we are running in circles...

[Heaven/TQA]

"What's the story behind the 16-bit revival of Dropzone?

 

There was a retrogaming phase in the UK in 1993, and many publishers asked about the possibility of massively updating the original. So that's what we did. It brings a smile to my face to know that we used the 90% of the original 1984 6502 code, but bolted on three megabytes of additional graphics, four times as many aliens and bosses, and spread it across four of Jupiter's moons, ending up with a battle to the death within a weightless Jupiter atmosphere. It was designed to be damn difficult, almost unfinishable, but some kids wrote in saying how they had mastered it without cheating and could we do an even harder one please! " Archer MacLean...

 

ehm... it's like in music biz? every 10 years we are in a "retro phase"?

 

1984 - 1994 - 2004?`

 

so where is my rescue on fractalus, star raiders 2, etc...??? i want rescue on my GBA...

[Heaven/TQA]

another one... nothing to add:

 

"Yes, every now and then I get the Atari 800 out and play some of the classics. Three years ago I showed the original "Dropzone" to a games journalist on my PC's monitor, without him seeing the old machine. He said "this is a nice and simple great blast, really addictive! When's it coming out?" i am sure the guy was from pc format...

[Heaven/TQA]

another bit from philip price...

 

What was the most difficult part of writing "The City"?

 

"I had no knowledge of 3-D. I was unaware of the techniques and terminology that existed in the academic world, so I had to reinvent many things. I used a vertical, single line z-buffer--though I didn't know it was called that at the time--and a number of techniques to cull the polygons. I used self-modifying code in the loops that did the incremental texture mapping. I did cycle-counting to allow hardware sprites to be in two places at once. It was a challenge to do 3-D fully textured mapped graphics--even with fixed ninety degree turns--on a computer that ran at less than 2MHz and had 48K of RAM. Keeping track of characters' blood alcohol level, disease incubation time, neural and blood poison was not too difficult. It was fun to have a character's reaction time decrease as they became intoxicated, as was the wobbling and finally the blackouts.

 

The movie-like intro--with pan-shots, synchronized audio and video--was the most fun, though most of the conversions heavily edited the intro and didn't have all of the effects. The 8-bit Ataris were awesome in their day and the Apple II and C64 were hard for Datasoft's programmers to convert my game to, so they cut some corners. "

 

 

thank god for the internet...we now have most resources available... and knowledge...so no inventing the wheel twice... (reg. 3d z-bufer)