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Nice tricks! I never did much with soft-sprites on any platform really. One C64 game I worked upon did a bunch of interesting similar kinds of tricks — flips i

Nice tricks! I never did much with soft-sprites on any platform really. One C64 game I worked upon did a bunch of interesting similar kinds of tricks — flips in both axis, plus the stored graphics only used a partial area of the h/w sprite, so I could pack the graphics in advance, and copy them out every frame at runtime — but only for the main character sprite. My first 'proper' C64 dev environment was actually a BBC B, as I mentioned in another reply — almost identical setup to yours, but without the hard disk. A much better setup than just working on a single machine! After that, we used PCs with PDS cards.

justinlloyd 4y ago
Oddly enough Andy Glaister, creator of the PDS cards, and I, (Andy is two months younger than me) have very similar early careers of creating video games, heading in to local computer shops and buying C15 tapes, then duplicating them, photocopying the labels, and collecting some nice royalties for an 11-yr old. We had never met up until we both independently moved to the US and our paths crossed for a short time (Activision, other companies). Life is weird. I'll go hunt for your other comments down thread, seems you and I also share some disconnected history of developing games.
- jimsmart 4y ago
  Interesting, cheers. I did a brief stint at Software Studios / Electric Dreams (in Southampton) — who were owned by Activision — in the late 80s. And then I did some work (via Images Software) for Activision (in Reading), a little later in the 80s. Briefly met quite a lot of well-known (better known than I, anyhow) devs during that time. I think I recall meeting Andy Glaister at some point (though not at Activision), but I might be wrong: his name was often mentioned in our office because we (Images s/w) were dealing with PDS quite a lot. But if I did meet him, it was only very briefly, and he likely wouldn't remember me. Him and our boss (Karl Jefferies) seemed to have quite a few meetings. I think the early / home computer games dev world was actually kinda quite small (in the UK), well, fairly tightly networked — lots of folk knew one another, or were just a couple of friend-network links away. It seemed quite commonplace to meet other devs, usually during what is now called 'crunch time' towards the end of a project, in the publisher's office. I still have memories of sleeping under various desks, in various offices, on various projects. — Life is indeed weird!

justinlloyd 4y ago

Oddly enough Andy Glaister, creator of the PDS cards, and I, (Andy is two months younger than me) have very similar early careers of creating video games, heading in to local computer shops and buying C15 tapes, then duplicating them, photocopying the labels, and collecting some nice royalties for an 11-yr old. We had never met up until we both independently moved to the US and our paths crossed for a short time (Activision, other companies). Life is weird. I'll go hunt for your other comments down thread, seems you and I also share some disconnected history of developing games.

jimsmart 4y ago
Interesting, cheers. I did a brief stint at Software Studios / Electric Dreams (in Southampton) — who were owned by Activision — in the late 80s. And then I did some work (via Images Software) for Activision (in Reading), a little later in the 80s. Briefly met quite a lot of well-known (better known than I, anyhow) devs during that time. I think I recall meeting Andy Glaister at some point (though not at Activision), but I might be wrong: his name was often mentioned in our office because we (Images s/w) were dealing with PDS quite a lot. But if I did meet him, it was only very briefly, and he likely wouldn't remember me. Him and our boss (Karl Jefferies) seemed to have quite a few meetings. I think the early / home computer games dev world was actually kinda quite small (in the UK), well, fairly tightly networked — lots of folk knew one another, or were just a couple of friend-network links away. It seemed quite commonplace to meet other devs, usually during what is now called 'crunch time' towards the end of a project, in the publisher's office. I still have memories of sleeping under various desks, in various offices, on various projects. — Life is indeed weird!