You can find me here too. The account has been around for a while, but I haven't been using it. You may wish to bookmark or add me! Thanks.
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Kevin Edwards ( Retro Videogame development )
@KevEdwardsRetro
Retired video game programmer. Game code archivist. Creator of games for the BBC Micro, Electron, NES, SNES, PC, XBox, PS3/4, Mobile, Vita, 3DS. LEGO Dev/AFOL
Kevin Edwards ( Retro Videogame development )’s Tweets
TT well represented in this! Out little porting team was responsible for 5 of these titles!
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The Commdore sales guy probably has a really bad back after posing for this photo holding that Commodore PET. Personal Computer World, August 1978 - almost 45 years ago! #1970s #fashionstyle
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Ste still has a few prints of his cover artwork left if you are interested in obtaining one.
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Ste Pickford's amazing artwork as used on the cover of 'ACORN : a world in pixels' @stepickford
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Name all the games!
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The Acorn Bitstik consisted of the Bitstik controller ( a 3-axis joystick ), ROM software and CAD application software on floppy disk. You also needed a BBC Micro with 6502 2nd processor for it to work. All kinds of shapes & images can be manipulated using the Bitstik.
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In 1987 the popular programming languages and development tools appeared to be BASIC, PASCAL along with ASSEMBLERS, MODULAR-2 and ADA. No sign of C/C++ at that time, although they were certainly available. Grey Matter advert from Personal Computer World magazine, 1987 ( UK ).
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Back in 1985 Acorn Computers were close to financial collapse. At that time, they were working on their own RISC style processor, ARM. Acorn did eventually fold. However, out of all that went on, ARM emerged to become the biggest British success story of modern time.
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Some light reading for the weekend...and beyond. A stack of Personal Computer World magazines from 1985 to 1987. PCW is one of my all-time favourite magazines. Incredibly informative, technical and well written. From a time when there was no internet and books were expensive.
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The August 1987 issue of Personal Computer World reviewed the Acorn Archimedes - the first stand-alone computer using Acorn's ARM processor. A great machine and a great review...apart from one massive mistake. The 'Lander' demo was NOT written in BBC BASIC!
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Videogame development in 1988 at Software Creations. Tatung Einsteins were used as the development host linked to target machines such as C64, Spectrum or Amstrad CPC. ED was the IDE we used to edit/assemble/deploy our code. LED Storm Spectrum Music Driver shown here assembling.
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I'm fairly sure that's a Tatung Einstein next to me on the left side, by my elbow - I'm in the light blue jumper. This picture was taken around 1990/1 in Software Creations top secret NES development room - code name 'banana'. To the right is our NEWer PC NES dev system.
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A quick preview of some fun I've been having with Mike Webb's original Tatung Einstein development software - as used by Software Creations, Ocean etc. This was used for Spectrum, Amstrad and C64 game development in the mid/late 80s. I've not seen this running in over 30 years!
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Finally found the source code for Software Creations' AY Music Driver - Amstrad CPC. Written by my former colleague Ste Ruddy. Very similar to the NES and C64 ones in many repsects. The driver interpreted a byte stream 'language' manually typed in by the musician ( Tim Follin ).
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Sinclair ZX Spectrum 'LED Storm' game credits from the original source code. From a time when we wrote videogames in assembly language and the development team consisted of 3 people.
#Z80 #Spectrum #Sinclair #RETROGAMING
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Has C++ become a Katamari language as it collects ideas and features from other languages to make it seem up-to-date and relevant? Bloating and becoming less simplistic and more cryptic with its syntax. Time for a better and more relevant language to replace it?
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The C++ language has been around for a long time and is still evolving. In the game development world C++ began to take over from C during the 1990s. Whilst the early compilers didn't generate great code, things have changed. Love it or hate it C++ is still going strong.
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SCEE 'devstation 07' took place in May 2007 at the BFI Southbank in London. Sony developer's from the UK and Europe were invited to 3 days of presentations and training for the Playstation 3 console. These covered programming, art, production, networking, and audio. Great event.
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My archiving work is done for today. 24 discs have been imaged and are ready for inspection. Two or three had unrecoverable sectors. I will have to see if they are actually being used by files. If necessary I can do some flux level reading to try and repair.
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I was having a few issues with the new 3" drive and Kryoflux. It wouldn't calibrate or read data. Finally found the problem - the metal rail that the head mechanism moves along was gunked up with debris at the end causing seeks to track 0 to fail, thus aborting all commands.
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GOT ONE NOW! Thanks for your help, everyone.
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ZX Spectrum Bubble Bobble source code safely archived from Mike Follin's original development discs. I'm not sure if this is the final version of the game, but it does seem fairly complete. The game was developed on a Tatung Einstein and deployed to as Spectrum via a serial link.
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Ghouls 'n' Ghosts Master disk for Spectrum 128K version. Mike Follin's original development disk successfully archived. It mentions a cheat during loading where you hold down 'ADG' as the last file loads....interesting! Not sure if this is in the final game or not!
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Here's the recently acquired 3" drive hooked up to my Kryoflux device using a 2nd PC as a power supply! The video shows a disk being read as a binary blob/image that be be loaded into an emulator or used to extract the data. The main thing is to preserve the contents!
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In order to power and use a 3" disk drive with Kryoflux/Greaseweazle on a PC, it is necessary to use special cables. The first switches the power lead to match the PC one as the 12v and 5v are reversed on the 3" drive. Secondly, you need to convert the 26way ribbon cable to 34way
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Thank you everyone for offering to help me locate a 3" disk drive. Massive thanks to who not only gave me his spare 3" drive, but also dropped it off too. I can't thank you enough for your help and generosity. Please follow him, he's a real star! And here it is.
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I've even looked at buying a Tatung Einstein, CPC6128 or Spectrum +3 to use the drive from them and replace it afterwards. Unfortunately, they are even more crazily priced. Replacement drive belts/bands are easy to obtain, but sadly not the drives!
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For some reason these are really hard to source in good working condition. The ones that do come up on ebay are really silly prices and look like they've been stored in a damp shed for years.
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Does anyone have a 3" disk drive I could buy/borrow - preferably in UK/near Manchester? I seem to have lost mine and I have some archiving I need to do. Just to clarify I'm after a 3" drive as used by Amstrad CPC6128 / PCW and Spectrum +3, not the common 3.5" ones in PCs/Amiga/ST
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The document is split into three section with presentation slides and then regular text. Contributions by Robert P. Donker ( NOA ), Jez San and Rick Clucas ( Argonaut Software Ltd. ). It is (c) 1993 Nintendo of America Inc. For this reason I unable to share its contents.
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I just found this SNES 'SUPER FX Programming Seminar' presentation document. I didn't attend an actual seminar, but was sent this when I was working on other SNES titles at the time. Sadly, I never had chance to try any of it out.
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The wonderful Psion 3 PDA from 1991.
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Here's a random selection of quirky computers, PDAs and calculators that I've owned. The Psion 3 is one of my favourites. It's compact and has a decent keyboard and screen. Psion released many other varaitions of their 'digital assistants'. A re-badged version was sold by Acorn.
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MS-DOS v4.01 from November 1990. From a time when things happened instantly, even on modest hardware!
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The Microsoft SideWinder 3D Pro. A classic PC joystick from 1996.
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The Nintendo N64 classic 'GoldenEye 007' returns to Nintendo Switch and Microsoft XBOX! What about Playstation!? twitter.com/RareLtd/status
This Tweet is unavailable.
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Here are some more pages showing the pseudo assembly language used by the code examples. Knuth was a mathematician and parts of the book are very dry and heavy going unless you are a real maths head! These books, and additional volumes, are still available today.
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