'll be worth more than the $700.00 too.
Jeff minter has made some of the best games ever.
Tempest 2000 (made the Jaguar useful)
Tempest 3000 (got a nuon dvd player just for it)
Not to mention, llamatron, Defender2k, attack of the mutant camels..the list goes on and on.
I cannot wait for Unity.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
I love Jeff Minter and his work, but to say he stretched the ST is wrong. He had some crazy copper-type effects, but above that not much. The gameplay on the other hand ALWAYS rocked. I doff my cap to him.
Jeff visited us last year at Alternative Party in Helsinki. He shared his stories on game development, animal fetishes and other Minter oddities. Then he accompanied a large group of visitors for a pint of Guinness at the nearest Irish pub, then partied like a Finn in the sauna after eating reindeer meat (thanks Nosfe!). Too bad he couldn't make it this year...
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
After Unity is released for GameCube, Jeff plans on making a sequel to Llamatron (although this could change, that's very unlikely since Yak himself announced it):
i ght=llamatron
http://www.yakyak.org/viewtopic.php?t=14802&highl
I am born in 1970, and discovered my first computer in 1978 when I was visiting a university, there was a LEM game, where you enter the amount of fuel to give thrust to a moon lander, and it gives you your speed and altitude, and you have to land safely...
Then in 1982 my father bought a ZX81 in kit, assembled it, and I started learning BASIC on it, writing games (with 1K of RAM...), as it was slow, I started to learned Z80 assembly language, then we bought the 16K extension, it was wonderful!
I continued a few years later with an Amstrad CPC 6128, still a Z80, but with 128Kb of RAM, colour graphics, sound, integrated EXPENSIVE 3" floppy, still doing games in assembly, and applications in Turbo Pascal and DBaseII under CPM+
Next was a 8086PC, dumb... then a 386 with VGA and I re-started to write games and applications, in C and assembly.
When I discovered unix, I wanted to know all of it, then I let games and did all my study in unix environment, to become a BOFH...
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
...but all of Bill's classes were two thirds girls
Is that like as in Thai Ladyboys or something?
It's too late for me to die young
And there have been such "hidden features" in MS software ever since..
Reading stuff like this always makes me ponder the fate of the small developer over the years. I know they're out there (Ambrosia on the MacOS side, etc.) and that they still create some fun stuff. But in the current sea of endlessly rehashed titles by Big Corporate Game Houses(tm) it sure does seem like they get lost in the noise. Can't afford to buy shelf space? Sorry. Can't afford to buy a review in a fanboy game rag? Sorry.
Seems like the same dilemma as the book publishing industry. Anyone can write, most creations are crap but some real gems do get produced. The problem comes in gettings the freakin' thing on a shelf. Big publishers (dead tree and computer games) generally seem to filter out anything innovative by focusing on tried-and-true regurgitated themes.
The alternative is to go with a Web presence and skip the Big Publisher filter altogether, but even today that seems to be a compromise at best.
So... a very long-winded way of asking what small developers are doing these days? Self-publishing? Reluctantly tailoring titles to please the Big Publishers?
How I yearn for the days of People Pong and Aztec....
That was a fantastic bit of software.
:-)
A light synth. You set up reflections and transformations, picked a llama or CND shaped cursor and waggled it on screen. Like a kaleidoscope, on drugs. You could record the output and play it back at parties to impress you friends, or put on Pink Floyd and chill out, or simply sit there and have epileptic fits.
Every geek likes flashing lights. If you dont, you may as well just go and work for micro$oft right now.
The grass wasnt just greener in those days, it was stronger as well.
So, I decided to check out his site, and tried Gridrunner+++.
Is there something in the history that says "temporary insanity due to sensory overload"?
Here is the real mirror
The whole thing is obviously a C- junior high research paper!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
It kind of shows up one of the problems with computers today. Back then, you had a programming language built right into the machine and could play about with it to your heart's content, and if you felt that BASIC was a bit, well, basic, it wasn't going to break the bank to pick up a book on Z80 or 6502/10 machine code and an assembler to experiment with. I certainly did - not to any great level, but enough to create little games and get things moving around on screen.
What do kids have like that now, though? I'd hate to think that computer studies classes for 14-year-olds drop them right in with C!
You must think in Russian.
Not as tall as Phil Harrison (Sony) or Dave Perry (Interplay) though :-)
That story was in his book, "The Open Road" (I think), which was basically Bill Gates trying to predict the future of technology, with a bit of autobiographical stuff tossed in.
Anyway, that story is true as long as Bill G was telling the truth in his book. =D
In the book, though, his class scheduler put him in classes with the girls he liked, not just any girls.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
I can hardly wait to play Unity...
All right, I remember Not The Nine O'Clock News spoofs of Space Invaders competitions, and we even had an original table model in the office a couple of years back, but what's the Death Row Execution Method?
Quick wafting zephyrs vex bold Jim
Also Defender 2000 for the Jaguar and remakes of Gridrunner, Hover Bovver and Deflex for PocketPCs (and Windows). I admit he hasn't done anything terribly original since, well, ever, but then a) shooting games haven't been original since 1985 or so and b) Unity seems to be shaping up to be something pretty special.
Yup! Useless!
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I played many of these games to death on the C64. Some where a humorous slant on established themes (Matrix/Centipede, Attack of the Mutant Camels/Atari Empire Strikes Back), but others were truly original, like Iridis Alpha - a horizontally scrolling shooter where your craft was in the same level in two different dimensions at once via a split screen effect. That was really interesting twist on the old scrolling shooter - the Viewtiful Joe of it's day, but for shooters and not platform games.
:) Perhaps a "Programming Pearls" style book for programmers seeking to get the most bang for the buck. His games seemed to break the boundaries of what we thought the C64 could do almost effortlessly.
Anyway, I want to point out that Jeff's a pretty good *writer*, as well. Back in the day (1983), the game "Matrix", with it's smooth scrolling grid background, was very impressive. Jeff wrote an article in some magazine describing exactly how he did this. Right down to the machine code level. No listings, just an engaging and detailed description that left you understanding *exactly* how to do it (*). So much so, that I turned around and added it to the game/toy/demo thing I was mucking about with at the time. I was 13. I'm not saying that makes me a child prodigy (I'm sure others will quickly list their early coding experiences that beat that), I'm actually saying that makes Jeff's writing very, very, good.
I'd like to see him write perhaps a whole book on something technical. Anything
(*) I know, you want to know how it was done, without using the C64's hardware smooth scrolling. The simple answer is he took an unused character, and altered the bitmap for it. So take a "T", then create 8 frames where the horizontal bar drops so that your bitmap is an upside down "T". Because of the way the C64 video chip worked, altering the bitmap of a character made *every* instance of this character on the screen change *instantly*, in hardware. So fill the screen with your "T", hook up a little bit of machine code to an interrupt to drive the animation, and you've got a full screen smooth scrolling grid with "practically zero effort" as Jeff put it. Reverse the animation and you go backwards. Now *that's* lateral thinking.
but damn ammusing anyway and worth a click.
I really wanted to read this, but it seems to have gone away. I've tried to get the google cached version, but can't find the right way to stick my fingers down google's throat. Anyone got it?
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
He read Asimov and Clarke being 7 years old. Did I understand this correctly (x+9=16, x=7yrs)? Wow....