6 ms·

The boy behind the biggest coin-op conversion of the 80s

152 points by mmastrac 7y ago

henrikschroder 7y ago
If you liked this story, and haven't yet checked out Jordan Mechner's journals from the mid-80's when he developed Prince of Persia, I highly recommend that you do: https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/ https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/
- mmastrac 7y ago
  I go back and read this every once in a while. It's a pretty magical story.
djmips 7y ago
Once again you see that back then, the porting game programmer had no access to the any of the original assets, art, code or assistance. I was doing the same work back in the late eighties and it was part of the job to master the game you were porting and then reverse engineer everything.
- dunmalg 7y ago
  Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, and I just had to basically do everything from scratch. I could look at the original source code and art assets, but I was writing 6502 C64 assembly and the original was MSDOS 8088, with absolutely no commonality. Even the art-- I had to be my own artist-- was a tremendous chore. Downgrading 16px16px8 color EGA "tiles" to C64 8x16x4 color sprites when the 8 pixels were double width and one of the 4 colors was "transparent" was frequently an exercise in frustration. At one point I hollered at my boss that "I can't make a duck out of this!" (attempting to create a mallard flapping its wings) and went home early. I came back the next say and made a duck, but only barely. I eventually quit to work on my engineering degree. Never regretted it for a moment. A lot of us got really burned out back then.
- Flow 7y ago
  I wonder how much the authors of C64/Amiga Bubble Bobble, R-Type, Paperboy, Ghost'n'Goblins, Buggy Boy, Solomon's Key, Pang, Arkanoid, Silkworm played the game? Those were actually good ports. Do you have a list of the games you worked on?
  - mysterydip 7y ago
    Not sure on the C64 version, but you can read about the ZX Spectrum conversion of R-Type here: http://bizzley.com/ http://bizzley.com/ which I recommend if you're a fan of the spectrum, R-Type, or curious about ports.
- mpclark 7y ago
  And the ones working on the licensed ports were lucky, with their fancy arcade machines on free play in the corner of the office. Authors of, er, 'tributes' just had to wander down to the local arcade with a pocket full of coins and play until they'd remembered everything.
- JohnBooty 7y ago
  It is simply insane to me that companies didn't provide these assets (digital assets, design docs) to the folks producing these ports. I understand that these ports were often cash grabs. The original Japanese publisher could sign away the home computer rights to one of their games and get a nice check in return. But, still. Surely the original owners of these properties must have realized that by providing at least some assistance to their licensees (something requiring almost no effort) they would see better results? Surely these Japanese publishers must have understood that a bad port of Outrun or some other game would reflect badly on them and tarnish their brand even if they had no involvement in it? I say this as a long-time fan of Sega and other Japanese game companies, which were filled with some brilliant folks. That's why these decisions have always baffled me.
  - tenebrisalietum 7y ago
    They may not have had access to them, other than what would be in the ROMs. There weren't standard digital art tools in the early 80's. Things may have been physically drawn on graph paper, manually converted to binary, and then the drawings disposed of or otherwise inaccessible due to things like contracting situations, etc.
    - JohnBooty 7y ago
      Yes, but that's what I'm talking about. It's crazy that the developers never made some effort to preserve the source materials and get them to the porters. Even a very minimal effort would have surely yielded some large results relative to the effort expended. At the very least, you'd think they'd want to protect their company name by not having it attached to garbage ports. A lot of those design materials were indeed saved, btw. This book and its sequel collect a lot of them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2014/11/12/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-vol-1-book-review/#42f939b85156 https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2014/11/12/the-unto...
      - derefr 7y ago
        Games were small back then, so there was less often an ongoing relationship between a publisher and a developer, and more often just a one-time exchange: software, already finished, for a lump sum. As if the publisher had contracted out work on the game and didn't know it until the contractor showed up at their door. Basically, games as "piece work." At that point, the developer walked off with money, and the publisher walked off with a game binary they could resell and market however they liked (including taking the IP rights and licensing them to a porter.) But the publisher didn't retain any right to the developer's time; and often, the "developer" was just some college kid who developed just the one game, moved on to other pursuits, and now can't be found.
pmoriarty 7y ago
I can't find it now, but there was a very impressive story posted to HN about a kid who reverse engineered and patched an arcade game in the 80's and sent the code in to the company that made the game, and they wound up flying him out to meet its developers. I think the game was Robotron, but it might have been something else.
- ndespres 7y ago
  Are you thinking of the story of Ms Pac Man, which reverse engineered and patched the original Pac Man cabinet? I think it was Atari flying out to meet the developers. Great story either way: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-created-ms-pac-man-a-35th-anniversary-oral-history https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-cre...
  - pmoriarty 7y ago
    No. I'm sure it wasn't anything to do with Pac Man.
- joezydeco 7y ago
  It was Robotron. Christian Gingras reverse engineered the entire game from scratch AND patched a fatal crash in the game that eluded the original developers for years. http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christiangingras/ http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...
  - zeristor 7y ago
    Thanks, that made me smile like an emoticon.
iuguy 7y ago
I'd swear blind that game was cursed. Almost every 8-bit conversion (including the C64 version), and some of the 16-bit versions were terrible. ISTR the Sega Master System version being the most playable.
- Flow 7y ago
  Most racing games were horrible on the 8-bit computers. Even on the Amiga there were few actually good racing games. Lotus Esprit Challenge and Stunt Car Racer(God bless) was among the good ones.
  - philpem 7y ago
    E-Type on the Acorn Archimedes was pretty good. Unashamedly an OutRun clone, but with a Jaguar E-Type instead of a Ferrari. One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
    - axilmar 7y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY Not really on par with Outrun though.
      - philpem 7y ago
        I'll give you that. But to a kid playing it on lunch breaks, on the computers we used to do our school work? :) It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
    - radiowave 7y ago
      Of course, you're describing a 32 bit ARM system here. No surprise it outclasses it's 8 bit predecessors.
  - 7y ago
pushpop 7y ago
Couldn’t read their article because I couldn’t even get passed their cookie consent page: > You can choose here if you would not like this session tracking to occur. Does this mean I’m opting in or out? To compound things the options are “yes” and “no” rather than “opt in”, “on”, “enable” nor any other the other verbs typically used on other sites. Which means I have to navigate their maze of double negatives to understand what I’m electing for. I really dislike sites that employ this kind of language anti-pattern.
twic 7y ago
> When we got the first royalty check my dad gave me a grand and I part-exchanged my Mini Cooper for a Ford Fiesta XR2. A few months later I changed that for a Ford Orion 1.6i Ghia. This is where i cracked up. I think these models are all European, so American readers won't be familiar with them, but this article is a lovely tour of Shit Fords of the 1980s.
- reitoei 7y ago
  The Orion was a bit shit but the Mini Cooper and the XR2 Fiesta were great at the time. Hah, this brings back memories of buying weed in the 90's off a lad with a purple Orion.
  - noir_lord 7y ago
    In a true sense the Orion 1.6i was shit but not at the time, at the time it was high in the list of cars you'd want at 18 (I was born 80 so I remember lusting after them) particularly since it was the same engine as the XR3i without the utterly cripling insurance/reputation. I still have a soft spot for that era but I'd have the even more naff (and lethal) Capri.
    - reitoei 7y ago
      I loved that era of VW Scirocco but they were awful apparently. The Renault 5 GT was THE car to have around my parts.
raphlinus 7y ago
That was an interesting read, as my relationship with my dad was pretty similar at that age. I was coding image handling systems for newspapers (in 80286 assembly) with my dad handling the business side. We had some success - installations in a few newspapers and some banks in Iceland, but not making real money. The parts about the tension and fights sounded almost exactly like my story. Then I left home at 22 and came to grad school to UC Berkeley, all the way across the country, which was one of the best decisions I ever made. I'm still doing 2D graphics software! It flows more or less directly from the work I did as a teenager.

152 points by mmastrac 7y ago

If you liked this story, and haven't yet checked out Jordan Mechner's journals from the mid-80's when he developed Prince of Persia, I highly recommend that you do: https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/ https://www.jordanmechner.com/backstage/journals/

mmastrac 7y ago
I go back and read this every once in a while. It's a pretty magical story.

djmips 7y ago

Once again you see that back then, the porting game programmer had no access to the any of the original assets, art, code or assistance. I was doing the same work back in the late eighties and it was part of the job to master the game you were porting and then reverse engineer everything.

dunmalg 7y ago
Back then, it didn't even help much to have the original assets. I worked in-house for a company porting some of their early EGA graphics PC games to the C64, and I just had to basically do everything from scratch. I could look at the original source code and art assets, but I was writing 6502 C64 assembly and the original was MSDOS 8088, with absolutely no commonality. Even the art-- I had to be my own artist-- was a tremendous chore. Downgrading 16px16px8 color EGA "tiles" to C64 8x16x4 color sprites when the 8 pixels were double width and one of the 4 colors was "transparent" was frequently an exercise in frustration. At one point I hollered at my boss that "I can't make a duck out of this!" (attempting to create a mallard flapping its wings) and went home early. I came back the next say and made a duck, but only barely. I eventually quit to work on my engineering degree. Never regretted it for a moment. A lot of us got really burned out back then.
Flow 7y ago
I wonder how much the authors of C64/Amiga Bubble Bobble, R-Type, Paperboy, Ghost'n'Goblins, Buggy Boy, Solomon's Key, Pang, Arkanoid, Silkworm played the game? Those were actually good ports. Do you have a list of the games you worked on?
- mysterydip 7y ago
  Not sure on the C64 version, but you can read about the ZX Spectrum conversion of R-Type here: http://bizzley.com/ http://bizzley.com/ which I recommend if you're a fan of the spectrum, R-Type, or curious about ports.
mpclark 7y ago
And the ones working on the licensed ports were lucky, with their fancy arcade machines on free play in the corner of the office. Authors of, er, 'tributes' just had to wander down to the local arcade with a pocket full of coins and play until they'd remembered everything.
JohnBooty 7y ago
It is simply insane to me that companies didn't provide these assets (digital assets, design docs) to the folks producing these ports. I understand that these ports were often cash grabs. The original Japanese publisher could sign away the home computer rights to one of their games and get a nice check in return. But, still. Surely the original owners of these properties must have realized that by providing at least some assistance to their licensees (something requiring almost no effort) they would see better results? Surely these Japanese publishers must have understood that a bad port of Outrun or some other game would reflect badly on them and tarnish their brand even if they had no involvement in it? I say this as a long-time fan of Sega and other Japanese game companies, which were filled with some brilliant folks. That's why these decisions have always baffled me.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  They may not have had access to them, other than what would be in the ROMs. There weren't standard digital art tools in the early 80's. Things may have been physically drawn on graph paper, manually converted to binary, and then the drawings disposed of or otherwise inaccessible due to things like contracting situations, etc.
  - JohnBooty 7y ago
    Yes, but that's what I'm talking about. It's crazy that the developers never made some effort to preserve the source materials and get them to the porters. Even a very minimal effort would have surely yielded some large results relative to the effort expended. At the very least, you'd think they'd want to protect their company name by not having it attached to garbage ports. A lot of those design materials were indeed saved, btw. This book and its sequel collect a lot of them: https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2014/11/12/the-untold-history-of-japanese-game-developers-vol-1-book-review/#42f939b85156 https://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2014/11/12/the-unto...
    - derefr 7y ago
      Games were small back then, so there was less often an ongoing relationship between a publisher and a developer, and more often just a one-time exchange: software, already finished, for a lump sum. As if the publisher had contracted out work on the game and didn't know it until the contractor showed up at their door. Basically, games as "piece work." At that point, the developer walked off with money, and the publisher walked off with a game binary they could resell and market however they liked (including taking the IP rights and licensing them to a porter.) But the publisher didn't retain any right to the developer's time; and often, the "developer" was just some college kid who developed just the one game, moved on to other pursuits, and now can't be found.

pmoriarty 7y ago

I can't find it now, but there was a very impressive story posted to HN about a kid who reverse engineered and patched an arcade game in the 80's and sent the code in to the company that made the game, and they wound up flying him out to meet its developers. I think the game was Robotron, but it might have been something else.

ndespres 7y ago
Are you thinking of the story of Ms Pac Man, which reverse engineered and patched the original Pac Man cabinet? I think it was Atari flying out to meet the developers. Great story either way: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-created-ms-pac-man-a-35th-anniversary-oral-history https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-cre...
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  No. I'm sure it wasn't anything to do with Pac Man.
joezydeco 7y ago
It was Robotron. Christian Gingras reverse engineered the entire game from scratch AND patched a fatal crash in the game that eluded the original developers for years. http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christiangingras/ http://www.robotron2084guidebook.com/technical/christianging...
- zeristor 7y ago
  Thanks, that made me smile like an emoticon.

iuguy 7y ago

I'd swear blind that game was cursed. Almost every 8-bit conversion (including the C64 version), and some of the 16-bit versions were terrible. ISTR the Sega Master System version being the most playable.

Flow 7y ago
Most racing games were horrible on the 8-bit computers. Even on the Amiga there were few actually good racing games. Lotus Esprit Challenge and Stunt Car Racer(God bless) was among the good ones.
- philpem 7y ago
  E-Type on the Acorn Archimedes was pretty good. Unashamedly an OutRun clone, but with a Jaguar E-Type instead of a Ferrari. One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
  - axilmar 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY Not really on par with Outrun though.
    - philpem 7y ago
      I'll give you that. But to a kid playing it on lunch breaks, on the computers we used to do our school work? :) It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
  - radiowave 7y ago
    Of course, you're describing a 32 bit ARM system here. No surprise it outclasses it's 8 bit predecessors.
- 7y ago

pushpop 7y ago

Couldn’t read their article because I couldn’t even get passed their cookie consent page: > You can choose here if you would not like this session tracking to occur. Does this mean I’m opting in or out? To compound things the options are “yes” and “no” rather than “opt in”, “on”, “enable” nor any other the other verbs typically used on other sites. Which means I have to navigate their maze of double negatives to understand what I’m electing for. I really dislike sites that employ this kind of language anti-pattern.

twic 7y ago

> When we got the first royalty check my dad gave me a grand and I part-exchanged my Mini Cooper for a Ford Fiesta XR2. A few months later I changed that for a Ford Orion 1.6i Ghia. This is where i cracked up. I think these models are all European, so American readers won't be familiar with them, but this article is a lovely tour of Shit Fords of the 1980s.

reitoei 7y ago
The Orion was a bit shit but the Mini Cooper and the XR2 Fiesta were great at the time. Hah, this brings back memories of buying weed in the 90's off a lad with a purple Orion.
- noir_lord 7y ago
  In a true sense the Orion 1.6i was shit but not at the time, at the time it was high in the list of cars you'd want at 18 (I was born 80 so I remember lusting after them) particularly since it was the same engine as the XR3i without the utterly cripling insurance/reputation. I still have a soft spot for that era but I'd have the even more naff (and lethal) Capri.
  - reitoei 7y ago
    I loved that era of VW Scirocco but they were awful apparently. The Renault 5 GT was THE car to have around my parts.

raphlinus 7y ago

That was an interesting read, as my relationship with my dad was pretty similar at that age. I was coding image handling systems for newspapers (in 80286 assembly) with my dad handling the business side. We had some success - installations in a few newspapers and some banks in Iceland, but not making real money. The parts about the tension and fights sounded almost exactly like my story. Then I left home at 22 and came to grad school to UC Berkeley, all the way across the country, which was one of the best decisions I ever made. I'm still doing 2D graphics software! It flows more or less directly from the work I did as a teenager.