For the retro gamers...

[pauld]

Some linkage for retro gamers/aging nerds:

http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=987

Memories of the guy who ported Donkey Kong to the Atari.

[flammableBen]

Cheers paul. Interesting read.

[Panda Paws]

Oh those were the days ... I never really got into coding on Ataris etc but cut my teeth on Spectrums. I used to come up with some decent stuff on those thing, and proudest moment was creating about four editions of an electronic magazine. Pretty much a forerunner for what I do now!!!

[Batch]

Incomprehensible that a 'port' back then meant reverse engineering the whole game.

Good read though!

[flammableBen]

Jeff Minter's history of llamasoft biography thingy is a good read...

http://www.llamasoft.co.uk/lshistory1.php



I remember reading about Peter Scott managing to port the original Sim City onto the BBC Micro towards the end of it's life time. There's a bit here.. http://beebgames.com/psinterv.php

...But SIM CITY was my one major programming achievement. I was a competent programmer, no better, no worse than many. Gary Partis, for example, was a far better programmer than me. But not being that good had its advantages. I couldn't do that many fancy tricks so I'd try and make the games playable. I didn't want to impress anyone with my technical knowledge, so I tried extra hard on the graphics and sound.

SIM CITY wasn't cute, wasn't easy and simply didn't seem possible. Fitting a 512K game into 20K a game full of artificial intelligence and hugely complex algorithms.. a nightmare. But I think it came out OK. Won awards and stuff. And the original programmer even said he preferred it over the C64 version (a disk-only game with three times as much memory as mine). I was and still am proud of that 'un.

I think he goes in more detail somewhere on the Stairwaytohell forums. Can't be fucked to find it though.

The way people used to find ways to push systems to do crazy things is always interesting. Developers are a bit spoilt for resources nowadays.

[flammableBen]

Warren Spector (worked on games from Ultima Underworld up to being responsible for Deus Ex) has been doing lectures at the University of Texas, involving interviews with other people in the gaming industry, general game design, where it lies as a media form, how it's changed / is changing  etc. Watched the first 3 and the Harvey Smith one in particular is fascinating. They're pretty long, 2-3hours each. But definately worth a viewing if your interested in that sort of thing.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1253

You can find links to them in the comments section under the article. I think they've been taken down from the university page.

[redbullzeye]

Oh those were the days ... I never really got into coding on Ataris etc but cut my teeth on Spectrums. I used to come up with some decent stuff on those thing, and proudest moment was creating about four editions of an electronic magazine. Pretty much a forerunner for what I do now!!!

I remember typing in code for ages on the Spectrum(I think, the one with the memory plug-in) only for a lorry to rumble by and shake the building and the bloody plug-in would dislodge and I'd lose it all.  Give me an Amiga anyday