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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!"
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... :)
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
tempest 2000 & 3000 among others..
some list from google..
Code & Graphics
* Ancipital, 1984
* Attack of the Mutant Camels, 1983
* Batalyx, 1985
* Gridrunner, 19??
* Hellgate, 1984
* Hover Bovver, 1983
* Iridis Alpha, 1986
* Lazer Zone, 1983
* Made in France II(?), 19??
* Mama Llama, 1986(?)
* Matrix, 1983
* Mega Blast, 19??
* Return of the Mutant Camels, 1987(?)
* Revenge of the Mutant Camels, 1984(?)
* Rox 64, 198?
* Sheep in Space, 198?
* Voidrunner, 19??
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
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
If you check here, not only can you get a list of titles, but most of them are freely available for download.
Where's my lobbyist? Right here.
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
He keeps a blog on the YakYak forum with screenshots of WIP :)
Almost right.
It was so easy to copy that Jeff Minter and his axe had quite a job to do before justice had been served. Unfortunately almost no-one was left to mention the game.
Except you.
In fact, now that you've come public with this particular skeleton in your closet, don't you think that you should keep an eye on any axe-carrying Jeffs you might run into.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
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.