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Part 2 of Jeff Minter's History of Llamasoft Published
Tmuk writes "The second part of Jeff Minter's Complete History of Llamasoft has just gone up over at The Way of the Rodent. Straight from the man himself, it's a fantastic read after the previously Slashdot-covered first part. Enjoy!"
Mate - Jeff used to provide downloads of his whole video game archive on his website before he switched to llamasoft.co.uk. I don't know where you can get them now. Jeff reckoned that one of his larger mistakes was to license his software for release on a PC at one point - perhaps he has realised the value of his software brands and has withdrawn the downloads so he can realise an income off them at some point. His Gridrunner and Camel titles as well as Llamasoft and his name certainly have good brand recognition amongst the gamers of the day so he well deserves to profit from those :)
http://www.llamasoftarchive.org/
http://www.medwaypvb.com/llamadloads.htm
Putting the romance back into necromancer.
Two . Colour, Sound, Poking Around.
.Enterprise. (a PET graphic character that was meant to be similarly shaped playing-card club symbol) across sectors of the galaxy in real-time using the keyboard, one sector per screen. Sometimes, you would encounter a .Klingon. or a .Romulan. (cue more PET playing-card symbols) and a firefight would ensue, with everyone firing straight and diagonal line characters at the other (.lasers.).
.ship. from opposite ends of the keyboard (a bit cramped, since the PET keyboard was tiny) and bumbled around, sniping at each another (one of the ships was just an X-shaped graphics character, so of course whoever had that was said to have the X-Wing). Ahh, you needed real imagination to flesh out your games with a little atmosphere in those days.
.graphics. characters and the keyboard, although at first sight appearing to be nicer (being actually keyboard-shaped, rather than small and weird and fiddly like the PET.s) was a bit tacky and prone to double-entering. We stuck with the PET and carried on creating and played our little games.
.Ruptured. Rawlinson was the guru of the geeks, and he had told me about some strange BASIC commands called PEEK and POKE. At first these commands seemed completely mysterious, because I had no idea what it was they actually did. I knew it was something to do with accessing parts of the machine's inner memory, and we used them mainly to try and make strange things happen by altering values in a location called, mysteriously, .zero page..
6
Back in college, we finally had enough knowledge to begin making simple games. And simple they were . to the point of being ludicrously primitive by any reasonable standards. But they were our games that we had made ourselves, and there was something immensely satisfying about playing a game with your mates and knowing that it had come entirely out of your head.
I remember writing a realtime version of those Star Trek games that were popular at the time. In mine, instead of being a turn-based game, you guided the
Out of that grew a two-player dogfight game, in which each player controlled their
The Enterprise, off of Star Trek.
A club, from out of playing cards.
We spent every spare moment in front of the PET, coding up games, watching others coding up games, or playing each other.s creations. In due course, the PET was joined by a TRS-80 Model 1, which became known to us as the Trash-80. This was a Z-80 based machine, and although we were curious about it at first, it didn't appeal so much to us gamers - it lacked the PET's
I remember that before long I began to run into difficulty as the ambitions for my games got loftier. Everything was fine as long as there weren't many objects on the screen and the environments weren't too complex. But I wanted to have many enemies on the screen at once, and gameplay arenas more complex than just a straightforward box. But BASIC was too slow and unwieldy to do some of the things that needed doing, and although I had achieved competence at BASIC programming, I really had no idea how things actually worked inside the heart of the machine.
7
We gleaned from magazines that BASIC stored some working variables in this zero page area, and by fiddling around and changing those values you could do odd things - like speeding up the flash rate of the cursor until it became a blur, or reducing the keyboard auto repeat rate so that the merest touch of a key would spew out loads of characters all at once. Sometimes, messing with these values did nothing at all, and sometimes it crashed the machine solidly. I can't say that I used PEEK and POKE on zero page to any great end, or really even knew what I was doing at all - it was all very much just voodoo. POKE about and see what happened, without really understanding why.
A Commodore Pet on top of a fridge. Recently.
The problems with my games w
There was an in depth interview with Jeff on an issue of PC FORMAT quite a few eon's ago. Plus on the coverdisk it had a copy of llamatron! I wish they had online archives of those older articles :-/
Get a Gamecube - his latest psychedelic shooter Unity is soon to be released.
Info and images here.
it's in my head
I have to wonder what you were expecting, if you found it disappointing. If the game's called "{Attack,Revenge} of the mutant camels", how can you be disappointed to find a game involving killing camels? The clue's is the title, one would have thought...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Actually, you only need to type lI (lower-case l, upper-case I). run is rU, ...
> He does own at least one (maybe three) sheep
> (one is 16 years old and called Flossie)
Actually, Flossie died in September last year.