3 ms·

No mention of 17 Bit / Team 17 is complete without mentioning they got their start by publishing a hugely successful disk magazine. Initially quite amateur but

No mention of 17 Bit / Team 17 is complete without mentioning they got their start by publishing a hugely successful disk magazine. Initially quite amateur but became a fairly slick presentation, and very popular. If memory serves a few of the magazines gave away their disks a time or two. Pretty much every UK Amiga owner knew of them from this. Worms was also notable in that it was one of a very few decent games produced in BASIC - Blitz Basic. Not sure if other 17 Bit output was also Basic.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
richardjdare 10y ago
Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines. I was a Blitz Basic programmer myself (still do a bit now and again). The other big Blitz Basic game was Skidmarks, a really cool isometric racing game from Acid Software. I used to carry my Amiga and TV set a few hundred yards to my friends house for multiplayer games over a null modem cable! I was a huge fan of Alien Breed, Team17's first self-published release. It was a gauntlet style top-down shooter with an "Aliens" theme. Rico Holmes's pixel art was fantastic and it had great sound. I had to buy an extra 512k for my A500 for £25 in order to play it. I think it was also one of the earliest games to have a pre-rendered animation sequence in the intro. It was made by Tobias Richter, who was well known on the Amiga scene for his 3d renders.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  They did. The mag was probably started to promote the PD library - it'd include a few PD things each time. Seem to remember they'd put a scene demo, a game and an app or utility on every disk. They seemed to curate their PD collection and give good descriptions, rather than havng to buy on blind faith and a disk title. The main PD competition, the Fred Fish disks were so very variable by comparison.
- busterarm 10y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VFOzKrv8RY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VFOzKrv8RY Ahh man...Allister Brimble's themes man...so good. Even the (relatively) recent remakes were quite good!
mrec 10y ago
Blitz wasn't your grandfather's BASIC, though. Structs and pointers and inline asm, oh my.
- talideon 10y ago
  Had all that in BBC BASIC, back in the day!
  - mrec 10y ago
    Really? I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC (Acorn Electron), and while I recall asm I don't remember it having structs or pointers.
    - talideon 10y ago
      Not structs, but it did have pointers, or at least the BBC Model B version of BBC BASIC did. '?a%' or 'a%?0' would let you read/write the byte pointed at by 'a%', for instance. In BBC BASIC V on the Archimedes, you also had '!' (i.e. '!a%' or 'a%!0'), which would allow you to read 32-bit words. I missed you mentioning structs, though I do recall simulating structs with PROCs specifically for manipulating system data-structures, which was essential for WIMP programming on RISC OS, if you didn't want your code to be an unreadable mess. Assigning the offsets to variables helped with simulating structs too.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

richardjdare 10y ago

Didn't 17bit run a PD library as well as a disk magazine? Back in the day, if you wanted free software or shareware you ordered it by post from a Public Domain library. They used to advertise in the Amiga magazines. I was a Blitz Basic programmer myself (still do a bit now and again). The other big Blitz Basic game was Skidmarks, a really cool isometric racing game from Acid Software. I used to carry my Amiga and TV set a few hundred yards to my friends house for multiplayer games over a null modem cable! I was a huge fan of Alien Breed, Team17's first self-published release. It was a gauntlet style top-down shooter with an "Aliens" theme. Rico Holmes's pixel art was fantastic and it had great sound. I had to buy an extra 512k for my A500 for £25 in order to play it. I think it was also one of the earliest games to have a pre-rendered animation sequence in the intro. It was made by Tobias Richter, who was well known on the Amiga scene for his 3d renders.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
They did. The mag was probably started to promote the PD library - it'd include a few PD things each time. Seem to remember they'd put a scene demo, a game and an app or utility on every disk. They seemed to curate their PD collection and give good descriptions, rather than havng to buy on blind faith and a disk title. The main PD competition, the Fred Fish disks were so very variable by comparison.
busterarm 10y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VFOzKrv8RY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VFOzKrv8RY Ahh man...Allister Brimble's themes man...so good. Even the (relatively) recent remakes were quite good!

mrec 10y ago

Blitz wasn't your grandfather's BASIC, though. Structs and pointers and inline asm, oh my.

talideon 10y ago
Had all that in BBC BASIC, back in the day!
- mrec 10y ago
  Really? I cut my teeth on BBC BASIC (Acorn Electron), and while I recall asm I don't remember it having structs or pointers.
  - talideon 10y ago
    Not structs, but it did have pointers, or at least the BBC Model B version of BBC BASIC did. '?a%' or 'a%?0' would let you read/write the byte pointed at by 'a%', for instance. In BBC BASIC V on the Archimedes, you also had '!' (i.e. '!a%' or 'a%!0'), which would allow you to read 32-bit words. I missed you mentioning structs, though I do recall simulating structs with PROCs specifically for manipulating system data-structures, which was essential for WIMP programming on RISC OS, if you didn't want your code to be an unreadable mess. Assigning the offsets to variables helped with simulating structs too.