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AtariAge welcomes Philip Price, creator/coder of 'Alternate reality'


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Wow, the man himself...

 

All I can say is THANK YOU for the hours and hours I spend on your creations from then and still doing it...Marvellous games on a great little computer.

 

And can we have Beta Lyrae II please :) (strange features removed :) )

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Hmmm, I actually owned legitimate copies of both the City and Dungeon, so I guess their manufacturing of weak sectors was a bit... lets say weak. Gee if I'd known then that I had bad disks, I could have complained and maybe got sent new ones. All that time I thought I just wasn't listening to my Mom and not eating enough greens. I definitely didn't get scurvy all the time, so the weak sectors must have passed most of the time. Oh and kudos on another cool but cruel pirate prevention technique.

 

Bob

 

I had a philosophy in protection that I rather let a clever pirate play the game (A Pirate False Negative), then for a honest owner's character be marked as a pirate (A Pirate False Positive). So since the weak bits was the strongest disk copying protection I had in the game I wanted to make sure a small production skew in where they wrote a specific disk's weak bits would not create a False Positive. Therefore I had an allowed variance in the start of the weak bit area [so if a single production copy was off by X bytes it would still be considered an original]

Example (Not to scale ):

ooooooo[.............XXXXXX.............]oooooo

 

o = Must not contain weak bits

. = May contain weak bits

X = Where weak bits are supposed to be written to in production (the ... therefore give wiggle room)

 

But the publisher came back and said they did this

0000000[XXXXXX..........................]oooooo

 

Needless to say there was less wiggle room in one direction. (Actually amazed they didn't get more FP)

 

Worst thing is, if you load a character it will get scurvy (Not curable by the doctors), and if saved and run again (on a game not detected as a pirate) will still have scurvy because it is saved on the character data.

 

Not sure if I did anything other than give people scurvy if I detected weak bits violation[i.e. Don't know if you can just zap the scurvy in the disease elements in the character data.

 

Phil

 

P.S.

For those not familiar with a weak bit. It is a bit that the floppy drive could read as a 1 or 0, and will read it differently if you read it often enough. Happy and other devices (at that time) would read it either as 1 or 0, and then write a strong 1 or 0[ thereby revealing it is a copy]

Edited by Philip Price
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Wow, the man himself...

 

All I can say is THANK YOU for the hours and hours I spend on your creations from then and still doing it...Marvellous games on a great little computer.

 

And can we have Beta Lyrae II please :) (strange features removed :) )

 

MCLaneinc,

 

I am very glad you enjoyed it. I agree the Atari 8 Bit was a phenomenal machine, I am so glad I got to design games and write code for it.

 

I like Beta Lyrae too, perhaps someday when I can afford to quit my day job, I can once again write games. There was so much I wanted to do both in the early 80s, and back in '97, my real goal was social dynamics [and I won't go any farther into that subject, but it is much farther than what today I 'think' is what social media has done], I wouldn't even write that down back then (and even now won't explain it in depth), because any idea is easy to copy. I do tend toward the complex when simple things (such as Facebook) obviously provide a very general and profitable solution to their creators.

 

I always liked layers within layers within layers. So that the mind, the eye, and most importantly the emotions all got attention. (This last sentence doesn't apply nearly as much to the side scrolling game like Beta Lyrae, but more to an alternate reality type game). I like and play both.

 

Phil

Edited by Philip Price
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MCLaneinc,

 

I am very glad you enjoyed it. I agree the Atari 8 Bit was a phenomenal machine, I am so glad I got to design games and write code for it.

 

I like Beta Lyrae too, perhaps someday when I can afford to quit my day job, I can once again write games. There was so much I wanted to do both in the early 80s, and back in '97, my real goal was social dynamics [and I won't go any farther into that subject, but it is much farther than what today I 'think' is what social media has done], I wouldn't even write that down back then (and even now won't explain it in depth), because any idea is easy to copy. I do tend toward the complex when simple things (such as Facebook) obviously provide a very general and profitable solution to their creators.

 

I always liked layers within layers within layesr. So that the mind, the eye, and most importantly the emotions all got attention. (This last sentence doesn't apply nearly as much to the side scrolling game like Beta Lyrae, but more to an alternate reality type game). I like and play both.

 

Phil

 

i won't ask for Beta Lyrae II , but at how about an AR conversion to run from ide carts?...

Edited by Aking
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Worst thing is, if you load a character it will get scurvy (Not curable by the doctors)
Of course us limeys already knew how to avoid such things :) But seriously though you deserve all the credit bestowed upon you for AR and it's ingenious copy protection. We all very much appreciate your work to this day.

 

Personally on the note of piracy I always bought every piece of software back in the day to support the A8 and the software houses despite pirate copies being readily available. It was sad that so many saw copying games and programs as acceptable rather than the industry damaging theft that it is.

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Welcome to AtariAge Mr Price, nice to see another famous 'old school' game coder/designer joining in the fun at AtariAge (assuming ofcourse you are THE Philip Price)

 

Just one question though, according to various sources (the Wikip being one of them) claimed that there was a 'falling out' between you and Datasoft (who marketed/published Alternate reality) because you wanted all six parts of the alternate reality series packaged as one game whereas Datasoft saw things differently and wanted the 6 parts of the game to be packaged as separate games/programs (which is why the city and the dungeon are packaged as two seperate games)

 

Any chance you could clear this one up once and of all and also possibly if you still have the source code or disks, release the other 4 parts that Datasoft passed up on

 

To continue to clear this up. I wanted the following (Pretty much what Gary wrote is a lot of what I would orally tell him about at the Deli, of what I had planned, so I will not repeat much of that here[if without reading it I remember it was in there].)

 

City+Dungeon (One game, I used to remember and think that Datasoft was the one that wanted to split them, but I think Marsten Systems (Who was involved before Datasoft) first asked for the split, and Datasoft when they became our publisher for the game wanted also to keep those split. So I wanted both an initial shock and survive part(aka The City) in what was meant to feel like an alive world; and then, a very non-linear and adaptive underground that was fully tied into the city.

 

The dungeon/underground was to have multiple potential final parts so that people could feel and in one since have completed the dungeon...but not really have discovered what was behind it all. While others could discover a deeper secret (i.e. the aliens and this wasn't just a fantasy world of magic[but it was still magical]).

Acrinimiral was a mage from a true alternate reality and he therefore was not in the alien's system and had ways to disrupt the aliens recon/surveillance. Finally trapped by the aliens he could help the player. These were some of the things I tried to communicate.

 

I did not want it to be linear, I want multiple choices for solutions with different effects from those choices. Having left to make a living (and architect the mission control room realtime software for the B-2 Stealth Bomber), I think they(Ken, Dan and Jim) did an excellent job (on Dungeon), not exactly what I wanted in every detail, but more than I feared might be. I tried to explain over the phone what I wanted, and a bit was in there , and a bit of what they thought should be too. What I should have done is taken strong control, but I was getting no pay for any consulting, and assumes I was understood.(And I was young)

 

The original Dungeon I was writing would have the player hearing prisoners under the palace and noises from the animal and champion pits below the arena, there would be traps, including pits, some which would drop you to other levels, and a lot of atmosphere. I did plan on multiple solutions so that players could choose a solution they wanted and felt was aligned with the character's moral, amoral, or immoral leanings at the time.

With the dungeon I wanted to patch into the city full spells sets using a NP complete n dimensional magical universe.

 

Arena, There would be conscription/slavers/debt collectors patched into the city, the arena would explore the question of why we love to watch (and play) violence and conflict. I hoped by then I could have some type of face and body generator that would allow people to see what they looked like. You could go up and watch the arena actions, people could breed/crossbreed/evolve creatures for the arena, bet on outcomes, or of course be freely or forced into the action (see slavers). Slaves could win freedom and become a champion and potentially a leg up to entering nobility.

 

Palace, Arena and City would have the patching to integrate politics, commerce. There would be Political intrigue (this was always planned, but If I was stating it for the first time today, with contemporary analogies, I would say, think what the character call the 'game' in the series Game of Thrones, but back then I didn't have something as clever as GoT to learn from in what I would have done[Though I would have tried to find some rational way that morality is not 'always' suckered punched as it is in GoT, but I do believe in free will)

 

By Palace or Arena I would start to let one to acquire a home (I think I had it planned for Palace)

 

Wilderness, was really less defined, I pictured having more kingdoms/cities to deal with politically (i.e. have to patch palace for that), exotic adventures and challenges, beauty and terror, night skies, cool and warm winds. Rivers to slide down through, waterfalls and lakes to play in (Ok some would have piranhas). Some people would be playing a metagame of growing a kingdom, others exploring the mysteries. And there would be the door, a door that would take sacrifice freely given(Though I might have allowed other ways because I hate forced linear moments that all most pass through) and mercy to open, a bloody thing, but necessary (and something the aliens felts would never be done, and therefore the way in was secure)

 

Revelation, Yep we are in a big ship orbiting the alien planet, and later we find that the 'I' in the ship is really just a VR that can interact with the real matter, and our real biological shell is in a machine, a cocoon.

 

Destiny, and then we have to decide live in our virtual self, with by then lots of power and influence, and perhaps even those we have grown to love and bond to, or return to our old body. The final destiny is when we take control of the ship and have to make those choices I talked about decades ago, Kill the aliens in revenge, try to make peace, run away home (with or without the VR Ship), the consequences of which would depend on the context and clues derived throughout the game about what the gamer had done, and the alien motive, strength, and intentions. (And the game would have predetermine those alien personality traits uniquely to each game).

 

-Phil

 

But do not expect to be writing a game like these that I had planned so long ago until I can retire and safely write games without fear of poverty.(I don't 'fear' poverty, but I try not to without great cause enter it_

 

So only the city and dungeon were to be one game (in the sense of a product to buy)

 

Each of the others would come out in sequence, but all would integrate together updating the prior games too.

 

I wanted political, personal and emotional intrigue.

One of the reasons I loved getting music into a game is how it can influence emotion and thought. There are so many other subtle things I had planned, but perhaps one day will find a way to do.

Edited by Philip Price
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Mr. Price,

Have you given any thought to a reissue of both the City and Dungeon?

A limited edition of say 100 copies with your signature should command a decent price say $100. You can maybe work with one of the Atari dealers like video 61 or Best electronics, or maybe even here at the Atariage store.

Perhaps people can reply on a separate thread to gauge the interest...

Edited by IndusGT
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MCLaneinc,

 

I am very glad you enjoyed it. I agree the Atari 8 Bit was a phenomenal machine, I am so glad I got to design games and write code for it.

 

I like Beta Lyrae too, perhaps someday when I can afford to quit my day job, I can once again write games.

 

Phil

 

Thanks Phil, at 52 with arthritis I'm too sore to do the "We are not worthy" Waynes World bowing but as said its an honour to have spoken to he creator of some of my most enduring fun on the Atari and I know I'm not the only person who feels the same.

 

Could I just hog a moment of your time with a catch up if you don't mind saying, what are you doing these days?

 

I see you have relocated to Florida.

 

How is Gary?

 

And you mentioned a series of unreleased synth songs Gary did, any plans for these to go public either paid or not?

 

And I'm sure I'm not the only one shaking a virtual fist at Datamost for stiffing you out of sales cash, I'm pretty sure they raked in a small fortune from yours and Gary's products. Twas early days though, must have seemed like something ultra special at the time?

 

Thanks

 

Paul....Devoted Atarian since day one.

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Mr. Price,

Have you given any thought to a reissue of both the City and Dungeon?

A limited edition of say 100 copies with your signature should command a decent price say $100. You can maybe work with one of the Atari dealers like video 61 or Best electronics, or maybe even here at the Atariage store.

Perhaps people can reply on a separate thread to gauge the interest...

 

Yep,

 

I would immediately buy such a limited edition - but not only for collecting it, I would also open the package and play the games.

Maybe Wrathchild and P.Price could work together to get both City and Dungeon onto a limited cart. release...?!?

 

-Andreas Koch.

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Mr. Price,

Have you given any thought to a reissue of both the City and Dungeon?

A limited edition of say 100 copies with your signature should command a decent price say $100. You can maybe work with one of the Atari dealers like video 61 or Best electronics, or maybe even here at the Atariage store.

Perhaps people can reply on a separate thread to gauge the interest...

 

37830704.jpg

 

As CharlieChaplin says, I'd not only buy it to have it as a collector's item, but I'd play the hell out of it.

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Gary did a lot of musical work for the original games, and for ARO'97 he had been doing preliminary work on a lot of music for it. He would be composing and playing a synthesizer, tapping his foot to keep rhythm in the office we shared back then. While I was spending most of my time doing some very preliminary game design, systems architecture, and having to explaining it all to outside company marketers(When Monolith had not the funds) The other company marketing people saw things as MMO marketplace is an unknown and unproven market, and the game was innovative (therefore risky). Therefore project was high risk, with an unknown reward. Basic MBA means they are risk adverse, and I understand that from a MBA's point of view.

 

In any case, the best things that came out of it was all of Gary's songs, and a preliminary 3-d image of the Alien portal room that Michael Sheeler and Gary both worked on. When we broke up with Monolith, Gary was heading back to Hawaii, and I would be doing some telecom stuff. I had hoped when dust settled we could work again on the game, and felt he was more stable there in Hawaii then were I was. So we had all the computers with all of the work done to that point sent with him to Hawaii. Life was not been easy for anyone, and neither one has had the free time nor the money in the years since(and right now I don't have both of those at the same time either, unless I don't want to have money.lol). In time, the computer data was mostly lost from what heard from Gary.

 

But I did have a couple of CDs of Gary's music. 100% written and played by him on that synthesizer back then. I enjoy listening to the 24 track version I have (and I used to have a 30+ track version too), even to this day. It was meant to be preliminary work (that might for the final real game be played by an orchestra[it was never finalized]. But even at that, with just him on a single keyboard, it's great.

 

So here are two of the songs, in their working draft version from ARO '97. (Yes these are part of the copyrighted ARO work that is owned by Gary and I, but feel free to play them for personal, non-commercial enjoyment only]). For example, if someone includes these in something they charge for without Gary and my permission they would be in violation. But enough of the legal stuff. I texted Gary today and he is cool with sharing the songs with the fans. by releasing these for personal use I wanted to let the fans taste a little of Gary's work from '97.(Just as it was in '97, unaltered)

 

First song was meant to be a orchestra tuning up in the background, prepping and playing fragments of songs they would play later. It is about 6 minutes long. The end is to sound a bit mysterious leading into whatever we planned gamewise at that point. Always loved Gary's work.

 

01 Track 1.zip

 

Second song will be on next message due to size per message constraint

 

Enjoy,

 

Phil

Edited by Philip Price
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(This message to be edited shortly got to get the songs onto this computer and upload them to the site...one sec)[assume I can upload them to the site)

 

There is a "More Reply Options" button on the bottom when you are posting. That is where the option to include files is located.

 

Bob

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Purely self taught. I read the consumer Atari magazines, self taught on copy protection, self taught on graphics. I thought then did. Later I did get any Atari document I could get, but did not have them at the start. I was very, very poor and only could afford what the local computer dealer gave me (When I did Beta Lyrae) both equipment and information wise. AR I had an Atari 800(and later I think I had a 130xp) and by some point in that development had gotten ahold of some Atari documents (naming the registers etc).

 

For doing a RPG I played in the 1970s a wireframe MMORPG on PLATO.(which I found fun and was one inspiration). A lot of the scifi I read was another, plus I always wanted to understand people, socialization, and how we interact.

 

The second program I ever wrote was a multiplayer game (i.e. I think I wrote a 'hello world' program for class and then I independently started to write my first multiplayer game on the IBM mainframe in the mid 1970s). I took two classes when I first got into computers, The math teacher was teaching Basic, and by the second week he was asking me questions on things he didn't understand, and the other was Fortran (and I was writing on my own a multiplayer game(Star Wars. LOL, what a naming coincidence) after hello world). I just had a knack for computers (and I had make dramas and games all my life growing up..so when I got ahold of computers that is what I made)

 

I was also finding vulnerabilities in computers from the very start, had a peculiar knack for them.

 

One of my favorite weirdness was one I found on an APL operating system running at Goldenwest College's IBM mainframe (I went there for a semester or so before I went to Virginia Tech at age 16).

 

Take an APL variable lets say it is a a<-2 6 p 0 and make it a <- -2 -6p a and presto you have an array in storage taking of negative amount of memory (increasing the user's memory space by that much [iBM had to fix this real quick once they found out about it since I could read other user's memory]

The school even paid me (and as work study I got an A) for writing data protection for them (I wrote something that literally folded all APL functions and variables into a variable that was namespaced in a function that was created on the fly by it's parent function [which it deleted], un readable by computer operator (due to namespace conflict) nor was it copyable by copying the workspace (All you got was an empty workspace), you didn't even need to password protect the workspace, but anyone on the access list was able to get too all functions and variables). So I had an early knack for understanding exploitation, vulnerabilities and defense.

Edited by Philip Price
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To continue to clear this up. I wanted the following (Pretty much what Gary wrote is a lot of what I would orally tell him about at the Deli, of what I had planned, so I will not repeat much of that here[if without reading it I remember it was in there].)

 

City+Dungeon (One game, I used to remember and think that Datasoft was the one that wanted to split them, but I think Marsten Systems (Who was involved before Datasoft) first asked for the split, and Datasoft when they became our publisher for the game wanted also to keep those split. So I wanted both an initial shock and survive part(aka The City) in what was meant to feel like an alive world; and then, a very non-linear and adaptive underground that was fully tied into the city.

 

... and all the rest

 

Your memory is fantastic! I've met some programmers of 80s games and their memories are not as good as yours. No sarcasm, what foods do you eat?!

 

I'm more of a Beta Lyrae fan, can I ask where you got the name for the game from?

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Well I was up at Gary's house in Hawaii and he had a big astronomy book, and Beta Lyrae seemed to fit what I wanted and could imagine lots of broken up matter/asteroids if you have two stars in a system causing significant gravitational fluxuations (And I have no idea if it would scientifically, just felt it would).Those fluxuations might also cause some unique matter formation/deposits worth mining.

 

 

(My memory was better when I was writing games, literally 100,000+ or so lines of assembly in AR was all in my head, I could talk to the developers converting the game and off my head know the code (At least that's what I remember now). I know I didn't need comments in code for myself (Though I know I had one at the inner texture map loop, because I had to use self-modify code to get the 3d performance I needed, and I didn't like self modifying code (except it was necessary in this case)

 

In the ten years I worked on the B-2 stealth Bomber no one ever found a bug in the Fortran or C++ code that I wrote. [Though I found some before I released my code to integration]. Later in life I definitely had some bugs escape my hands.

 

Now AR City had at least the bug where I forgot to use the value12 in a compare and that cause the end of year banks to go bust. And I heard the data for the city had that one wall that led to a death trap, I assume I somehow corrupted that on whatever I had sent to production.

 

Some memories just stick, like I can say I remember a label wasbuf, can't remember why I labeled it that, but I remember one day at Datasoft talking to one of the programmers doing the conversion and that came up and it stuck in my mind ever since.

 

Labels in the game (and the lack of original docs) was that I thought only I would ever see my code. I never wanted loop1 loop2 or things like that in my assembly, so I would sometime use a set of meaningless words for loop names. One time I had HBO in the background and I was coding and needed loop names. So I looked up and there was

Man:

 

Woman:

 

S__:

 

Child: (i.e. the result of the above)

 

All because of whatever was playing on HBO

 

 

as loop names. I was a bit embarrassed when the converters asked me what they meant :)

 

Phil

(Ack really got to get back to work)

 

P.S.

Now why I have so many transmission errors between my mind and my fingers when I type English on the fly (compared to code on the fly) is a mystery to me.

 

P.S.S.

I remember very little of the exact opcodes and specific 6502 instruction sequences today (Though I am sure a lot would come back into short term memory if I loaded the floppies(and found them) with the source code.

Edited by Philip Price
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Uj... Take care with the discs and source... You should send them for reservation ;)

 

But source codes would be cool incl all data files :)

 

 

And 6502 to forget is nearly impossible with its RISC like commands ;) lda sta inx cmp etc ;)

Heaven,

Yes, I remember lda sta and cmp

I also remember x and y registers, page zero memory for indexed indirects

jmp and beq etc.

Forgot inx (of course if I went and googled 6502 it would all come back, but that would be less fun than trying to remember mnemonics from 30 years ago)

 

I think there is sti and cli (unless I am mixing in intel)

 

I agree the risc like commands, the very fixed cycles made some things easier.

 

I know there was an add and sub, I assume there was xor ror rol (Not sure if I remember the mnemonics right). I know there was not a multiply.

 

I don't remember any of the GPU op codes (Heh I could probably dig up one of the old manuals I still have in storage)

 

I cannot forget the trouble SIO gave me [i devoted two channels to sound during disc load, which sometimes must of crosstalked onto the two channels used for disk IO because sometimes the disk IO failed if I was using the other two channels(But it made the 9600 baud speed of floppy disks bearable to have some music playing when loading imo)

 

Phil

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Hi Phil, just wanted to chime in here with my appreciation for what you created with The City--I had lots of fun with it, including making maps of The City and Dungeon in Envision.

 

I seem to remember reading something somewhere (vague, I know, but Google has failed me) about how you put subliminal messages into the game, and I have a vague recollection of seeing a flash of something every once in a while before encounters, but always thought it was just an artifact of the limitations of the machine. Did you put subliminals in the game, and if so, why? :)

 

Also thought I'd let you know that I sat through and read your scrolltext that you had on The City (I think it was on disk 2?) and thought that it was tres cool to see something personal from the author.

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