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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
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!
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
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.
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....
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.
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.